Rain hit the city like someone was firing nails at the sky.
Outside, neon bled through the smog, trains howled past on their mag-rails, and somebody in the next apartment was drunk enough to think screaming at three in the morning was a personality trait. The D-class complex's walls let all of it in.
Lu Jin barely registered any of it.
He was folded into the sagging sofa, fingers hooked into the cracked armrest hard enough to warp the cheap plastic. Under his skin, veins stood out in thin, ugly ropes. His spine felt like someone had jammed a metal rod into it and was tapping each vertebra with a hammer, one by one.
The terminal on the coffee table cast a sickly glow over his face. The light made his lack of color look even worse.
Lines crawled slowly across the screen.
[Patient: Lu Jin (Citizen ID: D-9527…)][Diagnosis: Accelerated Cellular Degeneration Syndrome (ACDS), Terminal Stage][Estimated Remaining Life: 89 days][Recommendation: Discontinue treatment. Apply for euthanasia program. (D-Class citizens enjoy 10% discount.)][Note: D-Class citizen death does not affect social stability metrics.]
A dry laugh slipped out of his throat. It broke apart halfway and turned into a fit of coughing.
He pressed his palm to his mouth. Warm wetness hit his skin. When the spasm passed, there was a bright smear of red in the center of his hand.
"Even dying comes with a coupon now," he rasped. "The market never sleeps."
He grabbed a crumpled tissue from the stack of "clean enough" on the table, wiped away the blood, and that was when the terminal vibrated once.
No call. No notification. No ad.
Just a new icon, sliding into the center of the display like it owned the place.
Black background. A girl's silhouette, standing on rubble, head tipped back to look up at a starless sky.
App name: [Deep Space Echo].
"A virus?" Lu Jin snorted. His finger hovered over it. "Wrong target, hacker. My whole account's not worth eight grand. Can't even afford a grave plot."
He felt a thin, cold amusement. If someone wanted to scam a dying D-class nobody, they deserved a show.
"Fine. Entertain me."
He tapped the icon.
The terminal didn't react. The room didn't change.
His brain did.
A faint current jumped from his fingertip straight up his nerves. Blue text snapped into place across his retina.
[Neural link established.][Cognitive interference module loaded: Bystanders and monitoring devices cannot see the true interface.][Only you can hear the echo from deep space.]
"…Brain-computer interface?" Lu Jin went still.
Before he could poke at that, the blue faded, and something else tore across his field of vision.
Like someone had opened a window in his skull.
It wasn't just high resolution. It felt like his eyeballs had been moved.
Cold air. Grit scraping along… wherever the "lens" was. The view tilted toward a wasteland: yellow-grey rubble, snapped rebar thrust out of broken concrete like exposed ribs, all of it under a low, dirty sky.
Wind dragged sand across the ground. Each hit on the "camera" made Lu Jin's teeth itch.
In the lower corner of the view, a small shape sat jammed under a slab of collapsed concrete.
A girl.
Sixteen, maybe seventeen. Drowned in an oversized lab coat that had been dragged through every gutter in the zone. Bare feet on frozen ground, skin blackened with grime and old blood. She had her arms wrapped around her legs, trying to make herself smaller under the concrete shelf.
Lu Jin leaned in before he realized he'd moved.
On this side, she was just pixels. On that side, the dirt on her face had thickness. Her eyes were a washed-out glassy blue that looked like they'd once been bright and had simply… gone out.
He'd seen that expression before.
"In the mirror. An hour ago."
His chest clenched.
A red warning burst open at the edge of the wasteland feed.
[Warning! Observed target's life signs dropping rapidly!]
A status pane snapped open.
[Name: Li Xing][Hunger: Maximum][Body Temperature: 34.2°C (losing heat)][External Injury: Left thigh laceration (infection risk: extreme)][Life Countdown: 29 minutes 58 seconds]
The girl's body tipped slowly to one side. Her cracked lips parted, and something like a whimper scraped out. It was barely sound at all, but the system pushed it through the audio channel and into Lu Jin's ears.
He flinched.
"Damn it."
His finger jabbed toward the only thing that looked like it might matter: a [Rescue] button floating above her.
He couldn't save himself. Maybe he could keep one other discarded loser from going into the grinder with him.
The moment his finger brushed it—
[Ding!]
The cheerful tone was straight out of a mall checkout lane. Gold graphics splashed across his vision like someone had thrown confetti at his face.
[Congratulations! You've triggered a limited-time offer! Newcomer Welfare Bonanza!]Respected Observer, your cloud-adopted target is about to disconnect—permanently!Want to save her? Want to become her only light?
[First Top-Up "Savior" Pack]• High-Energy Nutrition Bar (Strawberry) x1• Military-Grade Nano-Clot Patch x1Original Price: ¥98Current Price: ¥6
(Friendly Reminder: If you don't top up, she really will die, sweetie! Countdown: 59… 58…)
Lu Jin stared.
On the other side, the girl's chest barely moved.
The sale countdown ticked down: 58… 57…
Six yuan.
Three days of nutrient paste for him.
Even if he bought it, what then? Maybe she lived an extra day in that kind of hell. Maybe she didn't. Either way, the world would keep spinning. The Federation wouldn't notice.
But the look in her dead-glass eyes was the same one he'd had reading his own death sentence. Same numb waiting.
Same quiet surrender.
"…What a joke," he muttered.
His mouth tugged at the corner in something too twisted to be a smile.
Let the economy have the last word.
He authorized the charge.
[Payment complete! –¥6.00][Thank you for your generosity, great Savior! Deploying supplies—]
Golden banners burst again. Fireworks, fake banners, cheap particles. Six yuan of godhood.
On the wasteland side, the cold was so deep Li Xing had stopped feeling it as "cold." It was just blankness, chewing its way in from the outside.
Her thoughts floated. Weightless. She knew she should be scared, but even that took energy.
She decided to close her eyes.
Right before she did, the air above her flicked.
Something dropped.
A thin stick hit her chest and bounced down into her arms, still warm from… somewhere. A faint scent followed it. Sweet. Behind it, a blue patch glowed faintly on the snow.
Li Xing froze.
Her fingers, stiff with frost, closed around the stick. Solid. Real.
She brought it closer. The wrapper crinkled. Pink stripe. Strawberry—a word she didn't know, but her body reacted when she tore it open.
The smell hit her hard. Her stomach cramped so hard it felt like it wanted to climb up her throat and bite the bar itself.
She crammed it into her mouth. Tears spilled without permission as her tongue finally tasted something that wasn't metal or dirt.
Heat spread down her throat, pooled in her gut, chased back a fraction of the emptiness.
The blue patch stayed where it was, glowing quietly like a dropped star. She peeled it off its backing and slapped it over the wet, hot throb in her thigh. Nanofibers crawled into the wound. Numbness chased the fever.
"…Who?"
Her voice was raw. The sound disappeared immediately into the wind.
She tipped her head back and stared into nothing.
Someone was watching. She didn't know how she knew. She just did.
Her hands came together on their own. Fingers laced tight, pressed under her chin.
It was an awkward, clumsy gesture, copied from scraps of old-world faith stories she'd heard muttered around fires. It was also sincere in a way that hurt.
In the dull glass of her eyes, something tiny flicked on again.
Lu Jin watched her color come back, pixel by pixel.
He couldn't name the feeling that pushed up in his chest. It wasn't "moving" or "touched" or any of the junk words from corporate empathy ads.
Six yuan.
Not enough for a proper bowl of noodles in his city. On the other side, it had bought a pulse.
"Cheaper than a lottery ticket," he whispered.
Gold motes lit up on the edge of his vision, where his fingertip still hovered over the interface. They reversed direction, flowing into him.
[You received intense gratitude from Li Xing!][Converting… Holy Resonance Energy +1][Triggering Holy Resonance Feedback!]
His body tightened on instinct.
He expected a jolt. Burnt nerves. At least a migraine.
What came instead felt almost insulting in its softness.
A thin warmth slipped from his finger up into his arm, up his neck, spread down the line of his spine. It didn't erase the pain; it covered it. Smoothed the edges where the worst spikes dug in, dulled the spots where his bones felt like they were grinding.
The hollowness gnawing at his organs paused, as if someone had leaned on the "stop" button.
[Life countdown adjusted: +2 hours.][Current remaining: 89 days 2 hours.]
A translucent panel unfolded lazily at the side of his view. Not like the hospital's clinical white. More like a budget mobile game.
[Holy Resonance Energy: 1 point][Effects: Mild analgesia; Life countdown +2 hours][Source: Strong emotional wave from observed target]
Lu Jin's pupils tightened.
Her gratitude could be cashed out as his time.
He looked back at the girl on the screen. She sat with her knees hugged close again, chewing carefully on the last crumbs of the bar, cheeks flushed from actual body heat and not just fever.
The sense of wrongness twisted a little deeper.
Two condemned people, tied to different ends of the same wire. One ate. The other breathed longer.
This wasn't charity.
It was a deal.
"Six yuan for two hours of life," he said under his breath. His tongue flicked over the split in his lip, tasting the faint salt of leftover blood. A thin, dangerous smile crept up. "That's a margin I can work with."
As he weighed that, the system shifted again, sliding in another panel alongside the first—this one marked differently.
[Observed Target: Li Xing][Life Status: Critical → Barely Stable][Holy Song Realm: Mortal Echo · Afterglow Stage][Level: LV1][Growth: 12 / 100][Progress Bar: Mortal Echo LV1 (12/100)][Current Song Efficiency Coefficient: 0.8]
Twelve out of a hundred.
A pathetic little starter bar. The sort you get from popping one slime in a new-player tutorial.
Except these twelve points had come from her crawling back from the cliff edge, then pouring that thankfulness at him like he was an altar.
Lu Jin tapped the edge of the panel with a fingertip and minimized it. Saved for later.
On the feed, the wasteland had gone quiet in that way that meant it wasn't.
Between the broken walls, a pair of green glows opened.
Then another. Then another.
The speakers pushed a low growl through from the other side, buried under heavier breathing and the wet drag of something moving too close to the ground.
Three shapes slid into view, spreading out.
Each was the size of a calf. Exposed bone, stringy muscle, metal mesh wrapped into tendons. Their lips had rotted away, leaving teeth bare in permanent, dripping grins.
Corpse hounds.
They circled, closing in on the girl under the concrete slab.
Right on cue, a pop-up bounced into existence on Lu Jin's HUD, this one in an offensively cute font.
[Alert! Your cloud-raised girl is about to become dog food!]
Limited-Time "Anti-Wolf (Dog)" PackHigh-Frequency Sonic Resonator (Single Use)Price: ¥198
(Friendly Tip: Her leg's still busted. She really can't outrun dogs! Countdown: 10… 9…)
Lu Jin glanced at the price, then at the three sets of teeth on the feed.
His bank balance flashed instinctively in the corner of his mind. The number was not big.
"Robbers," he said.
He hit confirm anyway.