The soldiers leaped from their Humvees, rifles raised, only to find a smoking crater filled with nothing but shifting sand. Fang Yuan was already kilometers away, moving like a blur of indigo shadow through the desert heat.
By nightfall, he and Lia stood on the outskirts of the 10th of Ramadan City. To Fang Yuan's cosmic eyes, the city was a chaotic grid of electrical hums and chemical smog. It was primitive, but it was perfect—a massive industrial hub where thousands of tons of metal and energy moved every hour.
"Why here, Master?" Lia whispered, her human clothes (looted from a roadside warehouse) feeling heavy on her skin. "This place... it smells of burning oil and stagnant dreams."
"Exactly," Fang Yuan replied, his eyes scanning the industrial zone. "In a world of order, the best place to hide a virus is inside a factory. Here, the humans produce 'Value'. I will teach them the true meaning of that word."
He looked at a massive, automated steel mill at the edge of the city. With a flick of his finger, he sent a microscopic pulse of Null-Logic into the factory's central server.
He didn't break the machines; he optimized them. He rewrote the algorithms to be 500% more efficient, creating a "Miracle of Engineering" that would attract the owners like moths to a flame.
"Step one, Lia: We need a legal identity and a digital throne," Fang Yuan said, as they walked toward the city lights. "By tomorrow, the owners of this facility will be looking for the 'Ghost Engineer' who saved their empire. And by next week, I will own the electricity of this entire country."
Fang Yuan wasn't weaving space anymore. He was weaving the Global Economy.