4:17 a.m.
The rain had stopped, but the damp didn't. It crept through the crooked window frame of the rental like mold with a grudge, spreading across the room tile by tile.
Lu Jin lay on the floor.
Ten minutes ago he'd tried to get up from his three-legged chair to pour some water. That was when the thing called "gene sequence collapse" in his medical file woke up again.
It wasn't needles anymore. Someone had jammed a dull, rusty saw inside his spine and was dragging it back and forth through the bone.
When he fell, he took the glass with him. The last mouthful of water hit the floor, mixed with dust, and turned into a muddy smear.
His cheek rested in it.
Cold sweat ran down from his hairline, burned his eyes, and dripped off his jaw into the mess. His fingers dug into the gaps in the laminate floor. Nail beds went dark, tips scraping up little curls of wood.
"Hah… ha…"
His breath rattled out of him like a broken bellows. Every inhale felt like his lungs were rubbing against sandpaper.
He waited.
Going by every crappy pay-to-win game he'd ever seen, this was exactly the moment the system should pounce—like a shark that smelled blood in the water.
Normally, when a player was "near death" or "hard stuck," the UI would slam up a bright red first aid kit. Or a glowing "Limited-Time Resurrection Pack." Bold font, friendly voice:
Dear~ if you don't top up now your account is gonna die! Super sale, only 6 yuan!
Lu lay there and waited for that damned pop-up.
If it came, even if he had to borrow from a loan shark, even if it meant tossing his last ten cents into the void, he'd hit pay. No hesitation.
Because this hurt.
This wasn't the kind of pain a person was built to endure. It peeled the thoughts out of your head until there was nothing left but raw nerves twitching.
One minute passed.
Three.
Five.
The room stayed as quiet as a morgue. Outside, occasionally, a car rolled through a puddle, tires hissing. That was the only sign the world still existed.
No banner.
No "dear host."
No "limited-time offer."
The Deep Space Echo system—usually chatty, greedy, borderline obnoxious—sat dark at the edge of his vision like a bricked device.
Lu forced his shaking mind to drag the interface out of hiding.
A thin blue panel slid into focus, washing his paper-white face in cold light.
The shop page was a graveyard.
Most items were grayed out with the mocking tag: [Insufficient Funds]. The only thing still blinking was a lonely [Balance: ¥0.10] in the corner, pulsing like it was laughing at him.
His blurred gaze swept every inch of the UI, hunting for anything—some hidden "newbie safety net," some "emergency assist."
Nothing.
Until his eyes landed on the very bottom. Tiny text, the sort of thing you only ever read when you had nothing else left.
[ System Protocol, Clause 44: This system strictly prohibits proactive advertising in the real-world layer. ][ Note: We respect each host's free will. If you choose death, the system will remain silent. There will be no emotional manipulation or purchase prompts. ]
Lu stared at the line.
Then a small, cracked laugh slipped out of him.
"Ha…"
The sound tugged at whatever scar tissue he had in his lungs and set off a brutal cough. Blood spattered the floor, bright against the mud.
Respecting free will.
Such a pretty phrase.
Translated: You're broke. Your life isn't worth the electricity it'd cost to save you. If you don't crawl over here on your own and beg me to take your money, why should I waste cycles on you?
This wasn't a game.
There were no soft-hearted devs who cared about player retention. No starter welfare.
It was pure exchange.
He was consumable. The system was a machine. Machines only valued materials that still had burn left in them.
Lu rolled onto his back, staring up at the ceiling stain blooming across the plaster like a moldy continent.
The pain kept chewing through him, but the begging in his eyes died away. What replaced it looked a lot like the quiet before someone does something stupid and irreversible.
"Not gonna save me, huh…"
His voice came out hoarse, ragged, barely there.
"Fine."
If you don't hand me a way out, I'll build one myself.
—
The feed fell through jagged data, then settled on dead-white ice.
Wasteland. A-11 Zone, Resource Point #7, underground warehouse.
Different air. No agony here. Just a pressure that sat on the chest and didn't move.
Li Xing was packing.
She took the few precious cans of expired beef and wrapped them layer by layer with strips she'd torn from old clothes.
"Why wrap them?" Little Rock squatted nearby, snot frozen under his nose, genuinely confused.
"So they don't make noise."
Her voice barely rose above a whisper, as if even the dust in the air might be listening. She tucked the padded cans into the very bottom of her pack, hands pressing them down to make sure they'd never clink against each other when she ran.
"The things out there… they can hear." She lifted her head. The silly, trusting look she usually had was gone; in its place was a seriousness that didn't fit her age. "We're going north. It's far. As long as we don't make a sound, as long as we don't get noticed, we can live."
The old man hunched in the corner, nodding so hard his head might fall off. "Right… right… no sound… move quiet… like rats… like rats…"
The two of them had been scared hollow by the wasteland. Their survival strategy now was simple: shrink.
Li Xing had picked that up. Or maybe the "oracle" had put too much weight on her shoulder. Either way, she didn't dare charge a monster anymore just because she'd made a promise.
She'd become sensible.
Too sensible.
She had even wrapped rags around S-09 Big Yellow's feet, layer after layer, trying to muffle the thunder when the thirty-ton mech walked. The sight was both pathetic and pointless.
Back in the rental, Lu still lay on the floor, but Deep Space Echo's overlay kept scrolling Li Xing's status across his vision.
[ Observed Subject: Li Xing ][ Current State: Extremely cautious / preparing for stealth travel ][ Recent Holy Resonance Gains: ][ +1 (Calm) ][ +1 (Focus) ][ +0.5 (Faint Hope) ][…]
The graph representing his Holy Resonance income lay almost flat. Like a flatline on an EKG.
Lu stared at the little "+1" ticks, and the curl at the corner of his mouth twisted colder.
Too safe.
Good for her, maybe. She was learning how to survive like a rat in the ruins.
For him, it was a death sentence.
His current Holy Resonance debt: [-103].Time until the system docked life directly: under 70 hours.
At this rate, even if Li Xing strolled all the way to North Star without so much as a scraped knee, Lu would already be a corpse rotting on his floor for the neighbors to smell.
And that was before factoring in the money pit named S-09.
His gaze flicked to the corner.
In the warehouse feed, the S-class mech lay in shadow. The red cloth collar around its neck, the rags on its feet—none of that mattered. Underneath, Lu could see the truth.
[ Hunger: 19% (rising slowly) ][ Energy Reserve: 2.8% ]
Walking bomb. The longer Li Xing tried to freeze the world and avoid risk, the more that countdown ticked down.
No intense fights meant no intense feelings.
No intense feelings meant no big Holy Resonance spikes.
No Holy Resonance meant no money for fuel.
No fuel, and S-09 would switch to the most convenient biomass source in reach.
It all looped back into a perfect little death spiral.
And Li Xing's current "stay small, stay safe" approach was the fastest way to spin that spiral out of control.
"She can't keep going like this," Lu muttered.
He shut his eyes and rebuilt the board in his head.
Pain hit him in waves, but underneath it something sharp and ugly took shape. Every nerve screaming only made his thoughts clearer, edged them in a kind of fevered precision.
If the system was just a loan shark that didn't care whether he stopped breathing…If Li Xing was too good-hearted, too naive to game her own emotions…
Then he, the only one standing between them, didn't get to play babysitter anymore.
He had to be the director.
Lu opened his eyes and called the shop back up. His hand barely obeyed, fingers twitching as he scrolled.
He skipped every "miracle product" with four, five zeroes in the price. No point even looking. Instead his attention went to the gutter—where the cheap items lived, the ones players mostly used for trolling or suiciding in PvP.
It didn't take long.
[ Sound Lure Device (Civilian Model) ][ Effect: Mimics the cries of a wounded juvenile animal. Strongly attracts predators within a 500m radius. ][ Side Effect: Extremely high chance of the user being surrounded and torn apart. ][ Price: ¥50.00 / 5 Holy Resonance ]
[ Single-Use Low-Power Flare ][ Effect: Briefly illuminates dark environments, perfectly reveals user's position. ][ Price: ¥30.00 / 3 Holy Resonance ]
[ Scent-Block Spray (Trial Size) ][ Effect: Obscures user's smell for 30 seconds. ][ Price: ¥20.00 / 2 Holy Resonance ]
Trash-tier tools.
All designed to get people killed.
Lu studied them. His bloodshot eyes didn't soften.
In his head, a sequence clicked into place:
Act One: Use the lure to blow up Li Xing's "safe stealth" plan and drag monsters in.Act Two: Fire the flare, expose her completely, escalate the situation into a genuine no-way-out. Squeeze her fear and will to live to the limit.Act Three: At the last moment, hit the Scent-Block, cut her out of the hunt. Let her walk away from the impossible—courtesy of "God."
Terror.Despair.Then the whiplash of surviving anyway, of being saved by an unseen hand. Gratitude so strong it made your ribs ache.
Run that full arc once and the Holy Resonance haul would spike hard. Enough to chew down his debt, maybe even enough to afford a "bone" for S-09.
It wasn't just a gamble.
He was shoving Li Xing toward the edge of the cliff himself.
If any part of the choreography slipped—too many predators, mistiming, the spray misfiring—she was done.
His finger hovered over [Purchase].
The floor was cold under his back. His lungs throbbed. The red life-countdown pulsed at the edge of his vision like an aneurysm about to burst.
He thought of the "seat" she'd made for him on the sled, lined with a scarf so he "wouldn't be cold."
Thought of the star she'd drawn on Big Yellow's stupid red bow.
"Sorry, kid," Lu said quietly.
There was no apology in it. Just the calm viciousness of someone who'd decided dying nicely wasn't an option.
"If we want to stay alive, we all have to lose our minds a little."
He hit confirm.
[ Ding. ][ Transaction Complete. ][ Acquired Items: Sound Lure Device x1, Flare x1, Scent-Block Spray x1. ][ Current Holy Resonance Debt: -113. ]
In his mental interface, he created a new folder.
He didn't give it some soft, hopeful name.
He typed four words, each one cutting into the empty space like a chisel on stone:
"Pre–North Star: Miracle Performance Plan."
If they made it through, it'd be called a miracle.
How much it hurt getting there was never the director's problem.