At three in the morning, the air inside the "Family Fortune" 24-hour fast-food joint was thick with old fryer oil that had been reheated one time too many. Underneath it lurked the sour stink of a mop that hadn't seen clean water in weeks.
Lu Jin sat scrunched into the farthest corner booth. The free cup of hot water in front of him had gone cold ages ago. Condensation beaded on the glass, ran down the side, and spread a thin, icy halo under his fingertip.
He was in an awkward spot.
To his left, a couple fed each other fries and giggled. To his right, a middle-aged office drone pecked at a laptop like a dying pigeon trying to hit its quota. Overhead, the kid in the uniform cap had walked past with a rag for the third time, eyes saying very clearly: when is this broke bastard leaving.
Lu ignored him. He pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose and turned his collar up to hide half his face.
On his screen, the wasteland blizzard was getting worse.
[Warning: Current regional temperature has dropped to -18°C.][Warning: Long-distance travel detected. Target location "North Star Supply Depot" distance: 142 km.][Warning: Based on current physical stats, projected mortality rate for subject "Li Xing" crossing the ice plain on foot: 99.87%.]
Red text bled down from the top of the screen like fresh paint.
Then, right on cue, Deep Space Echo slapped a new popup over everything, complete with falling coin sound effects and gaudy edges.
[Wasteland Expedition · Supreme Vehicle Pack (S1 Season Limited)]
[Copy: Hey hey~ Heartbroken watching your daughter run her legs off? Worried the wind and snow will ruin that pretty little face? It's the apocalypse, but your princess still deserves the best ride!]
[Contents: All-Terrain Blastproof Off-Road Vehicle (Nuclear Edition) x1 + Lifetime Fuel Policy + Heated Seats][Original Price: ¥88,888.00][Limited-Time "Bone-Crusher" Price: ¥48,888.00][Countdown: 59s… 58s…]
[Note: Not buying? Aww. Then let's pray her leg bones are tougher than permafrost~]
Lu Jin stared at the number—48,888—expression flat. Then his gaze slid down to the corner of the screen.
Balance: ¥0.10
"Take that 'hey hey' back," he muttered.
His thumb tapped the glass, mouth hooking in a dry, humorless curve. "Forty-eight thousand? They could strip me for parts and sell me on the black market and maybe afford a tire."
In his head, he added a word: parasite.
The system apparently took the insult in stride. The popup shook once and swapped to a "budget option."
[Beggars' Edition · Used Snowmobile: ¥6,888.00]
Lu didn't even blink.
For someone who had to split one yuan in half before spending it, six thousand and forty-eight thousand lived in the same universe: impossible.
"Some roads don't need wheels," he said.
He closed the shop tab and went back to the wasteland feed.
Outside the warehouse at Resource Point No. 7, the gutted tank hull he'd paid through the nose to locate lay half-buried in snow. Only the chassis and half a track remained, but that slab of pre-war military alloy was still hard currency out there.
Right beside it, the S-09 mech—Big Yellow—pawed at the snow with its claws, bored and overcharged after two isotopic "meals."
An S-class mech had enough torque to drag a hill.
A familiar spark lit in Lu Jin's eyes, the kind only tech freaks got when they smelled a stupid idea that might work. He opened the command input field, thumbs flying.
If you couldn't afford a top-shelf armored SUV, you didn't cry about it.
You built your own damn minivan.
—
A-11 Wasteland Zone, outside Resource Point No. 7.
The wind carried ice chips that cut any exposed skin. Snowline blurred sky and ground into the same dead white.
Li Xing huddled in her slightly-too-big exosuit, breath fogging in the air as she stared at the golden lines that had just appeared in front of her. Her lips parted.
[Oracle: Strip the tank's bottom armor. Tie the steel cable around Big Yellow's waist. We're building a sled.]
"A… sled?"
She blinked and turned to look at the hulking S-class killing machine beside her.
Big Yellow jerked its massive head up. The yellow glow in its lone eye flickered as it locked onto the industrial steel cable in Li Xing's hands like it was a guillotine blade.
[Thought Bubble (Big Yellow):][Detected hostile gaze…][Core Logic Warning: Dignity loss risk 99%…][I am a Reaper… I am fear incarnate… I am—]
"Big Yellow. Come."
Li Xing crooked a finger at it, tone gentle, like a nurse lying through her teeth about how this shot "won't hurt at all."
Big Yellow rolled back an inch on its tracks. Its IQ wasn't impressive, but every servo in its frame screamed that whatever came next would be deeply unsuitable for an "S-class strategic unit."
"Listener said," Li Xing continued, "if you work hard, once we reach that 'North Star' place, the batteries are all-you-can-eat."
She pulled a folded candy wrapper from her pocket—the last trace of a chocolate she'd refused to finish—and shook it in front of the mech's face. There was nothing inside, but the motion carried its own promise.
"And if you don't…"
Her smile tilted. Something bright and slightly vicious crept into the curve of her mouth.
She pointed at Little Rock, who was shaking so hard his teeth chattered.
"If you don't cooperate, Listener said we'll pop your batteries out and let Little Rock use them as hand warmers."
[Thought Bubble (Big Yellow):][!!!][Threat Level: Lethal!][Dignity Score: -100… Survival Instinct: +1000…][Executing directive: Become a dog.]
Big Yellow let out a drawn-out, miserable electronic whine. Then the mighty Reaper mech flopped down with a crash and turned its armored back toward Li Xing, presenting its waist like a condemned draft horse.
The next thirty minutes were the sort of thing that would give any pre-war military engineer a stroke.
Under Lu Jin's remote guidance, Li Xing directed Big Yellow to dig its hydraulic claws into the underside of the tank chassis and rip out the flattest, strongest armor panel.
"Skreeee—"
The tearing metal shrieked across the empty plain.
The old man stood at the shelter entrance, eyes almost bulging out of his skull. He stared at the S-09—once a symbol of "death and annihilation"—now harnessed with a thick steel cable, dragging several tons of armor plate like a draft beast.
"This is blasphemy…" he whispered, hands shaking on his cane. "Mockery of the art of war…"
He didn't raise his voice. Not when he saw what Li Xing was doing next.
The armor panel was roughly twenty square meters, edges curled just enough to make a natural lip. A giant sled, waiting to happen. Li Xing began hauling crates, scrap parts, and even the cleaning robot "Holy Spirit" onto it, stacking them in a neat pile and tying everything down with rope nets.
Just as Lu Jin thought they were finally ready to move, Li Xing did something that made his fingers pause over the screen.
In the middle of all that greasy, dented metal, she cleared a space. The flattest spot with the best angle forward.
From inside her jacket, she took out a piece of white cloth folded with almost ceremonial care—a sterile surgical drape she'd saved from the medical kit and never had the heart to use.
She laid it down carefully, smoothing every crease. Then she stuffed a few pieces of softer foam underneath to form a crude cushion.
A makeshift seat. Wrong setting, wrong era, but somehow… right.
When she finished, she stepped back, hands on her hips, and nodded, pleased with herself.
Then she turned to the invisible camera in the air, eyes bright, finger pointing at that spot.
"Listener," she said, cheeks dimpled, "this is the best view. No machine oil smell either."
"You sit here."
—
Back in the corner booth of Family Fortune, Lu Jin stared at the tiny white patch of "clean seat" on his cracked display.
For a second his breathing hitched.
He wanted to mock her. Wanted to scoff that he was a higher-dimensional observer, a player outside the screen, not some god you could plop onto a sled.
But his throat felt stuffed with damp cotton. The joke wouldn't come out.
Light bloomed at the edge of the UI, soft and pale gold.
[System Prompt: Detected extremely strong "service" and "concern" directed at you from observation target "Li Xing".][Emotion has high target specificity. Special interaction mode unlocked.][Do you accept this "invitation"?]
Options: [Yes] / [No].
Lu Jin didn't do the math. Didn't ask what it would cost in mental strain. He just hit [Yes].
A strange sensation flowed from his fingertip through his arms and spine.
The ache in his back from hours of hunching on cheap plastic loosened. Muscles along his spine relaxed one by one, as if someone had slid the world's softest pillow behind him. For a moment, it felt like he'd sunk into a cloud left on a windowsill all afternoon.
[Feedback Gained: Holy Seat in the Void (Trace)][Effect: Sharing "comfort" stat with observation target. Spinal pressure reduced by 90%. Lower-back overuse pain temporarily suppressed.]
Lu Jin eased against the horrible booth backrest and let out a long, involuntary breath.
Somehow, this trash diner chair beat the leather couch he'd once sat on in a corporate award banquet.
"Stupid girl," he said under his breath.
The words scraped out rough.
In a world where everything was numbers and leverage, where kindness got itemized and monetized, some kid in a dead wasteland had given a seat of honor to someone she couldn't see, couldn't touch, on a sled built from war junk.
And that felt hotter than any cup of free water.
He typed two characters into the command bar.
[Set off.]
—
"Big Yellow! Let's go!"
Li Xing hopped onto the sled, waving a little scrap of cloth like it was a flag at a parade.
"Wooo—!!!"
The S-09's core roared. It still thought this was beneath it, but if you were going to be a dog, you might as well be the fastest one.
Tracks bit into frozen ground. Thousands of virtual horsepowers kicked at once.
Boom.
The tank armor sled jerked forward like a flicked coin.
There was no suspension. No shock absorption. No safety rating. The only thing this vehicle had going for it was raw, insane thrust. In the first second, they shot up to a speed that would've gotten any pre-war driver arrested.
"AAAAAAAHHH—!"
Little Rock clung to a crate handle, soul halfway out his mouth, lungs filled with ice.
The old man wrapped both arms around his black box, dentures perilously close to ejecting, eyes screwed shut in pure regret.
Only Li Xing was laughing.
She knelt beside the white "throne," one hand braced on the edge, guarding it from flying slush, the other pointing ahead at the collapsing ruins streaking past on both sides.
"Listener! Look! We're flying!"
On his side of the glass, Lu Jin watched the scenery streak by on the feed, feeling a phantom echo of the sled's violent bounce in his bones.
He couldn't stop the grin.
Yeah. This beat a forty-eight-thousand-yuan SUV into the ground.
Of course, warmth never lasted.
As the sled carved a white trail into the storm and vanished from the cameras at Resource Point No. 7, the old man finally forced his eyes open and glanced back.
Behind them, the torn-up snowfield and the engine's roar spelled a single, blaring message.
"Too loud…" he rasped, face drained. His voice barely reached his own ears over the wind. "All that noise… it's like yelling 'dinner's ready' at the whole damn wasteland…"
"Up north… if those things wake up…"
The rest of the sentence blew away on a gust.
—
In the real world, the phone on Lu Jin's table buzzed once.
Not Deep Space Echo's sound.
A regular notification chime. Reality, knocking.
An SMS. No sender name, just a scrambled, encrypted line.
One short line of text. Enough to strip away whatever warmth his eyes had picked up from the sled.
[Sender: Unknown (Encrypted Line)][Message: The rats let something slip. Someone's posted a bounty on the black market, looking for the D-class tech who fixed the 'Thunder God' chip. Price's high—enough to buy you a hundred lives. Run.]
Lu Jin stared at the text for three seconds, then deleted it without saving.
He grabbed the glass, tipped back the last of the now-icy water, and let the cold wash the taste of blood off his tongue.
Out there, Big Yellow was dragging a stolen sled into a forbidden northern zone, calling monsters out of their sleep.
Here, in a city drowning in neon, a different kind of net was closing around him. Quiet. Professional. Paid well.
"A hundred lives, huh…"
He nudged his glasses up, scooped the few remaining coins off the table, and slipped them into his pocket.
Then he stood, pushed open the greasy glass door of Family Fortune, and stepped into the three a.m. rain, black as spilled ink.
"Let's see," Lu Jin said to the empty street, "who ends up the prey."