Proceed with [SKILL] activation?

  “Yes,” said Eathan.

  

  [Auspice Ignition (Lv. 1)] has been activated!

  

  700 Karma has been subtracted from your [PROFILE]! (12260 → 11560)

  

  70 Qi Tokens has been subtracted from your [PROFILE]! (8409 → 8339)

  

  [Humanity] has decreased by 7%! (45% → 38%)

  Within the second, Eathan felt Qilin move within him.

  Not the consuming tidal wave of the Commander’s Nightmare—no annihilating plunge into omni?whatever. Just a tilt. A hand on the wheel.

  He could feel the heat bloom under his ribs, the feeling of something older, like frost thawing off old stone. His shadow peeled up off the snow and lifted into translucent antlers. Gold glyphs raced along his veins like circuitry, under his skin, up his throat, pooling heavy in his eyes.

  Lotus petals he didn’t actually see drifted over the edges of his vision. The world brightened by a half?step.

  He exhaled.

  Golden light burst out from him in a low, rolling wave, hugging the ground.

  It wasn’t the dramatic sky?splitting pillar the Games had seen. It was a purr more than a roar, an auspicious hum that slid under the snake’s charm and rewrote the frequency.

  Fog that had been creeping eagerly into human lungs shrieked in reverse, recoiling like it had brushed a hot stove. It whipped back toward the rift cracks, edges smoking.

  The jiangshi closest to him spasmed. Threads of charm binding their limbs snapped like rotten rubber bands. Stolen flesh crumpled in place—gently, this time—back against their grave plots.

  The snake screamed. Its song hit his aura and disintegrated, notes shredding into faint, harmless noise. The shadow?body that had been blurring in and out of view tried to dissolve again, except this time the lotus flame clung to the pieces, burning off the excess hatred in slow, satisfying curls.

  On the comms, someone swore.

  

  UR?02: What the hell—? Is that… cleansing qi?”

  UR?01: Agent Lin. What you’re doing is without clearance.

  UR?01: Eathan Lin. Respond this instant!

  Chewie skidded back into his radius, eyes wide, pupils pinpricks of reflected gold. For a second, she just stared.

  “Your face is doing the thing,” she said.

  Eathan gazed back at her. I know, he wanted to say, yet he did not answer. Everything felt... sharper and further away at the same time. The charm no longer tugged at his thoughts; emotions wobbled on a dampened string. At 38% [Humanity], the apathy edge hanging like a sweet temptation.

  He didn’t have long.

  The snake spirit was still coiled around something.

  Eathan could feel it now, clearer with [Auspice Ignition]’s soft hum threading his senses into the ground. The snake wasn’t just squatting in the cemetery; it had rooted itself into a specific point. A nexus, a grudge, a name that had attracted too much attention.

  He breathed once. Twice.

  Then he pushed his senses out, like a receding tide. A golden pulse reverberated from beneath his feet. Under [Auspice Ignition]’s effects, he could perceive the same level, if not more, of nuances as [Calamity Radar]’s Deep-Scan without actually activating the latter. It was a bug, one could put it, that he thought of and only got the chance to execute now.

  The world froze more than it already did, or at least felt like it. Lines sharpened into wireframes. Every headstone glowed faintly with greens and yellows for quiet dead, a few ambers where restless ghosts clung.

  One stone flared full crimson.

  It was old and half?sunken. The name carved into it had been almost erased by time and weather, but qi had carved new grooves—lines of resentment and neglect cut deeper than any chisel.

  The snake’s shadow?body ran straight through it. The strands of grave paper fused with its base, drawing up whatever that name still held. Around it, spiderweb cracks spread into all the smaller rifts like veins feeding from a single black heart.

  Text flickered over it as the [SYSTEM] tagged the node.

  

  [LEDGER TAP (MAX)]:

  Source node identified!

  Object: Tombstone – “Zhao Lianxiu” (records incomplete)

  Status: Death?adjacent node hijacked by unknown entity [???]

  Classification: Class?S origin, Class?A active field manifestation

  The anchor graph stuttered, its numbers flickering, then dropped by a notch under the Ignition field to 63%.

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  However, it wasn’t enough. Not yet.

  Somewhere behind him, an agent whispered, awed, “Is that even… a human?”

  Chewie snorted. “That’s our intern,” she muttered, half to herself, half to the comm.

  On Li Wei’s line, there was a silence that sounded like someone revising three plans at once.

  “Well,” Eathan said, breath misting the frigid air.

  [Auspice Ignition]’s countdown ticked by another second, accompanied by colour that rushed back into the world. He could feel it; time running out. Running out, but enough remaining to get the job done.

  The snake thrashed, lotus fire licking its shadow edges, struggling to re?coalesce as if sensing an imminent danger.

  Eathan straightened, lotus glow curling tight around his ankles, overtaking the previous haze.

  His eyes burned gold at the edges.

  “Found you,” he said softly—to the stone, to the snake, to the knot of resentment binding them together.

  Snow hissed as another ring of auspicious heat rolled out across the graves.

  And in the coiled shadow of its own stolen name, the serpent flinched.

  ***

  Rafie woke up to the feeling of warmth moving through his bones.

  Not a blanket?warmth or hospital?warmth. This was different—like someone had poured sunlight through his veins and drenched his heart in a pool of honey.

  He blinked.

  Gold filled his vision.

  For one disorienting second he thought he’d died and this was some bad afterlife décor, but then the world resolved: he was on his back, staring up at a lamppost that looked absurdly wrong.

  Fine, hair?thin lines of light crawled up its metal spine, branching into circuits that spread into the snow like roots. Someone had drawn a circle around the base, except the circle wasn’t ink, it was pure pressure. Rafie could feel where it stopped, the way the charm?song’s nausea cut off as if a volume knob had been yanked down.

  He pushed himself onto an elbow.

  His squad was sprawled around him in a messy radius—Cho sideways against a headstone, Vasso half under an angel statue, John slumped sitting up. All of them breathing. All of them lying inside the lamppost’s invisible ring.

  “Oh, you’re awake?”

  A shadow fell over him. An agent with grey, spiky hair crouched by his shoulder, the guy’s Elite Team patch half hidden under a dusting of snow. Rafie recognized him vaguely from the briefing photos—one of Li Wei’s people, the kind who had “seen some shit” written permanently between their eyebrows.

  “Head still on?” the agent asked. “Eyes tracking? Any vertigo, chest tightness?”

  Rafie opened his mouth.

  Nothing came out.

  He clapped a hand to his throat, panic spiking. Then, as if the world had been waiting for this exact cue, something moved behind the Elite agent’s shoulder.

  A jiangshi lurched out of the fog. Its neck was at the wrong angle, uniform hanging in tatters. Half a burnt talisman was still flapping on its forehead, intermixed with purple?green veins that wormed up its face like ink in water.

  Rafie’s eyes bulged. He tried to shout.

  The Elite agent sighed.

  Without even turning, he stepped sideways.

  A fishing rod whistled through the fog and cracked across the jiangshi’s jaw like a baseball bat. Undead flesh left the ground as it pinwheeled backwards, smashing into a line of headstones with a crumpling snap.

  “Home run,” a cheery voice sounded from somewhere in the mist.

  A child he now recognised as Chewiw Jiang skidded after the flying corpse, tiny silhouette dragging a not?at?all?regulation weapon that looked suspiciously like a sword pretending to be sports equipment. Her grin was too wide, too delighted, like a villain mid?cutscene.

  This entire time, the spiky-haired Elite agent didn’t even twitch.

  He pressed a talisman into Rafie’s free hand. “Here. Chew this or stick it over your heart, whichever feels less dramatic. It’ll clear out the charm residue faster.”

  Rafie stared. Then he stared harder as his voice came back in a croak.

  “...You, are you not seeing—”

  He gestured wildly toward where Chewie had just drop?kicked the jiangshi’s spine.

  The agent glanced over his shoulder. Another jiangshi staggered into view, only to get cut off at the knees and shoved back into the fog with a cheerful, “Back to bed, corpse boy,” from the girl.

  “Yeah,” the Elite said, deadpan. “We’re seeing it.”

  He tilted Rafie’s chin, checking his pupils with the boredom of someone who’d done this too many times. “How’re you feeling? Any ringing in the ears? Compulsion to walk into fog? Sudden desire to kill your coworkers?”

  Rafie hesitated. “...My throat’s dry?”

  “Normal.” The Elite nodded. “You took a direct hit from the hypno?band. Be grateful the lamppost caught you.”

  “The lamp—”

  He turned properly this time, taking in the ring of faintly glowing snow, the golden circuits, the way the charm?song’s pressure scraped at the edge of the circle but didn’t cross.

  Memory slammed back.

  The golden boy, Eathan Lin, in a cap yelling at them from mid?air: Stay inside the circle. If your ears ring, sit your ass down and breathe. You do not leave that circle until I say.

  Speaking of—

  Rafie twisted, scanning the cemetery.

  Queens’s old stones rose all around, half swallowed by fog. Snow fell in fat, lazy flakes that melted before they hit the charm field. He could hear sirens somewhere beyond the walls, the distant thump of flash?copper rotors.

  But the center of the cemetery...

  His breath snagged.

  There, at the main gate, was a different world.

  A vast crack yawned at a young man’s feet, a rift split straight through the earth like someone had drawn a black wound between graves. Above it hung an enormous, grotesque snake spirit: a ribbon of grave paper braided around a spine of stolen names, its body patched with glued faces—eyes, cheeks, mouths stitched from different mortals. Every now and then, something pulsed beneath the scales, the suggestion of limbs trying to push through.

  A dome of golden light wrapped the entire scene like a bell jar.

  Inside it—dead center—stood Eathan Lin.

  Rafie blinked hard.

  The kid looked wrong.

  His cap was pulled down, shadowing most of his face, but the part Rafie could see looked carved from something colder than human. His eyes were entirely gold, irises fractured like lotus petals. Antler?shaped… shadows branched above his head, like some glitch in the air.

  He wasn’t smiling, nor was he frowning.

  He wasn’t anything.

  Rafie’s throat dried further.

  The warmth that had woken him pulsed again.

  Golden light rolled outward from Eathan’s chest in a low, steady wave; it hugged the ground, threading between headstones as it brushed regular agents and Elite alike. Every time it touched a human, Rafie saw shoulders slacken, veins fading from purple back to normal, mouths snapping shut mid?silent scream.

  Every time the same pulse touched a jiangshi, the effect reversed.

  Undead flesh smoked where the wave grazed it. Talisman scraps burned away in clean flame; charm threads snapped with an audible twang. One jiangshi near the lamppost went rigid, then collapsed like someone had cut all its strings at once.

  The snake spirit’s scream never stopped.

  The sound pressed more on bone than eardrum, a hiss that made snowflakes shiver mid?fall. Its paper?scale hide writhed, ink sigils blistering wherever the golden pulses crossed scales.

  What healed them was killing it.

  Rafie’s pupils shrank. “How the hell is he so calm,” he whispered, “with that right on top of him...”

  Behind Eathan, the snake reared.

  Its chest mouth yawned open, and a flood of teeth spilled out. Shards of yellowed fangs and jawbone fragments gushed toward the boy in a grisly waterfall, each tooth humming with monstrous, copper qi.

  Before Rafie could react, gold flared off his vision.

  Another pulse rolled off Eathan’s body like a heartbeat made visible. The teeth slammed into the light and ricocheted aside, dissolving into ash before they hit the ground. The wave reached the lamppost ring a second later. Warmth flooded Rafie again. His stomach, which had just caught up to the visuals, revolted.

  He bent forward and threw up onto the snow.

  The last thing he saw, between dry heaves, was Eathan’s silhouette swallowed by light—antler shadows brightening, the snake shrinking around him like paper near a candle.

  Then darkness took him again.