The rain kept coming, wrapping itself around Lu Jin like a wet burial shroud.
Sirens wailed nearer at the mouth of the alley. Red and blue flashed crazily across the damp walls, jittering like death's shadow closing in. Lu Jin lay in reeking runoff, his mind pulling apart at the seams. Every spasm of his lungs felt like he was swallowing barbed wire. His right arm floated uselessly in the filthy water; there was no pain there anymore.
That meant the nerves were burning out.
Only his phone still glowed faintly beside him. A last, pathetic thread tying him to the world.
Wasteland – A-11, Resource Point No. 7.
Silence.
The kind that crushed sound flat. The kind that made you feel like your eardrums had been unplugged.
Li Xing stared blankly at the steel mountain kneeling in front of her.
S-09 "Executioner."
The brain floating in its glass tank had gone still. The enraged red lights in its eye sockets had dimmed to a muddy yellow—the color the database called "standby obedience."
It was shaking.
She could feel it through the floor. Every hydraulic joint in that killing machine hummed with a kind of raw, animal fear.
That voice…
The one that had just rolled through the entire subway station, cold and absolute like a verdict from above—that had been the Listener.
Her Listener.
Her eyes went hot all at once. She didn't understand "permission override," didn't know what "quantum echo" meant. Her world only had one simple equation:
To save her, God had struck something down.
And God never intervened for free.
She thought of the old storybooks, the ones with paper pages and faded covers. Heroes who unleashed miracles and then fell into long sleep. The great voice earlier had been stern, but at the very end, buried under the crackle of interference, she'd heard it—
A breath, ragged and held back.
"Are you… hurt?"
Li Xing whispered toward the empty air. Her voice shook like a leaf caught on a web.
No answer.
The dead silence coming back through the screen on the other side of reality crushed the joy of surviving in a heartbeat. Panic surged up and overflowed. She fumbled the nail gun from her hands, let it clatter, then dropped to her knees in front of the steel behemoth.
She had nothing to offer a god.
Nothing but her life, and—
Her gaze dropped to the black metal box lying beside the old man.
The same box the old grandpa had clung to even while unconscious. The trigger for all this.
It had to be precious.
Her small, scarred hands, streaked with grime, closed around the weight of it. She lifted it with both arms, muscles screaming, and held it above her head like she was lifting up her whole world. The pose was awkward, almost childlike, but the way she gazed at the invisible "eye" in the air was pure devotion.
"This… is for you."
Li Xing shut her eyes. Tears tracked down her dirty cheeks and splashed onto the cold surface of the box.
She started to hum.
Not a war song. Not the mourning chant they'd forced her to learn in the lab.
Just a few crude notes. The nameless tune she'd used to keep herself from freezing to death on the worst nights.
A song that made things hurt less.
"Please… get better…"
Reality – Lower District, back alley.
Lu Jin's vision had narrowed to a slit.
As that last line of light was about to vanish, his phone exploded in gold.
[System Prompt: Legendary-grade Offering detected—Ark · Resource Point No. 7 Key (Physical Entity)!]
[Warning: Cross-plane transport of physical objects requires ¥1,000,000.00. (Balance insufficient.)]
[Plan Adjustment: Switching to "Data Extraction" mode. Parsing key core code… Converting target Li Xing's Devout Faith into usable energy…]
[Scumbag Clause Triggered: A 30% handling fee will be charged for this cross-plane operation.]
Lines of data raged up the screen, but Lu Jin's eyes were beyond reading.
He just felt heat.
No—fire.
Li Xing's soft humming seemed to seep straight through from the other side of the glass. A mass of pure, blazing gold ignored every rule of space, punched through the blood-slicked skin of his palm, and forced its way into his dying body.
"Ah—!"
His eyes snapped open. A raw sound tore out of his throat.
It hurt.
Bones knitting back together hurt. Dead muscle being kicked awake hurt. Gold light surged through his veins like someone was stitching him back together from the inside, fingers made of lightning shoving broken pieces into place.
For a second, in the glare behind his eyelids, he thought he saw her.
That thin girl, stepping out through the screen, out through the rain, wrapping her arms around him.
No blood. No reek of sewage.
Just a faint warmth, like sun-baked straw beneath your back when you lay down and closed your eyes.
[Feedback Received: Holy Resonance · Rebound (Devout Tier)]
[Effect: All physical stats temporarily calibrated to D-grade (average adult human baseline). Duration: 10 minutes.]
[Bonus: "Ark Database (Fragmented Version)" access unlocked.]
[Detected: Target Li Xing has attempted "Reverse-plane Offering" using a Legendary-grade item, accompanied by a devout healing prayer.]
[Emotion Assessment: Devout Sacrifice – S · Fear Suppression – A · Healing Wish – A+]
[Holy Resonance EXP Settlement: +100]
[Target: Li Xing]
[Holy Resonance Realm: Mortal Echo · Glimmer Stage]
[Level: LV2]
[Growth: 244 / 500 → 344 / 500]
[Progress: Glimmer LV2 (344 / 500)]
[Note: Majority of Holy Resonance converted into "Rebound" effect and cross-plane transfer energy. EXP shown is after fees.]
Lu Jin dragged in huge gulps of cold, wet air.
His right arm, the one that had been broken badly enough to need an amputation consult, still throbbed and burned, swollen and ugly. But the kind of pain that made your soul crawl out of your skin was gone. In its place was a deep, heavy ache. Dull. Manageable.
He could move it.
The edges of his vision, usually filmed with that permanent gray haze from hypoxia and nerve damage, were crystal clear. He could pick out every flake of rust on the pipes in the distance. His ears snapped into focus too—the ping of raindrops hitting manhole covers, the slap of boots in a puddle, the low, background hum of the city's power grid.
This wasn't healing.
This was overclocking the whole sensory rig.
He pushed himself upright out of the filthy puddle and stared down at his phone. The screen was cracked. The balance displayed in the corner was still that humiliating [¥21.00].
His mouth pulled up slow. The movement tugged at broken skin and split a scab, a thin line of blood beading at the edge of his lips.
"Stupid girl…"
His voice was sandpaper on concrete, but there was something in it he hadn't heard in himself for a long time—warmth, and a kind of deranged joy.
"A key worth a fortune… and you just… gave it to me?"
Twenty-one yuan.
In this city, it wouldn't buy you a decent bowl of noodles.
On that distant wasteland, someone had just handed over the key to a world and said it was his.
"Woo—woo—!"
The sirens hit the alley mouth like a blade. High beams carved through the darkness, sliced across the three bodies on the ground, then began to search toward the trash cans.
"Over there! Blood trail!"
"Move in! Target is extremely dangerous!"
Shouted orders mixed with the hard slap of tactical boots hammering through puddles, rushing closer.
The fondness in Lu Jin's eyes iced over. What replaced it looked more at home on a starving wolf.
Riding that Holy Resonance rebound, he launched himself forward. His movements were still rough, but the burst of speed was obscene for someone who'd been half-dead a minute ago.
He didn't run for the exit.
He dove straight for the nearest corpse in a raincoat—the one he'd ventilated.
Hands moved on muscle memory.
Two spare mags. A tactical knife. One encrypted comm unit blinking red.
All of it disappeared into his clothes in a heartbeat.
The first SWAT trooper stormed into the alley proper, rifle up and sweeping.
By then, Lu Jin's newly reconnected right hand had already slipped under the manhole cover in the corner and levered it up.
The heavy cast iron disk felt like cardboard.
For this moment, he wasn't a D-class piece of trash. He was someone a god had reached down and yanked off the scrap heap.
Water splashed.
He dropped into the black throat of the sewer and, with a quick twist, eased the cover back into place above him.
Boots thundered overhead. Someone snarled, "Dammit! Lost him! Seal every exit!"
The stink of rot and gas surged up to meet him, thick enough to make a normal person vomit.
Lu Jin pressed his back to the slime-slick wall and let the filthy water soak his shoes. He lifted the encrypted communicator he'd stolen.
The red light blinked faster, then connected.
"This is Cleanup Command."
The voice on the other end was processed to hell, genderless and flat. "Report. Has the target 'D-class trash' been neutralized? We require the body for recovery."
Lu Jin slid down the wall until he was sitting, the darkness folding around him.
He glanced once at his phone. On the cracked screen, Li Xing was still there, still praying toward the sky, lips moving in some clumsy little hymn.
He felt his own heart slam against his ribs, strong again, because of her.
His mind flashed through options. Smash the communicator and vanish—the clean choice, the clear declaration of war. Or talk. Use the line. Turn it into a hook. Higher risk. Higher yield.
His eyes lingered on Li Xing's face frozen mid-sacrifice.
No exits left anyway.
He hit the talk button. Blood-stained lips hooked into something sharp.
"Bad news," he said. His voice rolled through the pipe like it was coming out of a grave. "He just crawled back from hell."
"Do me a favor."
Lu Jin tilted his head back against the stone, looking up into darkness.
"Tell Rat. And whoever's hiding behind him."
"Wash your necks. Wait for me."
He closed his hand.
Plastic and circuitry crunched. The communicator fell apart in his palm, pieces dropping into the rushing black water and vanishing downstream.