Block 0 wasn't on any grid.
A half-flooded metro station. Rusted, cracked, abandoned after the Collapse.
Perfect.
Riven stood at the edge of the station platform, wind slicing through the dark.All around him: silence, decay… and potential.
"No power. No light. No problem."
He set the blueprint down. ARK—Autonomous Reconstruction Kernel—was ambitious. Too big for a workshop.
It would be the workshop.
Self-healing walls. Internal drone factory. Quantum-coded security locks.Something that could move if it had to.
A living lab.
First step: power.
Riven cracked open a maintenance panel.Dead wires. Corroded lines.
He rigged up a pulse core from scrap and Ghostwire remnants.
A single spark.Then lights flickered.
"Hello again," he whispered.
Next: walls.
He 3D-scanned the structure, built a frame overlay, and summoned Ash's supply drones.
Over 48 hours, he slept in shifts. Coded in bursts.Melted plastic into steel. Fused scrap into shape.
ARK began to grow.
From the bones of a train station… to something alive.
Final touch: a signal mask.
He didn't want to hide anymore.But he needed time.
He built a new Ghostwave: not to subtract himself… but to distort location, like a GPS hallucination.
Block 0 wouldn't show up on any map.
Even if someone looked straight at it.