Lower Ring 8 – the Gutters – 03:11 standard time.
Acid rain falls in lazy, poisonous sheets, eating through anything cheaper than military-grade titanium. The neon that reaches this deep is half-dead: a dying magenta sign that flickers between "RED LOTUS ARENA" and "REDIT LOTUS ARE A" depending on which transformer is failing tonight. The air tastes of burnt wiring, coolant, and the copper tang of fresh blood.
Liàn Xing limps along Catgut Alley with the slow, deliberate gait of someone who has learned that hurrying only makes the pain arrive sooner.
Eighteen years old. One meter seventy-eight. Fifty-one kilos after three days of water and recycled protein paste. His coat—once military grey, now a patchwork of scars and prayers—was the only thing his mother left behind before she vanished into an enforcer raid twelve years ago. Underneath, his torso is a living museum of other people's victories: boot prints, blade scars, the perfect circle of a shock-rod burn just left of his sternum.
His left lung whistles with every breath. Black-market knock-off, third generation, already failing. The right lung hates its neighbour and makes that hatred audible.
In his pocket: 47 credits, a rusted collapsible baton, and a losing streak that has its own fan club.
Ninety-eight consecutive losses in the Red Lotus VR Arena.
Zero wins.
The bookies don't even bother posting odds anymore. They just call it the "Talentless Tax." Put money on whoever fights Liàn Xing and collect when he hits the floor. The crowd loves it. There's something comforting about watching someone who is worse off than you are.
Tonight's opponent took forty-seven seconds to put him down. A new personal record.
The med-bots dragged him out the loser's gate and dumped him beside the trash vats the way they always do. Rain hisses where it hits the exposed wiring at his collar. His public-school neural port—model PX-09, the one they give orphans—sparks once and dies. Pain dampeners: offline. HUD: offline. Hope: never installed.
He lies on his back in the puddle and stares up at the narrow strip of sky visible between the leaning hab-blocks. No real stars. Only the corporate constellations: the Azure Sky dragon, the Moonlit Ice phoenix, the Heavenly Sword crossed blades. Holograms projected by the upper rings to remind the Gutters who owns the night.
Somewhere above, a drone speaker crackles to life and plays the highlight reel for the entire alley.
"—and that's ninety-eight! Ninety-eight straight losses for Liàn Xing, the eternal cockroach of Ring 8! Who wants to bet on ninety-nine?"
Laughter rolls like thunder.
Liàn Xing closes his eyes.
Inside his spine, fused to the seventh cervical vertebra since before he could walk, something ancient stirs for the first time in eighteen years.
A perfect sphere of absolute black no larger than a child's marble. Pre-Fall relic. Illegal in every ring. The kind of thing that gets entire districts purged if the corps discover it.
The Celestial Seed.
It has been silent his whole life. Drinking his pain, his humiliation, his blood. Giving nothing back.
Until tonight.
A hairline fracture splits across its obsidian surface with a sound like the universe cracking its knuckles.
A little girl's voice—sweet, ancient, and very, very annoyed—speaks directly into the part of his brain no surgeon has ever mapped.
"Oi. Host."
Liàn Xing's eyes snap open.
"You planning to die in this puddle, or can we get on with the apocalypse already?"
He coughs blood into the rain. "Who…?"
"Name's Zhenxing. Supreme Star Spirit, Class-9 forbidden entity, and apparently the unluckiest cosmic powerhouse in ten epochs because I got stuck with you as a host." A pause. "You've got about thirty seconds before the alley kids come to strip your corpse. Decision time."
The fracture widens. A single thread of pure silver light—no wavelength the visible spectrum has a name for—leaks out and races along his spinal cord like liquid starfire.
The pain in his ribs vanishes. The whistle in his lung goes quiet. The rain stops burning where it touches his skin.
Liàn Xing pushes himself up on one elbow.
Across the alley, five shadows detach from the darkness. Street kids with sharpened rebar and hungry eyes. They know the routine. When the arena spits him out, he's too broken to fight back.
The leader—a girl no older than fifteen with a missing front tooth and a Moonlit Ice Palace knock-off jacket three sizes too big—steps forward.
"Evening, big brother. Tax time."
Liàn Xing stands.
Not dramatically. Not with a burst of power or a heroic roar.
He just stands.
Silver circuits ignite beneath his skin like constellations being born. They crawl up his neck, across his cheekbones, into his eyes. The bruises fade as though someone hit rewind on his life. The coat that has never come off his back in twelve years suddenly feels too small.
The girl with the knife hesitates.
"W-what the hell…?"
On his shoulder, a tiny holographic figure materializes—visible to everyone now.
A silver-haired loli no taller than his thumb, wearing flowing daoist robes made of condensed nebula, twin tails bouncing with mischief. Crimson eyes glow like binary suns.
She waves cheerfully.
"Hi hi~♪ Took you long enough, idiot host."
The rusted baton in Liàn Xing's pocket vibrates once, then unfolds on its own with a metallic shriek. Rust flakes away like dead skin. Underneath, the cheap iron transmutes into something blacker than night, threaded with flowing silver galaxies.
Version 0.0 of what will one day be called the Meteorfall Spear.
Zhenxing floats in front of his face, hands on hips.
"So. Ninety-eight losses. That's a record, right?"
Liàn Xing looks at the spear in his hand—at the silver light dancing along the blade—and then at the arena's flickering sign in the distance.
His voice is quiet.
Deadly.
"I think it's time to update the leaderboard."
The girl with the knife takes one step back. Then another.
Too late.
Liàn Xing moves.
No one in Catgut Alley sees the strike.
They only see five bodies hit the ground at once, unconscious, untouched, neural links fried to harmless slag.
The rain keeps falling, but for the first time in his life it feels clean.
Zhenxing claps tiny hands in delight.
"That's my boy. Now let's go collect some debts."
High above, in the pristine observation decks of Moonlit Ice Palace, a girl with frost in her veins watches a grainy dark-feed recording of the alley on repeat.
Lan Shuyin pauses the frame where the silver light first ignites.
Her cryo-tubes run backward for 0.7 seconds.
Warm.
In Heavenly Sword Court's training spire, Zhao Shentian feels something shift in the dao of the blade itself and smiles like a wolf scenting blood.
And in the deepest server farms of the Void Court, something that was never human opens eyes made of corrupted code.
The Consort licks lips that do not exist.
"My heart comes home."
But that is still hours away.
Right now, a boy who has lost everything except a rusted baton and a coat full of scars walks back toward the Red Lotus Arena.
The Gutters tremble.
For the first time in four thousand years, a real star looks down on Ring 8.
And it is angry.