With only ¥21 to his name, Lu Jin rides out the backlash of borrowed divinity in a sewer, while Li Xing accidentally "tames" an S-class war machine with a lullaby and a rag.
[Current Account Balance: ¥21.00][Buff Remaining: 00:00:29]
The air in the sewer was thick enough to chew.
Lu Jin pounded through the dark, boots crushing decayed rat carcasses and slick mats of mold. Every breath rasped like a broken bellows—his lungs already warning him that the Sacred Echo · Rebound buff was burning out.
That false strength, that illusion of being possessed by a god, was slipping away.
In its place, pain seeped into his bones like acid, like a colony of ants gnawing straight into his marrow.
He had to find a grave to die in before he stopped moving.
Up ahead, a rusted maintenance door leaned half-shut on its hinges, thick with old grease.
Lu Jin slammed into it shoulder-first. The metal shrieked as it swung inward. He kicked it closed behind him and shoved the bolt into place.
This was the city's intestine.
Everything A-11 didn't want—its filth, its runoff, its waste—eventually flowed through here.
He slid down the damp wall until his back hit a mildewed mattress. His chest heaved. With clumsy fingers, he pulled out the Glock 19 he'd looted off the corpse and the tactical knife.
His nerves shook so badly he couldn't fully close his hand, but he forced the knife into position anyway, teeth clenched. He jammed the blade into the doorframe at just the right angle, anchoring it to a thin length of wire dangling from above.
If anyone tried to force the door, the wire would snap and trigger the flash trap he'd cobbled together from scavenged magnesium powder and dying batteries.
Cheap, dirty, barely controlled.
Just like him.
Only when the trap was set did he look down at his phone.
[00:00:03][00:00:02][00:00:01]
The timer hit zero.
"—ghhh!"
Hell arrived without warning.
The bones in his right arm, held in place only by the lingering echo, shifted with a sick little grind. Fractures slipped, edges bit into muscle again. The fibrotic scars in his lungs lost their golden clamp, tearing open all at once. Heat and iron surged up his throat.
Lu Jin curled on the moldy mattress, his body jerking like a salted shrimp in a pan. When he tried to scream, only broken bubbles of air rattled in his chest.
Cold sweat mixed with sewer water and glued his eyelashes together.
His vision went to static—gray-white snow filling his world—that familiar sign that his overtaxed optic nerves were shorting out.
Just as his consciousness skidded toward the edge of a cliff, the cursed app popped up again, painting the dark red.
[Life-Critical Warning!][Central nervous system collapse imminent. Irreversible overload detected.][Recommended Remedy: Nanomedical Swarm (Single-Use Trial)][Description: Rebuild your neural web in under 60 seconds! If your brain's still there, we'll drag you back.][Dying-Patient Price: ¥2,998.00][Friendly Reminder: Based on your spending history, you can't afford this service. Would you like to consider installment plans (3% daily interest) or mortgaging select organs?][Countdown: 10… 9…]
Lu Jin dug his nails into his palm so hard they peeled, skin tearing under the strain.
In his head, he flipped that countdown off with a shaking middle finger.
Twenty-one yuan.
He was too poor to buy his own life.
The darkness rolled in like a black tide and swallowed him whole.
[Wasteland · A-11 Sector · Resource Point No. 7]
The deepest part of the ruined subway stank of ozone and burnt oil.
Li Xing stood with her head tipped back, staring up at the steel god kneeling before her.
The S-09 Executioner was still frozen in that posture of absolute submission. Multi-barrel cannon pressed flat to the ground. The huge brain suspended in its glass capsule had gone completely still.
It didn't move.
What Li Xing couldn't see was that, on a screen in another dimension, a purchase window labeled:
[Mech Activation Key (Single Use) | Price: ¥50,000]
had quietly timed out and vanished the moment "Listener-sama" blacked out.
No money, no miracle.
Without top-up, the divine weapon was just scrap metal.
"Um… envoy-sama…?" she tried softly.
Her voice bounced around the vaulted ceiling and came back to her thin and lonely.
No answer.
"S–saint-sama, wait!" the old man croaked suddenly. He was staring at the faintly glowing blue slime streaks the Executioner's treads had left on the floor. "That's… 'Iron Plague'! Cooling fluid from the old days' reactor tech—one touch, and your flesh rots to bone!"
Li Xing blinked, then glanced down at the hand she'd used to touch the mech's armor.
A few scrapes. No rot. No smoke. No dissolving fingers.
Behind her, Little Rock sniffed hard. His eyes were wide enough to pop.
"N–no, that smell—old man, sniff it!" His voice broke from excitement and nerves. "That's military stabilizer! My dad said only the really fancy stuff in pre-war arsenals used that kind of preservative!"
He edged closer, flashlight trembling in his hand. The beam slid through a narrow gap between bulkheads—
And stopped.
His breath cut off for half a second, then came back in sharp, strangled gulps.
"Ah—! Hah—! That's… that's… f–food…"
Li Xing bit down on her lip. Her eyes stung.
It had to be her fault.
She hadn't been devout enough.
The offering she'd given earlier—the empty wrapper of a nutrition bar—was too shabby. Somewhere in her chest, a quiet certainty took root: the god who saved her must have been offended, and so His power had withdrawn.
"I'll… I'll clean it properly."
She tucked the precious empty wrapper into her front pocket like a relic and tightened the outer exoskeleton's straps around her slight frame.
Then she did something that made both the old man and Little Rock almost faint.
She grabbed one of the Executioner's spiked leg plates and started climbing.
The cold alloy shredded what was left of her thin clothes, scoring cuts into her skin. Blood welled, thin and bright, and smeared into the grime on the armor.
She didn't make a sound.
Like a stubborn ant scaling a war drum, she climbed, hand over hand, foot over foot, until she reached the massive glass dome that housed the brain.
It was buried under a crust of old radiation dust and dried, rust-dark stains.
All the filth the old world had left behind.
Li Xing tore off a strip of her own sleeve, spat into it to wet the cloth, and pressed it to the glass.
One stroke.
Two.
Her movements were slow and gentle, like she was wiping down a temple idol instead of a weapon of mass destruction.
As she wiped, she started to hum again.
"Sleep… sleep… let the pain all fly away…"
The melody was simple, awkward, and a little off-key.
But it was An Ning's Song.
Deep in the abyss of the wasteland, a girl sat on the shoulders of a machine built to end worlds, wiping its face with scarred hands and trying to warm it with a lullaby.
No one knew how much time passed.
Eventually, a patch of the glass dome—specifically, a solar sensor tile—gleamed under her hand, clear of muck.
The faint emergency lights hanging in the station ceiling spilled through the cleaned panel and fell directly on a buried sensor.
Beep.
The tiniest electronic chirp echoed.
Inside the dome, the "dead" brain jerked.
Pale tissue convulsed, thudding against the glass with hollow, muffled thumps. It was like the heartbeat of some trapped, furious beast.
Li Xing flinched backward, nearly losing her grip.
Then, from the mech's cracked external speakers, a warped, glitching burst of sound crackled out—twisted, broken, but still undeniably human speech.
"…hurts… so… dark…"
The voice cut off.
The brain twitched once more, and the dead, glassy optic on the Executioner's head slowly flickered on.
A single dim ring of yellow glowed to life.
[System Self-Check: Primary power offline.][Backup solar array: weak activation.][Current Mode: Low-Power Follow (Zombie Mode).][Command Source: Contactee (Li Xing).]
Hydraulics hissed as the massive machine let out a low, venting sigh.
It didn't stand. There wasn't enough energy left in its reactors to lift that enormous frame.
Instead, like an obedient giant hound, it used both treads and limbs to drag itself forward one step, settling half a meter behind Li Xing's back.
She clapped both hands over her mouth, eyes huge and shining.
Her god hadn't abandoned her.
He'd heard her song.
He'd let this steel monster "wake up," even if only enough to follow at her heels.
"We… we're going to find food," she whispered, wiping her eyes.
She pointed toward the heavy blast door deeper in the station.
The Executioner raised its massive arm.
It didn't use the cannon.
Instead, the chain-saw limb—still dripping old lubricant—whirred to life. With surgical precision, it carved through the locking mechanism.
Crunch.
The blast door toppled inward with a dull boom.
Stale air, sealed for half a century, spilled out in a dusty wave.
Little Rock's flashlight beam swept over the inner wall—and froze on a set of jagged, dark-red letters scrawled there in spray paint.
"March 17. Dr. Jacob sealed the main sector. He said this was 'necessary sacrifice.'""They took Lillian away. She only had a fever.""God is dead. The Ark is a tomb."
Below the words, dozens of tally marks scratched into the wall trailed off after the seventh group of five.
Little Rock made a strangled sound.
His fingers twitched toward the deeper shadows, then yanked back like he was afraid he'd shatter the illusion.
The flashlight moved.
Its cone of light fell on rows and rows of stacked crates.
Uniform. Sealed. Stamped with pre-war military markings.
A warehouse.
A full warehouse.
Combat rations.
Li Xing couldn't read most of the text, but she recognized one name buried among the scribbles—"Lillian," the lab tech auntie who used to secretly give her an extra half spoon of nutrient paste.
She stared at the pile of crates until her stomach thundered loud enough to echo.
Even after all these years, the packaging had only yellowed a little. Half might be stale. Half might be poison.
On the wasteland, this was still a mountain of gold.
She shuffled closer, hands shaking, and cracked open the nearest crate.
Inside lay rows of compressed biscuits, hard as bricks.
Li Xing picked one up and cradled it in both hands, then dropped to her knees.
Facing the empty air, she raised the biscuit high overhead and tried to smile.
The result looked closer to a sob.
"Listener-sama…"
Her voice wobbled.
"Dinner's ready."
[Reality · Lower City · Maintenance Room]
In the dark, Lu Jin had stopped breathing.
The cascade of pain had kicked his heart into shock. One foot was already on the other side.
Then—
At the exact instant his heart was about to stall for good—
The phone lit up.
This time, it wasn't the harsh red of a death warning.
It was a soft, milky-white glow, cool and gentle like moonlight.
[Detected: Target "Li Xing" expressing intense gratitude and desire to share blessings!][Offering: Pre-war military compressed ration (preserved, edible).][Initiating concept conversion…]
The glow seeped out through the spiderweb cracks in the screen and poured into his chest like liquid light.
It didn't knit bone.
It didn't close the shredded lesions in his lungs.
He didn't have nearly enough energy banked for that.
Instead, it brought something else.
A heavy, comfortable fullness.
And a calm, steady warmth, like a cool hand on a fevered forehead.
[Buff Gained: Sacred Echo · Full Belly (Tier II)][Buff Gained: Neural Soothing (Persistent)][Effect: Pain pathways forcibly blocked. Host will be dragged into deep reparative sleep.]
The lines on Lu Jin's face slowly eased.
Some stupid thought drifted through the fog in his skull: over there, one brick of compressed biscuit could snatch a life back from the edge… and over here, his best efforts had earned him a net worth of ¥21.
The exchange rate was a joke.
A bloody scam.
His body was still a wreck, a broken doll held together with tape and spite. But for now, the agony was gone. He floated in something warm and formless and finally, finally dreamed something that wasn't a nightmare.
He didn't know how long he was out.
A cold drop of water hit his eyelid.
Lu Jin jerked awake.
He was still in the same cramped maintenance room. Mold still crept along the walls. The air still smelled like gas and rot.
But the pain that had been driving him insane… was gone.
In its place was an overwhelming numbness, like his nerves had been wrapped in cotton.
Alive.
He was still alive.
He dragged his left hand up and clawed his phone closer.
The screen was a shattered mess.
Battery: 4%.
Balance: ¥21.00.
He tugged one corner of his mouth up. It tugged his split lip open and stung, but he let the expression sit there anyway.
His thumb slid across the cracked glass and brushed against a new icon.
The war loot he'd bought with his life:
[Ark Database (Fragmentary)]
The icon was a stylized ark, wrapped in a double-helix motif, glowing faint blue.
Before he could talk himself out of it, Lu Jin tapped it.
A flood of corrupted files and scrambled code scrolled by like a waterfall. Error markers, missing segments, partial restores—
Then the mess froze on a single document flagged with a bright red TOP SECRET stamp.
[Project Codename: S-09 "Executioner" Prototype][Lead Researcher: Jacob][Chief Neural Engineer: Lu… (Data Corrupted)]
Lu Jin's pupils shrank to pinpoints.
He locked onto the attached image.
An old, faded photograph.
The background was an Ark research lab painted sterile white. The Executioner towered there, mid-assembly, its frame still incomplete.
Two figures in lab coats stood near one of the massive steel legs.
One was Jacob—face hawk-like, eyes sharp and cold.
The other stood half-turned toward the camera, a familiar circuit board in hand, wearing a soft, focused smile.
A face Lu Jin could never mistake.
The face the Federation had declared dead in an "industrial accident" five years ago.
His father.
Cold flooded up his spine, biting deeper than any sewer draft, sharper than fractured bone.
In the dark, Lu Jin's fingers squeezed around the phone until his knuckles blanched.
A thin, eerie light flickered in his eyes.
"Found you," he breathed.
"Turns out… you've been here all along."