After Zhou Linlang's departure, the air in the cramped dwelling thickened with a palpable, awkward silence. The Xie guards watched their charge—the disgrace, the liability, the young master—devour the sumptuous, illicit feast with the single-minded focus of a starved hound. Their faces were a gallery of poorly concealed contempt and wary confusion. The captain, a man whose loyalty was as calculating as his blade was sharp, slipped away to make a discreet call.
The image that greeted him on the secure communicator was of a man in his prime, features handsome in a severe, coldly aristocratic way, but with faint lines of perpetual displeasure etched around his eyes and mouth. Xie An. The head of the Jingyang Xie family did not look pleased.
"You let that imbecile provoke her?" Xie An's voice was a low, controlled simmer. "Zhou Linlang is of the main Zhou line. A rising star in the Ministry, groomed for higher office. If that wretched bastard has offended her…" He pinched the bridge of his nose, a gesture of pure exasperation. "Did she leave in anger?"
The guard captain chose his words with the care of a sapper defusing a landmine. "It was… difficult to gauge her temper, Master. She was the one who first mentioned a 'midnight snack.' Perhaps she felt obligated to follow through. Her demeanor was… impeccably polite." He omitted the part about the hiccup and the cheese-dust.
Xie An's brow furrowed. A midnight snack? For that? Then the number registered. Severallobsters? How much could one useless glutton consume? A fresh wave of annoyance, this time tinged with a bizarre, paternal embarrassment, washed over him. This offspring was a cosmic joke at his expense.
"Disregard that for now," Xie An bit out, forcing his mind back to the chessboard. "Your primary objective is to deliver him. Tomorrow. I will tolerate no further… deviations." The pause was heavy, pregnant with unspoken threats—reminders of Adar and his team, who had deviated from their script and were now feeding the worms of X5.
The guards in the room, though not on the call, felt the chill. The fact that the family had launched no investigation into Adar's fate was more telling than any inquiry. It spoke of shadows best left undisturbed. They nodded mutely, their postures stiffening with renewed vigilance.
Their collective gaze then drifted back to the figure now picking lobster meat from a claw with fastidious, greasy fingers. The contrast was staggering. This… creature had just potentially alienated a Zhou, yet the Master's orders held a thread of urgency that bordered on need. He has value,the captain realized with a cold clarity. Some value we cannot see. Therefore, we must treat the vessel with care, no matter how foul its contents.
Xie An's next order, delivered in that same clipped tone, confirmed it. "Perform a sweep. Discreetly. I want to know if he left that room tonight, or if the Ministry hounds were sniffing at another trail entirely."
Soon after, the guards discovered that the "young master," true to his apparent nature, had eyes bigger than his stomach. Half the luxurious spread remained, picked over, the choicest morsels extracted with surgical precision, leaving behind shells and gristle.
"We'll pack this for the journey," Yao announced, wiping her hands on a napkin. "Waste not, want not."
The guard captain, now firmly in "cautiously respectful" mode, managed a stiff nod. "A prudent measure, Young Master. Your foresight is… admirable."
Yao beamed, a ghastly, greasy smile. "Oh, it's not for me. It's for your breakfast. Saves on provisions. I overheard you all discussing your daily meal allowance—300 coppers, wasn't it? Quite generous. You can just reimburse me for that. Consider it catering."
The guards stared. The air left the room. He heard us.The muttered complaints about his stench, his cowardice, his very existence—all of it, absorbed by those seemingly vacant ears while he wailed over an urn. The "leftovers" were not an act of bizarre frugality; they were a deliberate, petty humiliation, seasoned with financial extortion. A masterclass in passive-aggressive spite.
The captain's jaw tightened. He gave a curt, wordless gesture, and the men filed out, the promised reimbursement already feeling like a personal defeat. Once in the hall, the captain activated a slender, wand-like device, its tip glowing a soft amber. He swept it slowly around the doorframe, then pointed it into the room at the still-feasting Yao. The device remained inert, emitting no telltale chirps or flashes. No hidden recorders, no spy-tech. Just a miserable, greedy boy and his cold lobster.
Alone in the hall, the captain reported his findings. "No devices detected, Master. The young master never left. The Ministry's interest appears to have been misplaced. Magistrate Zhou likely acquiesced to the… meal request to save face after her error. And… he did hear our earlier conversation."
Xie An's sigh of relief was audible through the comm. The pieces, for him, fit. A lucky, stupid boy, a Ministry agent on a wild goose chase, and a humiliating but ultimately harmless bill for seafood. The narrative was clean. "Very well. Prepare for dawn departure."
Back in the room, the moment the door clicked shut, the grotesque pantomime ceased. The greasy smile vanished, replaced by an expression of intense focus. Yao rose, padded to the window, and with a careful reach, retrieved a small, flat recording device cunningly wedged between a rusty drainpipe and the outer wall. It was sheathed in a dried, hollowed-out citrus rind—a crude but effective organic insulator against most tech-scanners.
She fitted a thin listening bead into her ear and pressed play. The guards' muttered assessments, the captain's call to Xie An—it all flowed into her ear, a symphony of disdain and cold calculation. She listened, her face a mask.
"The climb from zero to a thousand is the hardest,"she mused silently, echoing the wisdom of earthbound tycoons she'd once studied. "No leverage, all friction. Every hand is against you, or simply not for you."She was deep in that friction now, grinding through the resistance. But she was moving. She was acquiring.
In the bathroom, with the faucet running a low, steady stream to mask any sound, she retrieved the stolen pack from its hiding place beneath the toilet's cistern cover. The air was damp, smelling of cheap soap and mildew. Her heart, for the first time that night, beat with a rhythm of pure, unadulterated avarice. She placed two boxes on the cracked porcelain of the sink.
The first was sandalwood, its surface dark and smooth, worn with age. She opened the clasp. Inside, nestled in molded velvet, were three crystalline orbs, each the size of a large marble. They glowed with a serene, internal emerald light, and within their depths, the double helix of ancient genetic code swam in a slow, eternal dance.
S1 Keys. Three of them.
For a moment, Yao forgot to breathe. The sum total of Oaks's mother's life, her only legacy, had been a single, crumbling apartment building. This… this was like looting three city blocks. Maybe four.A hysterical laugh threatened to escape. Okay, maybe there's something to be said for a career in grand larceny. If you survive.
"Steady," she whispered to her reflection in the smudged mirror. "You've brokered God-tier artifacts. You've seen screenshots of world-first drops. This is… a good start. A very, very good start." She tried to muster some disdain. Qin Mianfeng, you could have aimed higher. Was the old man losing his touch?
Then she opened the second box, of nanmu wood, denser and richer. The thought died, strangled by sheer, incredulous avarice.
Resting on a bed of black silk was a perfect tetrahedron, no larger than her fist. It was forged from a metal that seemed to drink the weak bathroom light, its surface a non-reflective matte grey etched with infinitesimally fine silver circuits. It hummed, not audibly, but in a frequency she felt in the roots of her teeth, a subsonic promise of power.
An Arcanum-Thaumic Reaction Core. A Trihedron. Entry-level, yes. But it increased mental focus and mana-channeling efficiency by ten percent. In the early game, it was the holy grail, the difference between a prodigy and a legend. Market value? Astronomical, measured in Green Notes, utterly monopolized by the great noble houses and their approved academies. Seeing one here, in this mildewed bathroom on a trash planet, was like finding the Crown Jewels in a dumpster.
Qin Mianfeng hadn't lacked ambition. His spectral guide had possessed terrifyingly good taste. This changed the calculus entirely. The S1s were a jackpot. The Trihedron was a cheat code for the soul.
Her hands trembled slightly as she reached for it. The hum intensified, a vibration that traveled up her arm, whispering promises of accelerated growth, of a mind honed to a razor's edge. With this, my progress won't just be stable; it'll be relentless.
But as her fingers traced the cool metal, her eyes—the eyes of a merchant who had inspected ten thousand virtual items for flaws, for scams, for misrepresented stats—caught a discrepancy. On the rear face, where the seamless casing should have been fused by molecular bonding, was the faintest, almost invisible hairline seam. A seam. On a Trihedron.
The cold splash of reality doused her excitement. Trihedrons were manufactured by arcane forges under imperial charter, their production a state secret. The casing was perfect, monolithic. It was never opened after leaving the forge because the core inside was bespoke, installed at creation. There was no "battery" to replace.
So why does this one have a seam?
Her mind, the resource broker's mind, clicked into analytical overdrive. The Lis. They had given this to Qin Mianfeng. They were not the sort to hand over a priceless treasure without insurance. They couldn't booby-trap a Thaumic device—its energy field would fry any foreign explosive or toxin. But a tracker… a tiny, passive, energy-harvestingtracker. It could lie dormant, a speck of silicon and rare earth metals, until the Trihedron was activated. Then, it would siphon a minuscule fraction of the device's own potent energy, power up, and beam a homing signal straight to Li Conglomerate assassins.
Qin Mianfeng would have been dead within days, the Trihedron and all his secrets recovered. The old man would have spotted it, of course. But the old man was gone, reduced to a sad, shining crystal in her pocket.
Now, the poisoned apple was hers.
Carefully, using the tip of her enchanted blade, she prised at the seam. It gave with a soft snick. Inside, nestled against the pulsing, opalescent core of the device, was exactly what she'd feared: a sliver of tech no larger than a grain of rice, its surface glittering with nano-conductors. It was welded directly to the core's energy manifold. Removing it would require micro-surgery she couldn't perform and would likely cripple the Trihedron.
"Clever, greedy bastards," she muttered, a grudging respect in her tone. The plan was elegant and ruthless.
She was left with a brutal choice. Activate the Trihedron, gain its immense benefit, but paint a target on her back for the Lis. Or leave it inert, a beautiful, useless paperweight.
Unless…The core itself was the issue. The Trihedron casing, the amplification matrix etched into its faces—thatwas the irreplaceable, monopolized technology. The core was just a particularly potent, stabilized mana battery. Prohibitively expensive, but… buyable. On the black market. For a price that made her newly acquired wealth weep.
She stared at the luminous core, now detached and sitting innocently in its box. A five-million-copper paperweight. The euphoria of her haul curdled, leaving the sour aftertaste of compromise. She'd have to spend a fortune to safely use a fraction of her fortune.
"Fine," she breathed, the word a sigh of resignation. "The casing is the prize. The core is just fuel. Fuel can be bought." It was the logic of a pragmatist, but it felt like a defeat. She carefully repackaged the treacherous core, sealing it away. The inert Trihedron shell went into a separate, lined pouch.
Her gaze fell on the three S1 Keys. They seemed to pulse in time with her heartbeat, calling to her. But she couldn't use them either. Not yet. The "Oaks" persona had to remain within plausible parameters—a talentless waste who'd stumbled into a bit of power. A sudden, meteoric rise in all attributes would raise questions she couldn't answer. The S1s had to stay hidden, a secret arsenal for a future she couldn't yet see.
She was rich beyond her wildest dreams, and yet felt poorer than ever, shackled by the very treasures she held. All she could do was… wait. And think.
The journey to the Xie family compound would take seven, maybe eight days of hard FTL travel. Seven days of dead time, hurtling through the void towards a nest of vipers. In the game, meditation was a button, a passive buff. Here, in the crushing reality of this world, it was a discipline, a technique she did not possess. How did one quiet the mind? How did one feel the mana flow? The manuals she'd memorized were useless without the foundational instinct.
She had wealth. She had power, latent and screaming to be used. She had a spider's grace and a fox's cunning. But for the next week, hurtling towards her gilded cage, she had nothing to do but stare at the stars and wonder how to begin.