Thud.
No glow. No triumphant jingle. No choir to make it feel holy.
A cheap 500ml water bottle punched through the blizzard and hit the snow in front of Li Xing like a thrown brick.
Plastic smacked frozen dirt.
A dull pop.
That was the miracle worth 6.00 Echo Credits.
On Lu Jin's screen, the small shape under the mech plating jerked hard—pure predator reflex, the kind you didn't learn, the kind you inherited. Li Xing didn't look up at the sky for a giver.
She went for the water.
All of her went for it.
She slammed into the bottle and wrapped herself around it as if the wasteland had teeth.
The cap didn't move.
Her fingers had gone stiff enough to be useless.
No pause. No prayer.
Her mouth clamped down on the neck. Teeth cut into plastic. A tear split open with a sharp, ugly sound.
"Ghk… ghk…"
The phone's speaker carried the gulping—fast, desperate—along with the crackle of the bottle collapsing under her grip.
Water ran out the corner of her mouth and streaked down over the radiation stains on her chin. It dripped into her cloak. She choked once, swallowed through it, refused to let go.
Greed wasn't the word.
This was survival with no manners.
Lu Jin stared, thumb hovering over the overheated screen.
So this was the verification step.
The most primitive supply chain in the universe.
Pay money. Watch a dying body refuse to die.
In the top-right corner, her timer froze.
[Proxy Countdown: 00:03:12]
It stuttered—like the world had to think about it—then collapsed into green code that scattered and evaporated.
[SYSTEM NOTICE: Transaction complete]
[SYSTEM NOTICE: Review channel unavailable during Proxy stabilization]
The system's timing hit—
—and Lu Jin's chest detonated.
Not pain.
Something worse, because it had been missing so long it didn't feel real.
Warmth flooded through his lungs and spread outward in a clean wave. The constant barbed drag inside his ribs vanished in an instant. Air went in without a fight. His head cleared so fast it made him blink.
The old sofa took his weight as his muscles stopped bracing for the next breath.
A sound slipped out of him—half swallowed, half disbelieving.
He lifted a hand into the neon spill from the window.
Skin still pale. Still thin.
But the pulse under it had strength now. Not a failing flicker. An actual rhythm.
So that was it.
So that was Sanctus Energy.
A gratitude-generated refund.
A receipt printed directly onto his organs.
His eyes closed.
The room stayed the same—mold, cheap furniture, the red paint's chemical stink sneaking in from the hallway.
But his body stopped screaming.
For a few minutes, "alive" didn't feel like an insult.
Pay money. Buy life.
Not only hers.
His too.
A loop.
A complete, brutal loop.
Lu Jin opened his eyes again.
The sickly gloom in them had burned down to a hard shine.
If it wasn't a scam, then it was a game.
And games had rules.
He looked back at the screen.
The blizzard kept hammering the dead mech's bones, but the girl under the plating had stopped trembling. Li Xing clutched the crushed bottle to her chest, the way someone held a weapon after a firefight.
Then she went still.
In the crater the bottle had punched into the snow, something small lay there.
A coin.
Not "credits" in a wallet display.
Not a number sliding down on a screen.
A real piece of metal.
The system had taken 6.00 Echo Credits from Lu Jin's bound wallet, folded it through whatever dimensional machinery it ran, and dropped "change" into the wasteland as a physical object.
Li Xing's hand crept toward it.
Frostbite scars. Black grime under the nails. Cuts that hadn't earned the luxury of healing.
Her fingertip touched the coin.
She snapped back as if it burned.
A beat.
Then her hand returned—slower—touching again, testing the edge, the face, the truth of it.
Lu Jin pinched the screen to zoom in.
The coin gave off a thin, visible thread of white vapor.
It was warm.
Warmth didn't belong in that storm.
That heat came from here—from his world's leftover temperature, carried across reality like a smuggled breath.
Li Xing closed her fist around it.
A hesitation—half a second of logic trying to catch up.
Then she pressed the coin to her cheek.
Right against the skin that had gone bluish with cold.
Lu Jin's fingers tingled.
Not metaphor.
A sharp numbness crawled across his fingertips, like his nerves had been yanked awake.
The coin sat against her face, and for a moment the phone stopped being a device and turned into a contact point. The interface didn't ask permission. It just happened.
A jolt ran up his spine and snapped behind his eyes.
Ting!
[Emotion spike detected]
[Proxy "Li Xing": dependency imprint formed toward "Miracle Artifact"][devotion response confirmed]
[Sanctus Energy Feedback: extended 00:10:00]
[Proxy Growth: +20 (First Imprint — Following the Miracle)]
Li Xing kept her eyes shut, lashes crusted with bloody frost. Her expression didn't look "grateful" the way ads sold it.
It looked devout.
A starving girl rubbing her face against the last bit of warmth in her universe.
A coin worth 6.00 Echo Credits.
And because the wallet was bound—
Six FedCreds.
In Lu Jin's city, it wouldn't buy half a pack of cigarettes. It was the kind of change you forgot in a couch until you moved out.
In the wasteland, it was heat.
A totem.
Proof that the sky could answer.
Lu Jin's mouth twisted.
"Cheap," he murmured.
Then the rest of the thought sharpened into a blade.
"Expensive."
That coin established an exchange rate so ugly it made his stomach sink:
In this world, money wasn't power.
Money was divinity.
Enough Echo Credits, and he became a god on the other side of the screen.
His thumb drifted toward the interface, ready to pry open the shop and see what else the system sold at "break-even prices"—
A crash interrupted the thought.
"BOOM!"
The entire wall shivered. Dust fell from somewhere it had been hiding for years.
The old security door took a kick and answered with a metallic groan.
Lu Jin's face went cold.
"Open up!" a man shouted from the hallway. "Stop pretending you're dead!"
Another kick.
Metal screamed against its frame.
"Lu Jin! We know you're in there! Someone saw you downstairs picking up food!"
Lu Jin didn't move.
Food.
That line wasn't random. It was a hook to snag guilt.
He hadn't gone downstairs.
Which meant they weren't guessing.
They'd been watching the building.
The hallway filled with more noise—shoes, bodies, laughter that carried a sharp edge.
"Got money to eat, but no money for interest?" the voice barked. "You think Brother Biao runs a charity?"
Brother Biao's people.
They'd painted his door. Now they wanted their entertainment.
Lu Jin's eyes flicked to the top-right corner of the phone's interface.
[Bound Wallet Balance: 314.50 FedCreds]
Pathetic.
Not enough for the Gene Suppressant shot.
Not enough to buy his week.
Not even enough to make Biao's interest blink.
Reality's gravity pulled hard, eager to drag him back into the mud the moment he tasted something sweet.
He tapped the phone dark.
Not off. Not locked.
Just dark.
Because the system didn't vanish.
It surfaced over the black screen, a single line in blood-red text—polite in the way predators were polite.
[Detected: Host facing physical survival threat]
[NOTICE: Host survival is contract-bound to Proxy stability]
[Clause: If Host terminates, Proxy termination will synchronize under Contract]
[View: "Emergency Liquidation" options?]
A sales pitch.
A threat.
A contract clause delivered without blinking.
The door took another hit.
"BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!"
Metal bat on metal bars—high-pitched, grating, designed to get under skin.
Someone outside laughed.
"Lu-ge," a different voice called, sing-song. "Brother Biao says if you can't pay today, we'll take an arm to cover interest."
A pause, savoring it.
"That hand types fast, right? Shame to lose it."
Lu Jin's gaze fixed on the door.
His posture stayed loose. His muscles did not.
The ten-minute "normal" he'd been gifted had its own countdown. The dull ache in his lungs started to push back in at the edges, testing whether it could reclaim its throne.
He slid a hand under the coffee table.
Cold metal met his fingers.
A box cutter.
The cheap kind with a snapping blade.
He thumbed it forward.
Click.
Steel appeared.
Quiet. Practical.
A lock pick scraped faintly against his door.
And then Lu Jin caught something else.
Not the voices.
Not the footsteps.
A heavier sound—slow, dragging, wet in a way shoes weren't.
Something big shifting weight in the hallway.
Something that didn't belong in an apartment building.
A breath followed it.
Not human.
A compressed wheeze, deep and strained, as if a bellows was trying to suck air through a slit.
"Shhh… ha…"
It came from behind the men at his door.
Close.
Too close.
The thug still cracking jokes didn't react.
Which meant he hadn't noticed.
Or his brain refused to process it.
Lu Jin's grip tightened on the cutter.
Every instinct that had kept him alive in corporate wars—every sharpened piece of pattern recognition and threat prediction—started screaming at once.
The hallway held more than debt collectors.
Something else had come with them.
Something drawn to his out-of-world purchase the way insects found heat.
The phone lit again on its own, red text jittering like a warning label slapped onto reality.
[WARNING: Micro "Probability Erosion" overflow detected]
[Reality Correction mechanism engaged]
Lu Jin's lips curled.
Not joy.
Not fear.
A grin cut from pure, reckless understanding.
So that 6.00 Echo Credits hadn't only bought a bottle of water.
It had bought attention.
"Interesting," he whispered.
The lock clicked.
The door shifted in its frame.
And in the hallway beyond, that wet drag sound slid closer—right behind the men who still thought they were the worst thing outside his room.