The rain in San Francisco doesn't fall; it gets aggressively sanded into your face by the freezing winds off the Pacific.

  Mike viciously wiped his phone screen with the cuff of his faded red DoorDash windbreaker. The smear of rainwater and grease cleared just enough, but the spiderweb of cracked glass in the bottom right corner stubbornly continued to pulse with the glaring blue light of the System UI.

  [Current Qi Concentration: Depleted. You have been breathing "Free-Tier Air" for 14 consecutive hours. Impurity buildup detected in your meridians. Daily Deal: Upgrade to Basic Tier for just $9.99/month and enjoy zero-latency, purified Qi today!]

  [Ad remaining: 14 seconds. Please maintain eye contact. Timer pauses if you look away.]

  "Fuck your ecosystem empowerment," Mike muttered, expertly snapping his gaze to a rusted fire hydrant on the curb. It was a physical hack he’d perfected over the years—if you didn't look at the screen, the Heavenly Dao System’s bullshit eye-tracking software would flag you as "distracted" and pause the ad, but at least it wouldn't force-feed you the pop-up.

  He swallowed hard against the familiar sensation of a damp cotton ball stuffed inside his chest. That was the price of a "Free Account." In a cultivation world bought out by venture capital, poor bastards had to wait in a queue just to breathe a lungful of high-density Qi.

  Mike's thumb clamped down on the handlebar, unconsciously and frantically picking at the yellowish, hardened callus on the side of his index finger.

  The payout for this delivery was four dollars and fifty cents. Four-fifty. In SF, that wasn't even enough to buy a half-off day-old sandwich for a vagrant, but it was enough for the System's dispatch algorithm to whip a guy drowning in seventy grand of credit card debt across the slick tram tracks of the Mission District.

  [Distance to customer: 0.8 miles. Punctuality Warning: If this order exceeds the time limit, your monthly rating will drop below 4.8 stars, revoking your access to 'Mid-Tier Qi Zones'.]

  Seeing the flashing red countdown, Mike felt a phantom cramp in his gut—a physiological panic conditioned by years under the algorithm. He ground his teeth and brutally twisted the throttle of his "Frankenstein" e-bike, a monstrosity cobbled together from three dead lime scooter batteries.

  The motor let out an agonizing whine, tires skidding wildly on the waterlogged asphalt. Mike banked hard, taking the bike and the insulated food bag into a blind alley so obscure even Google Maps pretended it didn't exist. If he could just cut through this tunnel of dumpsters and fermented garbage stink, he could bypass the next fucking traffic light and save a fatal forty seconds.

  But he didn't make it through.

  The brake pads shrieked. Mike slammed his right boot onto the pavement, kicking up a two-foot arc of dirty water.

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  At the end of the alley, slumped against a blue industrial dumpster, was an old man. He was wearing an unidentifiable, ragged Tang suit and gasping violently in the rain. He wasn't bleeding, but his chest—right over his heart—was hemorrhaging neon-blue digital static, like a shattered LED tube. His origin Qi was rapidly unspooling.

  "Hey! Man! If you’re gonna run an insurance scam, at least check the App’s heat map first! I got a 4.8 rating to protect—I don't have time for this," Mike yelled, his thumb picking at his callus at warp speed.

  The old man didn't flinch. He slowly raised his head.

  In the gloom of the alley, the old man had no whites in his eyes. His sockets were entirely filled with a cascading waterfall of glitching green code.

  A cold sweat spiked down Mike’s spine. He realized instantly that this wasn't a homeless guy; this was a high-tier Cultivator whom the System had flagged for "Low-Level Erasure." Driven by sheer instinct, Mike jammed a hand into his soaked pocket, pulled out a crushed fortune cookie he’d swiped from Sister Zhang’s restaurant, and shoved the crumbs—unread paper slip and all—into his mouth. He chewed aggressively. The gritty texture and cheap flour taste gave him a grounding anchor to reality.

  "Stanford…" the old man suddenly croaked, his voice sounding like sandpaper dragging across a rusted hard drive. "I checked… the base nodes in this sector… you’re the dropout architect…"

  "You got the wrong guy, buddy. I'm a proud DoorDash courier now. The only architecture I deal with is keeping the pizza from sliding to one side of the bag," Mike countered, swallowing the dry cookie dust and starting to walk his bike backward.

  "Do you know C++?" The old man lunged with a terrifying speed that completely belied his dying state. His hand, slick with mud and bleeding blue pixels, locked onto Mike's jacket.

  "I told you, I don't code anymore!" Mike tried to pry the old man's fingers off. "Let go! The cheese is gonna stick to the lid! The customer is gonna give me a fucking one-star!"

  The old man was deaf to the screaming. With a violently trembling hand, he shoved a freezing metal object deep into the pocket of Mike's windbreaker.

  "Go… port 443…" The green code in the old man's eyes began to dim, the edges of his physical body pixelating and flaking away like a low-res JPEG. "The protocols… they're wrong… they hijacked the source logic…"

  Before he could finish, the old man dissolved into a shower of blue data rain, scattering into the damp San Francisco wind. Not even a scrap of clothing remained.

  Mike froze, his boot still planted in the puddle. He looked down at his hand.

  It was a heavy, vintage silver flash drive. No corporate logo. Just a crudely engraved Yin-Yang symbol.

  Before his brain could even begin to process this absolute clusterfuck, the screech of tires echoed at the mouth of the alley.

  Three matte-black, bulletproof SUVs glided silently into the rain, forming an iron wall that blocked the only exit. The doors popped open, and a squad of men in tailored black suits stepped out.

  At that precise second, the cracked phone on Mike's handlebar let out a shrill, devastating beep.

  [Order time limit exceeded. Monthly punctuality bonus automatically deducted. Estimated customer rating: 1 Star.]

  Mike stared at the advancing wall of black suits. His thumb found the callus again.

  Heavenly Dao Compliance Dept., he read on their silver badges. Wonder what their Yelp page looks like, he thought.

  "Fuck me," he muttered under his breath. "Definitely not getting a tip on this one."

  Enjoyed the chapter? Found that old man in the alley as weird as Mike did?

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  See you in the fog.