The rattling security door finally gave up and slid open.
On the other side, the landlady's face waited—cheap foundation caked over bad skin, features twisted up for a full-volume screaming match. Spit hung at the corner of her mouth, ready to fly.
The line she'd loaded—something about "D-class trash getting out of my apartment"—never made it past her teeth.
She met Lu Jin's eyes and stalled.
This wasn't the tenant she knew. Not the guy who always kept his head down and apologized for breathing.
He stood in the shadow of the doorway. Behind his lenses, his gaze was flat, dry, like two abandoned wells. No fear. No anger. Just a kind of stillness that didn't belong to the living.
Under that look, the landlady suddenly felt less like a creditor and more like a line of junk code waiting to be deleted.
"Lu Jin, you—" She tried to haul her outrage back up. The sound came out thin, like air leaking from an old pump.
Lu Jin didn't answer.
He lifted his wrist instead. The spiderweb crack on his personal terminal caught the hall light as the screen came on. A holo window slid open above the device, projecting into the dark stairwell.
The recording played in silence.
Five straight minutes of her voice: insults, slurs, and her jamming a spare key into his lock and trying to force the door. Every frame crystal clear.
Next to the video, crimson text unfolded.
New Era Gene Federation Citizen Rights Protection ActArticle 11, Clause 3:Harassment, coercion, or verbal assault toward D-class or lower citizens is strictly prohibited. Violations will be recorded in the social credit archive; the offender's rating will be forcibly downgraded.
"According to the Federation's algorithm," Lu Jin said, tone as even as a coroner reading a report, "your current credit rating is C-grade. Standard."
The light from the holo reflected off his glasses as he looked up at her.
"If this footage—backed up in triplicate—goes to the dispute arbitration court, your rating will drop to C-minus within twenty-four hours."
His gaze flicked down briefly, across the lines of her neck, where cheap jewelry covered sun spots.
"As far as I know, your son's applying to a B-grade public middle school next month. A C-minus guardian rating means direct rejection."
Silence fell over the floor.
The sensor light hummed overhead. The landlady's breathing rasped loud in the narrow space. She stared at him like she was seeing some stranger wearing Lu Jin's face.
"Y-you're threatening me?" Her skin flushed an ugly dark red. Her finger hovered near his nose, but didn't quite land.
"This is a deal." Lu Jin killed the projection. The hallway dropped back into gloom. "This month's rent—three thousand. Waived. In return, the recording is permanently erased. You keep your money and your son's future."
Tranquil Song still sat on his brain like a golden filter.
With pain and fear stripped out, shame followed. Morality, too. For these thirty minutes, he wasn't Lu Jin. He was a calculator wrapped in human shape, searching for the highest survival probability.
The landlady stared hard, searching his face for a crack, for something she could push into. Nothing waited there but cold.
"…Fine."
She ground the word out through her teeth, turned on her heel, and stomped away. The harsh click of her heels smacked down the stairs, faster than when she'd come up, as if something bigger than debt was chasing her.
Lu Jin watched her retreat until the sound faded, then turned back in and locked the door. The movement was smooth, automatic.
First gate cleared.
No victory screen. No fanfare. Just the loan timer still ticking in the corner of his vision.
[Remaining Time: 21:15:09][Outstanding Debt: ¥20,000.00]
He pulled his hoodie off the back of the chair. Black, cheap, bought on sale. The hood came up over his head, shadowing half his face.
Then he stepped out of the rented box he called an apartment, down the mold-stained stairwell, and into the underbelly of the city—a back alley that smelled like burnt motor oil and rotten drainage.
Time to sell something worth more than furniture.
Grey Rat Alley sat deep in the lower district, the place city sensors pretended didn't exist.
Lu Jin stopped in front of a stained maintenance door bolted onto an old drainage pipe. He rapped on it three times: two long, one short.
A metal latch scraped. The door swung inward.
Cheap tobacco slammed him in the face first. The cramped room behind the door was a nest built out of electronic trash—old terminals, broken drones, cracked displays. A handful of holo screens floated in the air, glitching between ads, porn, newsfeeds, and black-market boards.
In the middle of this, parked on an overturned crate, a bald man with a mechanical eye held a modified rail pistol like it was an extension of his hand.
The local info broker. Everyone nearby called him "Rat."
"D-class?" The implant whirred as it focused on Lu Jin. Contempt crept into Rat's voice. "I don't deal with trash. Unless you're here to sell something… internal."
On any other day, the weight behind that tone would've made Lu Jin's ribs tighten. Adrenaline would spike, lungs would seize, and the coughing fit would do the rest.
Right now, under the fading halo of Tranquil Song, his heartbeat barely ticked up.
"I'm not selling organs," he said. "I'm selling my life."
He ignored the barrel pointed near his chest and walked straight to the cluttered workbench. A folded piece of paper came from his pocket and landed on the scratched surface with a soft slap.
Hand-drawn circuitry covered it. No smudges. No corrections. Every line precise enough to pass for a printout.
"This is the core architecture for Thor Industrial's latest military-grade neural transmission chip," Lu Jin said.
He'd drawn it in his head while patching old John's chip earlier, then put it to paper after. Same job, twice paid.
"You feed a pulse with this exact frequency through this node…" He tapped the right spot. "That three-hundred-thousand-yuan chip fries instantly. Full failure."
Rat's mechanical eye zoomed in fast enough to whine. He snatched up the page, organic eye glued to the diagram. His breathing shifted, thickening.
"How the hell would you know this?" He jerked his head up, suspicion replacing mockery. "You?"
"I was built to feel pain," Lu Jin said calmly. "A precision instrument just for that."
Same line he'd used on old John.
"These chips are already on the black market. If this backdoor leaks, Thor Industrial faces a giant wall of compensation claims." He paused. "Or you sell the information to Thor's rivals. I don't care who you screw."
Rat went quiet.
You could almost hear the numbers moving inside his skull, adding risk to payout and dividing by survival odds.
While he weighed, Lu Jin felt the cooling layer in his mind thinning. The edges of the world lost their sharpness; grain crept back into the image. The burn in his lungs started as a hint at the bottom of his ribs.
The buff was bleeding out.
"Twenty-five thousand," Lu Jin said, cutting across Rat's thoughts. "Cash. Now."
Rat stared at him. The red light in the implant pulsed a few times, like a heartbeat.
Then it settled into a deep, steady glow.
"Deal," Rat rasped.
He yanked open a drawer. Bills wrapped in oil paper hit the desk. As Lu Jin's fingers brushed the packet, Rat's knuckles pressed onto one corner, pinning it in place.
His voice dropped low.
"Take the money," he said. "Then forget this door. Forget my face."
He hesitated, then added, in a tone that didn't match his usual sharp edges at all:
"And kid…"
Lu Jin met his gaze.
Rat's one natural eye looked exhausted. The kind of tired that didn't sleep off.
"If you ever get some 'anonymous blessing' after this? Run. Don't look back."
Lu Jin slid the cash fully out from under Rat's hand.
He didn't answer.
He didn't promise anything, either.
Back out in the alley, he shoved the stack under his hoodie, into the inner pocket.
His account balance jumped by ¥25,000. The loan gap vanished, plus a cushion. On paper, he was safer than he'd been in months.
His body disagreed.
The second he stepped out of Grey Rat Alley's shadow, his face went white.
The string in his head that Tranquil Song had been holding snapped.
[BUFF: Tranquil Song (Trace) has expired.]
A strangled sound scraped out of his throat.
The pain he'd kept caged for forty minutes came back all at once, repayment with interest.
His lungs felt like someone had swapped them for burning wire wool. Every breath tore at him, raw meat dragging along metal. The vertebrae along his spine turned into a row of glass beads under a crushing hand, grinding.
His knees gave out.
He hit the filthy pavement hard enough to jar his teeth.
"Cough—"
The fit ripped through him. Hot wetness seeped between his fingers, then hit the puddle below in blooming red circles. His vision blurred at the edges; a high, needling whistle screamed in his ears.
That was the cost.
A human frame had limits. You borrow the clarity of a god for long enough, and your bill came due in blood.
Just as the black at the edge of his sight started closing in, his phone vibrated.
Light flooded through his palm.
Deep Space Echo forced itself open.
On the wasteland feed, Li Xing was in the shelter. She'd just finished handing out nutrient paste to Little Rock and the old man. The two of them sat under the warm lights, huddled over their bowls, gulping the thick paste like it was a feast.
Their shoulders had finally dropped.
No storm. No monsters. No countdowns. Just heat and food.
Home.
Protecting that was the whole point of everything she'd done today, and it showed in her face—quiet relief, a small, stubborn pride.
Li Xing turned from them toward the unseen "camera," toward him.
She opened her mouth and let out a tune with no words. Not the mourning hum she'd used before. This was steadier, warmer—a song for keeping watch.
On the screen, the black metal key box in her hands lit up again, gold bursting from the engravings.
Deep Space Echo reacted instantly.
[Detected dual-emotion resonance: "Loyalty" + "Achievement"!]
[Holy Resonance feedback threshold exceeded.]
[Observed Target: Li Xing]
[Emotion Profile: Loyalty A– · Achievement Joy B+]
[Holy Resonance EXP: +40]
The bar that had been stuck at 199 / 200 for so long finally jumped. The tail hit the end and broke through.
[Mortal Echo · Faint Light Stage]
[LV1 → LV2 (0 / 500)]
The interface gave a brief jolt, as if someone had hit Confirm on a system-wide reset.
[Congratulations! Your cloud-adopted target has advanced to Faint Light LV2!]
[Processing level-up rewards…]
New lines of soft gold text rolled down.
[Body status sync calibration: Executed.]
[Lung Fibrosis Damage: 72% → 64%]
[Cardiopulmonary Endurance: +12%]
[Neural Conduction Efficiency: +18%]
[Comprehensive Physical Evaluation: D- → D (baseline human).]
The last line hit like a hammer.
[Passive Talent Unlocked: Faint Light Echo (Tier I).]
[Effect: Whenever Li Xing experiences strong positive emotions, your thought speed temporarily increases (5%). Permanent +10% resistance to mental negative states (fear, confusion, etc.).]
The gold ripple didn't spill out of the screen this time.
It ran up his fingers instead, through the skin pressed to the phone, seeped into the nerves beneath.
It didn't stop at his skull.
Cold clarity swept down into his chest, straight into the diseased lungs. For one strange second, it really did feel like someone reached in there, tugged those scarred organs out, dunked them in an ice spring, and dropped them back in.
The constant, dull ache he'd worn like a second shirt thinned sharply.
He drew a breath without thinking.
No blades. No ripping. Just a faint itch, like a long-neglected machine that had just gotten its first shot of lubricant in years.
The grain at the edge of his vision faded. The shakes in his hands eased. His body was still garbage, but now it was garbage that at least hit the minimum standard for "functional."
Not recovery.
Just dragging a near-scrapped unit back up to "barely passes inspection."
For someone used to watching his own warning lights blink constantly, that alone felt almost indecently good.
Lu Jin sucked in air, then another, then another. His face was soaked in cold sweat, but color crept back into it, thread by thread.
He wiped the blood from his mouth with the back of his hand and looked at the girl singing inside the warm shelter.
His smile came out thin and crooked, half grimace.
"Thanks," he muttered.
He pushed himself up, steadying against the alley wall.
Pain still flared, but it no longer dragged him toward the floor.
Current cash plus the twenty-five thousand from Rat, minus what he already owed to other basics—he was sitting on over forty thousand.
More than enough.
He didn't hesitate.
His finger flew across the Deep Space Echo interface, and he shoved ¥20,000 into the same black hole that had given him the loan timer.
[Payment successful! High-interest loan cleared.]
[Congratulations! As a valued, trustworthy user, your "Divine Grace" emergency loan limit has been increased to ¥50,000! Withdraw anytime and walk the path to godhood!]
A new pop-up painted his view in gold and smug.
Lu Jin stared at it for half a heartbeat, then his terminal buzzed.
Different vibration pattern.
A new, encrypted message slid into view. No sender ID.
[We received the intel on the chip. Interesting work. Its original owner knows you sold it, by the way. Good luck, D-class trash.]
The alley suddenly felt a few degrees colder than the autumn air should allow.
Lu Jin's eyes narrowed, killing the last leftover softness from Li Xing's song.
So.
Loan cleared. Body patched. Talent unlocked.
And his name had just been written into a much bigger, uglier ledger.
He slid the phone into his pocket.
Somewhere on a dead world, a girl sang for him like he was a god.
Back here, the real game finally put its first piece on the board.