The red sirens of the Lia Estate screamed, their frequencies vibrating the very air. Yuan stood over the crumpled remains of the security drone, his skin still radiating a faint silver glow from the Liquid Mana-Alloy. He had less than three minutes before the Rank 1 Elite Guardians arrived.
"Logic is a tool, but Causality is the master," Yuan whispered.
He didn't clean the room. Instead, he grabbed a discarded thermal-pistol from the warehouse's armory—a weapon belonging to Officer Jax, a senior guard known for his gambling debts and secret resentment toward the Lia family. Using a microscopic thread of his newly forged World Breaker mana, Yuan "etched" a false memory into the drone's black box. To any technician, it would appear as if Jax had attempted to steal the alloy and destroyed the drone when it caught him.
Then came the hardest part: Sublimation.
Yuan activated the Abyssal Cloak. He forced the silver radiance of the alloy deep into his marrow, suppressing the physical pressure of his Rank 1 status until he appeared, once again, as a dying, malnourished orphan. He smeared his face with industrial soot and crawled through the ventilation shafts, reaching the servant quarters seconds before the lockdown.
He collapsed onto his thin pallet, shivering as the "metal-fever" began to burn through his veins.
The doors burst open. Elara Lia marched in, her silver hair shimmering under the emergency lights. Her eyes were predatory, scanning every shivering servant in the room.
"Someone has breached Sector 4," she hissed, her voice amplified by her World Breaker aura. "The Mana-Alloy is missing. If the thief is in this room, pray to the stars for a quick death."
Her floating crystalline orb passed over the orphans. When it reached Yuan, he let out a wet, metallic cough, spitting a glob of dark blood onto the floor—blood that contained the "toxic residue" of the alloy he had supposedly rejected.
«...Status: Critical Organ Failure... Mana Rejection: 98%... No threat detected...» the orb chirped.
Elara's gaze lingered on Yuan for a moment. She saw the blood, the shaking limbs, and the vacant eyes. She turned away in disgust. "Useless filth. They wouldn't have the strength to lift a vat, let alone destroy a Sentinel."
Just then, a communication link chirped in her ear. "Captain! We've found the culprit. Officer Jax was found near the perimeter with a high-grade thermal-pistol. The drone's last logs confirm his biometric signature during the breach!"
Elara's face contorted in rage. "Treason... within my own ranks? Bring him to the Neural-Extraction chamber. I want to know who he was selling our alloy to!"
As the guards dragged a screaming Jax away, Yuan closed his eyes in the shadows. The "metal-fever" was fading, replaced by the cold, dense power of a World Breaker. He had not only gained his strength but had also sowed the first seeds of internal discord in the Lia-Vance alliance.
«The frame is set, Elara,» Yuan thought, his heart now beating with the steady rhythm of a machine. «Now that you're hunting your own shadows, I can finally go down to the Core. It's time to talk to Aegis-0.»