The server room was a tomb, and Yin Lie was its only restless ghost. The revelation didn't just sit in his mind; it was a living, squirming thing in the core of his being. The Keystone. He wasn't just a variant. He was a reliquary.
The two forces that defined him recoiled from the intruder. The wolf's feral energy saw it as a parasite, a foreign scent in its territory, and snarled with a frustrated, impotent rage. The ice, a power of absolute order and stillness, tried to encase the Keystone, to suffocate its alien resonance in a coffin of absolute zero.
The result was a fresh hell. A three-way civil war erupted in his soul.
A psychic shriek, silent but deafening, tore through his skull. His vision fractured, showing him the world in three simultaneous, overlapping states: the wolf's thermal reds of heat and life, the ice's stark monochrome of structure and entropy, and a new, terrifying layer—the Keystone's vision. It was a world of pure energy, of geometric patterns and flowing lines of power connecting everything, a language of creation he couldn't begin to comprehend.
He slammed his hands against the server rack to stay upright. CRACKLE-POP!
A surge of raw, untamed energy—a chaotic blend of all three forces—blasted from his palms. The dead servers around him sparked violently. Lights flickered, capacitors blew with sounds like firecrackers, and the entire room was plunged into absolute, smoking darkness.
He had become a walking EMP, a beacon of pure power that had just screamed its location to anyone with the right equipment. The Directorate.
Move.
He stumbled out of the dead server room, his body a trembling vessel for a war he couldn't control. The hunt wasn't just about his power anymore. Qi Yan wanted to rip the Key from his soul. Su Li wanted to see how he'd use it. The Directorate just wanted the anomaly contained.
He was a prize, a weapon, and a monster, all at once.
He needed help. Not a sanctuary, not an ally of convenience. He needed a teacher. He needed a ghost. He needed Chen Gu.
The network was scorched, but a man like Chen Gu would have a contingency for the apocalypse. A final, hard-coded fallback. Yin Lie accessed the now-empty, encrypted memory of his device. One file remained, a single, corrupted data packet that resolved into a simple image: a stylized raven perched on the hand of a clock tower.
The Old Spire. The highest, most forgotten peak in the city's old district, a needle of gothic architecture left to rot among the glass and chrome giants. A place you couldn't reach by vehicle, only by climbing. A place for ghosts.
The journey was a gauntlet. The Keystone pulsed within him, a dissonant hum that set his teeth on edge. It leaked energy, painting faint, shimmering auroras in the air around him that only he could see. To variant senses, he must look like a lighthouse in a hurricane.
He was crossing a high-level skybridge connecting two corporate towers when the world went quiet.
It was a different silence than Echo's. Her power had been an erasure of sound. This was an erasure of everything. The hum of the bridge's mag-stabilizers, the distant city traffic, the frantic beat of his own heart—it all became dull, distant, muted. The wolf's fire in his blood became a guttering ember. The ice in his core felt sluggish, almost liquid. His power was being smothered.
He stopped, every instinct screaming. Halfway across the bridge, a figure was waiting. A woman, dressed in a simple, functional gray bodysuit, her face impassive, almost doll-like. Her eyes were empty, holding a placid stillness that was more terrifying than any rage.
She was a void. A walking dead zone.
"The Keystone does not belong to you," she said. Her voice was flat, without inflection, as if spoken by a machine. "You are an unstable vessel. Qi Yan requires the asset. I am here to collect."
This was the next wave. Not a brute like Scab, not a pair of synergists like the Silkworms. This was a scalpel, designed for one purpose: to neutralize and extract.
"Get out of my way," Yin Lie growled, forcing his power to the surface. He thrust his hand forward, trying to form a blade of ice. A pathetic handful of slush dripped from his fingertips and splattered on the walkway. The nullification field she projected was absolute.
She took a step toward him, and with it, the pressure intensified. He felt like he was wading through setting concrete. His lupine strength felt like a memory, his speed a forgotten dream. He was being reduced, disassembled, turned back into a normal man. And a normal man had no chance.
Think. Don't fight.
He couldn't use his power. So he would use his rage.
He let out a guttural, purely animalistic roar and charged, not at her, but at the thick, armored glass wall of the skybridge. He wasn't Frost Wolf anymore. He was just a cornered, desperate animal. He slammed his shoulder into the glass with every ounce of his remaining physical strength.
The glass shuddered, spiderweb cracks appearing. The woman—the blade—paused, her placid expression shifting to one of mild confusion. This was not the reaction of a powerful variant. This was the act of a madman.
He hit it again. The cracks widened. Below them, a hundred stories down, the city's traffic flowed like a river of light.
"Your resistance is illogical," the woman stated, beginning to advance again, a series of strange, metallic implements extending from her gauntlets. Extraction tools.
Yin Lie gave a final, desperate roar and threw himself at the glass one last time.
With a scream of tearing metal and shattering composites, the panel gave way. The roar of the city, the shriek of the wind, the blare of a thousand horns flooded back into the nullified silence. Alarms blared along the length of the skybridge.
He didn't fall. He grabbed the broken edge of the frame, his fingers straining. The woman was forced to stop, her sterile hunting ground now a chaotic, screaming emergency. Her mission profile likely didn't include a public spectacle.
"Another time, vessel," she said, her voice still unnervingly calm. Then, with a speed that was utterly at odds with her placid nature, she retreated, vanishing back the way she had come just as the first security drones began to ascend from below.
Yin Lie hauled himself back onto the bridge, his body screaming, his power slowly, painfully seeping back into his limbs as he moved out of her lingering field. He was cut, bleeding, and shaken to his core.
Qi Yan knew. And he had a weapon that could peel Yin Lie apart, one layer at a time.
He ignored the approaching drones and made for the far side of the bridge. The hunt had entered a new, terrifying stage. He was no longer just fighting for his life. He was fighting for his own soul. He had to get to the Spire. He had to find Chen Gu. He had to learn how to control the ghost in his own machine before it, or Qi Yan's blades, tore him apart for good.