The cheap "braised beef" noodles were still steaming. The white fog smeared over Lu Jin's glasses until the whole world turned into a blur.
He took them off, wiped them on the hem of his T-shirt, and pushed them back up his nose.
The moment his vision cleared, the warmth in his stomach met a flood of cold straight through his optic nerve.
On the other side of the screen, night over A-11 was thick enough to stain your hands. Black rain fell in hard lines, dragging radiation dust down with it, rinsing broken concrete and twisted rebar in a silent wash. Every drop carried just enough acid to chew at skin.
Li Xing sat pressed against the dead sonic bomb, as close as she could get without climbing inside it. Her body jerked in small, violent bursts, like a scrap of trash in a gutter draft.
The pale blue scent-suppressing mist still hung low to the ground, holding predators at bay. It didn't hold back cold.
Her face, already bloodless, had gone chalky with a hint of bruise-blue underneath. Bare feet, cut up and filthy, were knotted together in the muddy water, toes swollen red from the cold.
Lu Jin sucked a mouthful of hot broth.
The noodles warmed his gut. A block of ice settled in his chest.
He was eating. She was waiting to see which would come first—dawn, or death.
Even the sausage in his bowl tasted like cardboard.
A chime snapped through the room.
That cursed little sound again, the one designed to pop arteries.
[Alert: Your cloud-adopted girl is under cold snap assault.][Environment scan: Temperature has dropped to -5℃ with light acidic fallout.][On the wasteland, "normal colds" = terminal illness! Can you really watch your freshly rescued cutie turn into an ice sculpture in muddy water?]
A 3D model spun in the middle of the screen: a silver egg-shaped pod straight out of a sci-fi catalog.
[Recommended Item: Portable Single-Soldier Camping Pod (Civilian Edition)]
Functions: Constant 24℃ interior, radiation-shield coating, anti-insect field, built-in soft ambient night light.Price: ¥588.00
Newbie Protection Notice: First use is covered by system funds. Actual charge this time: ¥0.00.(Bonus: "Cloudlike" sleeping mat included with first order only.)
"Five eighty-eight…" Lu Jin murmured.
He glanced at the four-yuan-fifty instant noodles in his hand, then back at the spinning pod and its smug price tag.
Here, the great Savior of the Wasteland lived in a D-class apartment with drafty windows and a mildew blanket.
Over there, the "newbie starter gear" was a pod that cost more than three days of his food budget.
"Scam," he said softly. There was a hard edge behind it. "If your 'protection period' is just more ad copy, you'd better pray this thing actually blocks radiation."
Another line of text slid into the lower corner of his view like a fine-print trap.
[Use newbie protection benefit? System will cover this item's cost.]
"Of course I'm using it," he snorted, and hit Confirm.
[Item deployed. Newbie protection charges remaining: 1 / 1.][Friendly reminder: While this use is free, future repairs to the pod will be billed to you.]
Somewhere in Deep Space Echo, the debt ledger flipped a page and wrote his name in a new column.
At least, for this second, his real account balance didn't drop.
—
In A-11, the black rain kept peeling heat off Li Xing's skin.
She'd reached the dull, floaty stage of cold where shivers stopped meaning anything. Part of her brain had already accepted it: she'd freeze here, before the sky changed color.
The sky did change—but not the way she expected.
The air above her broke open.
A silver capsule slid out of nowhere and dropped toward the broken ground. When it "hit," there was no crash, no crater. The shell flexed, petals of metal folding back with a soft series of clicks.
A rush of warm air kissed her face.
In three seconds, an egg-shaped barrier blossomed on the wasteland. A translucent shell, glowing faint orange from within, formed a small dome around the pod. Rain hit its surface and skidded off in thin streams.
Li Xing's eyes widened.
A palace for gods?
She didn't move.
Years of conditioning in labs and cages had drilled a reflex into her—bright, clean, advanced tech usually meant clamps and needles, scanners and cold tables. In her vocabulary, "shiny" and "safe" had never once appeared in the same sentence.
Then a line of pale gold text floated into being in front of her.
The words came from the "listener's" paid feature: the command bullet text that had cost Lu Jin six yuan to unlock.
[Go in. Sleep.]
Simple. Short. No room for argument.
Li Xing's whole body reacted.
It was his "voice," in the form she could see.
She bit her lip and dragged her bad leg behind her, inching toward the warm glow.
Her palm brushed the edge of the pod.
No shock. No restraints snapping out. Just heat—a soft, steady warmth that soaked into her skin. The hatch slid aside on its own, unveiling a white sleeping mat inside.
She froze again.
Too clean.
The mat was so white it made the lab coats in her memory look dirty. Softer than anything she'd ever seen, like a slice of cloud carved out and laid on the floor.
She lowered her gaze.
The lab coat hanging off her shoulders was stiff with dried blood and black mud. Her bare toes were sunk in water laced with radiation dust.
She was garbage. A misprint. A "defective product."
And this was clearly something meant for gods.
Her instinct wasn't to jump in. It was to step back.
On the screen in the rental unit, Lu Jin's brows drew together. He was already composing a second line of bullet text in his head when the girl moved.
She grabbed the frame of the hatch and, without so much as a hiss of complaint, dragged the soles of her feet back and forth over broken stone. Scraping. Again and again, until the worst of the muck had rubbed off.
Only then did she sink to her knees.
There was no actual pair of shoes to remove, but she went through the motion. Careful fingers, an invisible knot, an invisible pair of laces. A ceremony she'd invented to make herself feel less like walking filth.
And then she went in the way a stray cat sneaks into a warm stairwell—on hands and knees, head ducked, trying to take up the least space possible.
The hatch sealed behind her.
Outside, wind and rain kept chewing on concrete and metal.
Inside, the storm stopped existing.
Warm air flowed out of hidden vents, raising the temperature to a comfortable 24℃. The floor had give. The light over her head was the color of late afternoon.
Li Xing sat in the center of the mat, muscles still twitching from the cold she'd banked in her bones. She stared up at the little orange lamp, and wetness spilled out of her eyes without warning.
Not from pain.
From warmth.
It scared her, a little. The idea that this could be real. That if she blinked wrong, the pod might vanish and dump her back in the freezing mud.
To make sure she wasn't dreaming, she reached into her coat and pulled out the only "treasure" she owned—a crumpled wrapper that still held a ghost of strawberry scent.
The packaging from that first nutrition bar.
She smoothed it with both hands until the plastic lay flat. Each motion was patient, cautious, as if she were handling some rare relic. Then she lifted it, arms straight, offering it up to the air, to the unseen point where she believed the listener was looking from.
It was the prettiest thing she had. So it had to go first.
"For you," she mouthed, soundless.
In the rental unit, that ridiculous bit of plastic filled Lu Jin's entire screen.
For a moment he stared at it, stunned, as if someone had shoved a mirror in his face.
Then Deep Space Echo dropped a prompt over the image.
[Detected: "Utmost Sincerity" offering.][Observed Target Li Xing is attempting to present you with a "treasure."][Accept? (Note: Physical object cannot transfer; will convert to equivalent spiritual link.)]
"Accept," Lu Jin said. His throat came out rough.
On-screen, the wrapper broke into fine points of light and scattered.
Li Xing didn't flinch when it disappeared. Relief eased the tightness in her expression.
He'd taken it.
Which meant he wouldn't throw her away.
Security rolled over her in a wave. Heavy, slow, absolute.
She folded herself up on the mat and let her eyes fall shut.
A thin line of sound drifted out of her.
Not a plea this time. A soft tune, the same scraps of melody she'd used to hum into the dark when she was locked up and scared. It had no official name, no lyrics, nothing anyone could look up. Just notes, small and steady.
The difference was in what she poured through it.
Gratitude. Relief. That raw, clinging faith that someone up there had chosen her and would keep choosing her.
[Detected: "Repose" Holy Song.][Converting Holy Resonance…][Holy Resonance Energy +2.][Life countdown adjustment: +4 hours (to be applied gradually during host sleep).]
[Observed Target: Li Xing][Holy Song Realm: Mortal Echo · Afterglow Stage][Level: LV1][Growth: 92 / 100][Emotional tags: Peace / Attachment / Gratitude ++]
Gold dust leaked out of the feed, drifting lazily through Lu Jin's field of view like a swarm of digital fireflies. One by one, they sank into his skin.
His eyelids grew heavier.
For three years, sleep had come like a bargain made under threat: painkillers first, then sedatives, then a few fractured hours of blackout.
Now, the needles in his bones drew back. The phantom knives in his joints slid out and vanished. It was as if someone had lowered him into a bath just shy of hot, letting his ligaments and muscles slacken for the first time since his diagnosis.
"This money… wasn't wasted," he muttered.
The plastic fork slipped out of his fingers and clattered onto the table.
He slumped sideways onto the couch and stopped fighting it.
No pills. No drip. No machines.
He slept like a kid who'd run himself out at recess and crashed on the rug.
—
It was too good. Too deep.
Morning light burned through the gap in the curtain like a thin white beam and landed right on his face.
Lu Jin jerked awake and reached, on instinct, for the painkiller bottle on the little table beside the couch.
His hand closed on nothing.
"…Huh?"
He blinked, then remembered.
He rolled his neck. The vertebrae answered with a series of crisp snaps, but no spike of pain followed.
His body was still weak; he wasn't about to go run a marathon. Yet the constant, ready-to-collapse heaviness had retreated. Walking no longer felt like balancing a broken frame on toothpicks.
"So this is what Holy Resonance does," he murmured, studying his fingers.
Hope flickered up before he could squash it.
If this was the effect when Li Xing was stuck at E-class cannon fodder level… what would it look like when she hit C-class? B-class? The "god-tier" nonsense Deep Space Echo kept hinting at?
Maybe "cure the incurable" wasn't pure marketing.
His phone buzzed against the table.
He picked it up, expecting another window from Deep Space Echo. Instead, an SMS from the real world stared back at him.
[XX Bank] Dear customer, your current credit card bill is ¥3,890.00. Payment due soon. Please ensure adequate balance.
Cold water, full bucket.
He cleared the notification and opened Deep Space Echo.
On the wasteland feed, Li Xing was still asleep in the pod, looking almost decent for once. But the safety of that image was undercut by the number pulsing in the top-right corner of the interface.
[Gene Collapse Countdown: 64 hours 12 minutes]
Below it, two neat lines:
[Treatment Plan A: S-Class Gene Repair Fluid (Shop locked. Estimated price: ¥500,000.00)][Treatment Plan B: Continuous input of high-purity Holy Resonance Energy (requires extreme positive emotional output from Observed Target).]
Lu Jin stared at the half-million like it was a punchline.
Then he checked his own balance.
¥7,489.
Last night's warm haze of gratitude and soft singing evaporated. Reality showed its teeth again.
"Sixty-four hours," he said.
He got up and walked to the window.
Outside, the steel jungle of the city glittered: rails, towers, drones, billboards the size of buildings. On one holo-screen, a polished couple laughed under the tagline for a top-tier gene optimization clinic—perfect skin, perfect teeth, a little boy between them who had never even heard the word "defect."
None of them would ever see "ACDS" on a medical chart. They'd never taste the iron in their own cough.
"Broke here, you die," Lu Jin said quietly. "Broke over there, you die too."
He narrowed his eyes. A lean, hungry look slipped into his features and stayed.
He needed money.
For himself. For the girl in the pod. For the half-million "estimated price" Deep Space Echo had dangled in his face like bait.
However this city wanted to protect its precious "order," he didn't care anymore.
If he had to flip it upside down to shake loose enough cash, then that was what he'd do.