The snow around Beiluo City had turned a permanent shade of grey. The soot from the new blast furnaces hung heavy in the air, creating a twilight gloom even at midday. To the citizens, it was the smell of warmth and industry; to the figure watching from the ridge line, it was the breath of a dying earth.
Ying was a Shadow Killer of the White Cloud Sect. She did not have a loud title like "Elder" or "Sect Leader." She did not emit a crushing aura. She was a void—a hole in the world where light refused to reflect. She had killed kings in their bedchambers and sect patriarchs in their meditation seclusion.
She looked down at the city she had been sent to purge. The Life Tablet of Elder Mo had shattered three weeks ago. The Sect was in uproar, but they were cautious. They feared a rival Great Sect had taken the territory. Sending an army against an unknown enemy was foolish. Sending a knife in the dark was prudent.
Ying adjusted her veil. Her breath made no mist in the freezing air; she circulated her Qi to match the ambient temperature perfectly. She was invisible to thermal sight, though she did not know the term. She simply knew she was invisible to the heat-seeking vipers of the Southern Swamps, and that was enough.
She moved. She didn't run; she flowed, slipping between the shadows of the pine trees, descending toward the city walls.
The walls had changed. They were topped with coils of strange, barbed wire. Metal towers stood at intervals, sweeping the perimeter with beams of white light that buzzed with a low hum.
Ying scoffed internally. Light was easy to avoid.
She waited for the beam to sweep left, then darted forward, scaling the thirty-foot stone wall with three silent steps. She crested the top, expecting to find a drowsy guard leaning on a spear.
Instead, she found a small metal box mounted on a swivel. It looked like a severed head made of iron and glass.
Ying froze. Her instincts screamed that she was being watched, but there was no soul nearby. No breathing. No heartbeat.
The machine's glass eye rotated. It passed over her.
Ying held her breath, suppressing her presence to the level of a stone. The machine paused for a fraction of a second, its internal lens dilating, then continued its sweep.
She exhaled. Just a mechanism. A toy.
She slipped over the parapet and dropped into the alleyway below. The city was loud. Even at night, the hum of machinery vibrated through the cobblestones. Strange, boxy carriages rolled down the main street without horses, their eyes glowing yellow.
Ying moved through the shadows of the slums, heading toward the mansion on the hill. The target was the "Usurper Prince." The mission was simple: Head. Bag. Return.
As she moved deeper into the residential district, she noticed something odd. The rats.
There were mechanical insects perched on the eaves of roofs. Tiny, copper-winged flies that didn't twitch. They were everywhere. A network of unblinking eyes.
Ying felt a chill that had nothing to do with the cold. This wasn't a city; it was a spiderweb. And she had just walked onto the silk.
Inside the Command Center, the silence was broken by a soft ping.
Jiang Chen didn't look up from his blueprints. He was designing a new recoil dampener for the artillery.
"Sector 4," he said calmly. "Alley 3. Anomaly detected."
On the wall of monitors, screen #42 flickered. It showed a grainy, night-vision feed of an empty alleyway.
"There is nothing there, Administrator," Chen Wei said, squinting at the screen. "The motion sensors didn't trip."
"The motion sensors are calibrated for mass," Jiang Chen corrected. "Look at the snow."
He pointed to the bottom corner of the screen. The fresh snow in the alley was undisturbed, except for two faint depressions that appeared and disappeared instantly, as if a ghost had stepped there.
"Footprints," Chen Wei gasped. "But no body?"
"Optical camouflage. Or high-speed movement," Jiang Chen tapped the console. "System. Switch to Lidar."
The screen shifted to a 3D wireframe mode. The visual feed was replaced by laser-mapped geometry.
There, moving against the wall, was a silhouette. A human shape that displaced the air but reflected no light.
"Assassin," Jiang Chen said. He didn't sound alarmed. He sounded validated. "White Cloud Sect. They finally sent the cleaners."
"I'll alert the Guard," Chen Wei reached for the alarm button.
"No," Jiang Chen caught his hand. "She bypassed the outer perimeter and the acoustic sensors. A standard squad won't see her until their throats are cut. She's a cultivator."
Jiang Chen stood up and walked to the weapons rack. He bypassed the AK-47. He reached for a prototype hanging in the back.
It was a Kel-Tec KSG Shotgun, modified. Bulky, ugly, twin-tube magazine.
"Clear the hallway," Jiang Chen ordered. "Cut the lights in the mansion. If she wants to play in the dark, let's make it darker."
Ying reached the mansion roof effortlessly. The tiles were slippery with soot, but her boots gripped them like claws. She located the Master Bedroom window.
She slid a thin, Qi-infused needle between the window sashes, lifting the latch without a sound.
She slipped inside.
The room was pitch black. Perfect.
She sensed the bed. She sensed a shape under the duvet. The breathing was slow, rhythmic. The sleep of the ignorant.
Ying crept forward, drawing her dagger. It was made of black obsidian, coated in a neurotoxin that stopped the heart in three beats.
She raised the blade. She brought it down in a fluid arc, piercing the chest of the sleeping figure.
Crunch.
There was no blood. The dagger hit something hard. Straw?
The figure under the duvet deflated. It was a dummy. A bundle of pillows and straw.
CLICK.
The sound of a heavy switch being thrown echoed in the room.
Suddenly, the darkness wasn't just dark—it was heavy. Gravity seemed to double.
[GRAVITY TRAP: ACTIVATED][MAGNITUDE: 3G]
Ying's knees buckled. Her internal organs were yanked downward. The Qi circulating in her body became sluggish, fighting the sudden crushing weight.
"Welcome to Beiluo," a voice spoke from the corner of the room.
Ying forced her head up. Standing in the shadows was a man wearing a strange visor with glowing green eyes—Night Vision Goggles. He held a short, thick weapon.
"You..." Ying gritted her teeth, forcing her Qi to flare. She was a Foundation Establishment cultivator; simple gravity spells could not hold her forever. "Trap!"
She exploded forward, fighting the gravity, moving faster than a mortal eye could track. She lunged for the man, her dagger aiming for his throat.
Jiang Chen didn't try to dodge. He pulled the trigger.
BOOM.
The shotgun roar in the enclosed room was deafening.
Ying twisted in mid-air, her body contorting impossibly to dodge the projectile. She expected a bullet.
She didn't get a bullet. She got a Dragon's Breath round.
A cone of magnesium fire erupted from the barrel, turning the air into a blast furnace. It wasn't about accuracy; it was about area of effect.
"AH!" Ying shrieked as the flames caught her black stealth robes. The fire clung to her, burning through her Qi defenses.
She rolled on the floor, extinguishing the flames, and sprang off the wall, launching herself at the ceiling to escape.
CHK-CHK. Jiang Chen racked the slide.
BOOM.
The second shot wasn't fire. It was a Taser Slug.
The heavy projectile hit Ying in the back. It didn't penetrate; it flattened against her reinforced skin. But upon impact, it discharged 50,000 volts.
Ying's nervous system, already strained by the gravity trap, short-circuited. Her muscles locked up. Her Qi seized.
She fell from the ceiling, crashing onto the floorboards like a sack of wet cement.
She twitched, trying to reach for her dagger, but her fingers wouldn't obey.
Jiang Chen walked over. The Night Vision Goggles whirred as he adjusted the focus. He looked down at the assassin—a woman, face veiled, smoke rising from her scorched robes.
He kept the shotgun aimed at her head.
"You people really rely too much on your eyes," Jiang Chen said.
He tapped his ear. "Chen Wei. Bring the containment cuffs. And tell the bio-lab I have a live specimen."
Ying glared up at him, her eyes filled with hate and humiliation. To be defeated by a mortal. To be captured by a toy.
"The Sect... will burn this... place," she slurred, fighting the paralysis.
Jiang Chen crouched down, keeping the barrel pressed to her forehead.
"Let them come," he whispered. "I need the fertilizer."
He hit her with the butt of the shotgun. Her world went black.
The next morning, the citizens of Beiluo noticed nothing different. The factories churned. The snow fell.
But in the deep basement of the City Lord's Mansion, beneath the concrete and the steel, a new cell was occupied.
Jiang Chen stood on the other side of a pane of reinforced plexiglass. Inside, Ying was strapped to a metal chair. Her meridians were pierced with suppression needles—a technique Jiang Chen had learned from the White Cloud Scripture found in Elder Mo's ring.
"Subject: Shadow Killer," Jiang Chen dictated to the System. "Cultivation: Foundation Establishment, Late Stage. Attribute: Shadow/Wind."
He looked at the assassin. She was awake, staring at him with dead eyes.
"You have valuable data," Jiang Chen told her through the intercom. "Your stealth techniques... how do you bend light? Is it refraction via Qi density?"
Ying spat at the glass.
Jiang Chen smiled.
"We have time. But first, I have a gift for your masters."
He turned to Old Wu.
"Pack the 'corpse'—the dummy she stabbed—into a coffin. Send it back to the White Cloud Sect with the Shadow Killer's dagger embedded in it."
"And the message, Your Highness?"
"Write this: 'Your knife was dull. Send a hammer next time.'"
Old Wu shuddered. "You are taunting them into a war."
"I am provoking them into a mistake," Jiang Chen said, turning to leave the lab. "Anger makes people stupid. And stupid people walk into minefields."
He walked out into the hallway, where the lights of the server banks blinked in the dark.
"System," he thought. "The assassin bypassed the outer wall sensors. Patch the hole. I want Thermal Motion Tracking on every inch of the perimeter."
[Blueprint: Automated Sentry Turret (Mk II - Thermal/AI Targeting).][Cost: 1,500 EU per unit.]
"Build fifty," Jiang Chen ordered. "If a bird flies over my wall, I want to know its heartbeat."
The atmosphere in Beiluo had shifted. The occupation was over. The Siege was about to begin. And Jiang Chen was done playing defense.