Three in the morning. Family Fortune 24-Hour Diner.
The air carried burnt fryer oil and sour mop water. The ceiling tubes buzzed with overtaxed current, a faint insect rasp that crawled under the skin.
Lu Jin sat in the most forgettable corner. The paper cup in front of him had been squeezed out of shape, rim half-collapsed. This was his third straight hour camped here, and his fifth cup of free hot water begged off the counter.
The mop head smacked the metal leg of his chair with a dull clang.
He didn't look up.
He stared at the napkin on the table, stained with a thumbprint of ketchup, fingers pressed to his temples. The warmth from [Holy Seat in the Void] had faded; the phantom comfort drained out of his spine. Needle-pain crept back into the bones, like something cold and thin was drilling through marrow.
He didn't have money for painkillers.
On his retinal display, blood-red numbers hovered where only he could see them.
[Current Balance: ¥0.10][Holy Resonance Debt: -103 pts (Overdue Timer: 71h 48m 22s)][Warning: Upon overdue, equivalent life span will be deducted directly.]
Lu lifted the misshapen cup and took a sip. The water had gone fully cold. It slid down his throat and hit his empty stomach, which answered with a tight, twisting spasm.
Deep Space Echo stayed quiet.
No cutesy pop-ups. No "dear host" nonsense. No flashing banners trying to sell him something.
In this rigged game, once you were broke, you weren't even worth spamming. The system would just watch the timer hit zero, then quietly cash in your body.
His hand shook as he pulled up the shop interface.
Most of the icons were dimmed. With his balance where it was, the system had auto-collapsed everything "irrelevant"—which was almost everything.
He scrolled to the bottom, into the [Locked Permissions] section.
In a sea of blacked-out silhouettes, one golden outline pulsed faintly.
[S-Class Gene Recomposition Fluid (Sequence Rewrite Edition)][Effect: Fully repairs all D-class and below genetic defects, rewrites life sequence, clears all pathological countdowns.][Price: ¥5,000,000.00 / 50,000 Holy Resonance][Unlock Condition: Core Holy Resonance Node Activated (0/1)]
Five million. Or fifty thousand Holy Resonance.
Lu Jin stared at the number, lips curling in a soundless, slightly hysterical smile.
Seventy-one hours of life left.
Price to buy that life back: five million.
"Bargain of the century," he muttered, voice rough, like gravel in a blender.
He fished a cheap ballpoint pen out from where he'd lifted it off the register earlier and dragged a hard line across the napkin.
The tip tore through the thin paper.
"If I rely on Li Xing being cute, scared, grateful… and me swooping in for saves…" He scratched out crooked little formulas. "Best-case, what, thirty Holy Resonance a day?"
Subtract food. Subtract pain relief. Subtract whatever emergencies would pop up in both worlds.
"That's not a plan. That's a slow-motion suicide."
Trickling emotions wouldn't save him.
He needed a spike. Something big enough to punch a hole straight through the rules.
A miracle, basically. Manufactured and monetized.
The pen wandered to the corner of the napkin, where a grease spot had already soaked through. He wrote three characters over it, pressing hard enough that the ink almost carved the table.
North Star.
That was the place in his father's recording—the "choral array." S-09's grave. The half-finished Babel tower this world once built, trying to scrape against something higher.
Light up that node.
Get Li Xing there. Get her to sing on top of that giant amplifier.
That was the only shot at S-class returns.
Lu's gaze cooled into something sharp and hungry.
This wasn't some mobile game anymore. This was a venture deal where the collateral was his life.
—
The feed jerked away from floating code into white, empty land.
Wasteland, north of A-11. Forty-five kilometers out from Blackstone Shelter.
Wind carried hard ice grains that pinged off armor plating. Temperature sat around minus twenty. The readouts were almost bored about it.
S-09—Big Yellow—had parked its bulk in the lee of a rock wall, exhaust washing heat into the world in useless bursts that the wind broke apart and stole.
Li Xing hopped down from the tank-sled, boots sinking into snow that swallowed her ankles.
Her face was bright red from the cold; even her lashes had a fine layer of frost. Her eyes, though, were clear and loud.
"Little Rock, dig a pit over there and bury the cans to heat them!" she shouted over the wind.
"O-okay…" Little Rock hunched into himself, snot frozen under his nose, teeth chattering, clutching a folding shovel as he shuffled off.
The old man wrapped his worn radiation cloak tighter, wedged into a crack in the rock. His cloudy eyes never left the northern horizon, where the sky sagged low and dark.
"We can't go…" he muttered, nails scraping at stone until they split. "That way's a dead end… north is full of monsters… ghosts that eat sound… we'll all die…"
Li Xing tuned him out.
She had something more important to do.
She didn't hunt for the warmest spot, didn't look for a windbreak for herself. Instead she climbed back up onto the rear of the sled.
There, nested among foam scraps and a folded surgical drape, sat the "throne" she'd built—a little raised platform, absurdly clean, reserved for the one who watched.
The wind had dusted it with a thin layer of snow.
Li Xing pulled off her oversized tactical gloves. Her bare hands were cracked and blotched with old cuts, but she used them anyway, brushing every speck of snow away from the seat.
The care in the motion made it look like she was polishing a relic.
Once it was clear, she untied the ragged cloth from around her neck—her makeshift scarf—and laid it over the seat. She smoothed it down, palms moving slowly until the cloth lay neat and flat.
"You sit here," she told the empty space, breath ghosting in the air. She beamed, stupidly content. "Now it's not cold."
She knew the Listener was just a gaze from somewhere she didn't understand. She knew he might never "really" sit there.
But in her world, if a god was watching, then there had to be a place for that god to sit.
—
Back in the diner, Lu Jin watched that scarf-wrapped seat on his cracked screen. Something thumped once against his ribs from the inside.
Gold light crept into the corners of his vision.
[System Notice: Detected extremely strong "service" and "concern" emotions from observation target "Li Xing".][Direction: Reserving a place for "God" and inviting Him to travel together.][Emotion focus extremely high. Special interaction mode unlocked.]
[Holy Resonance settlement…][Observation Target: Li Xing][Holy Realm: Mortal Echo · Glimmer Tier][Level: LV2][Growth: 459 / 500 → 484 / 500][Source: Proactively reserving a seat for the Listener and insisting He must accompany her (service + attachment).]
[Accept this "invitation"?]
Yes / No.
Lu didn't hesitate. Didn't wonder how much mental load it would cost. He hit [Yes].
The sensation slid from his fingertip through his entire body.
The ache in his spine from being bent over hard plastic for hours loosened. Pressure vanished like someone had gone vertebra by vertebra, lifting bricks off his back. It felt like a soft cushion had appeared out of nowhere, like he'd sunk into something warm that had seen real sunlight once.
[Feedback: Holy Seat in the Void (Trace)][Effect: Shared "comfort" stat with observation target. Spinal load reduced 90%. Lower back pain from overuse temporarily suppressed.]
For one breath, the constant grinding hurt eased.
It lasted exactly that long.
Red bled into the edge of the UI, slicing straight through that little pocket of comfort.
In the upper corner of the wasteland feed, Big Yellow's head turned slowly in the dark.
It hadn't shut down.
The eye that usually glowed a dull, almost goofy yellow now flickered in a murderous rhythm, red light stuttering behind the lens.
It stared at Li Xing's back. More precisely, at the back of Li Xing's head—at the soft, warm skull under frost-streaked hair.
Lu's pupils tightened.
He yanked up the backend of [All Things Have a Voice · Translator].
[Target: S-09 (Big Yellow)][Status: Critically hungry][Energy Reserve: 3% (nearly depleted)][Organic Mass Desire: 15% (rising)][Thought Feed: …so hungry… no power left… want to eat… something soft… brain pulp… sweet…]
His grip closed around the paper cup. It crumpled flat with a wet crackle, cold water spilling across the back of his hand.
Out of power.
Two isotope batteries had been a starter snack. Hauling a heavy sled forty-plus kilometers through a snowstorm had wrung the core dry.
Now the S-class weapon was nothing but a starving animal in a metal shell. Paper-thin against real hunger.
"Don't look at her," Lu said to the screen. His voice came out low and raw, full of wires pulled too tight. "Don't look at her head."
On-screen, Big Yellow's red eye jerked, then shifted away from Li Xing, tracking instead to Little Rock's scrawny neck.
Temporary.
Without fuel, it would eat someone eventually.
Lu dragged in a breath slow enough to hurt and forced his mind to line up again. He picked up the pen, went back to the napkin, and jabbed a huge red exclamation mark beside the pencil-sketched route to North Star.
Next to it he wrote, pressing hard enough that the nib scratched into the wood under the paper:
North Star Plan · Phase One: Feed the monsterNote: Before it eats Li Xing.
He tossed the pen down, folded the napkin along sharp creases, and slipped it into the inner pocket of his jacket like it was a bond he intended to cash.
Then he stood, joints protesting, and walked to the door.
Cold air leaked through the glass and met him as he pushed it open. Rain flecks rode the wind and bit at his face. He hunched into his thin coat and stepped into the black.
Behind him, the kid with the mop finally broke.
"About damn time," the boy muttered, stomping over to scrub away the muddy footprints under the booth. "Leech sits here all night and can't even buy a soda—"
Lu Jin didn't look back.
He was a leech. A broke D-class nobody with a ten-cent balance and a terminal diagnosis.
And this particular nobody was about to go cut a deal.
A very expensive one.