Chapter 2: The Firewall, The Frost, and The Very Confused Prince
Lin Xue awoke the next morning feeling like she'd spent the night debugging a mainframe with a rubber mallet.
Her arms ached, her head was doing a low, persistent buzz, and that persistent jade pendant was still pulsing faintly, making a sound in her mind like an overworked, slightly overheating router struggling to download a massive file.
"Okay, future Lin Xue," she muttered into the impossibly fluffy silk pillow, rubbing her temple.
"Immediate note to self: lightning plus ancient palace architecture always equals a massive system failure and personal disaster."
A maid—the same terrified kitten from the day before—peeked inside the door nervously, clutching a tray of what looked like delicate, slightly suspicious pastries.
"Lady Lin? Are you awake? His Highness Prince Han Jinhai urgently requests your presence in the Hall of Scholars."
Xue sighed dramatically, sitting up. "Fantastic.
Court meeting at nine, intense spiritual evaluation at nine-thirty, and a full-scale mental breakdown scheduled for ten o'clock sharp."
She grabbed one of the pastries—it was surprisingly delicious—and followed the maid.
When she arrived at the Hall, the air was thick with the scent of old paper and nervous energy.
Prince Han Jinhai stood at the center, looking perfectly composed among a group of older, robed scholars.
His expression was as cool and unreadable as ever.
The shattered jade tablet had, thankfully, been cleared away, but in its place was a glowing circle drawn on the polished stone floor—a powerful spiritual formation that hummed with a low, visible energy.
One of the older scholars, whose beard was long enough to rival a modem cable, bowed deeply to her.
"Lady Lin, the Prince has ordered a qi resonance test to carefully examine your recent, well, connection with the celestial relic."
Xue tilted her head. "A resonance test? Oh, I see.
So, basically a technical support session? Sounds like they're checking my Wi-Fi signal strength."
The scholar looked utterly baffled.
He adjusted his robes and frowned.
"Wi… what is this foreign concept of 'Fi'?"
"Don't worry about it," she said quickly, walking past him.
"Lost in translation.
Let's just call it a compatibility test.
Let's find out what my new OS can handle."
They motioned for her to stand inside the center of the powerful, glowing circle.
As she stepped in, the air immediately felt thicker and warmer.
Light spiraled up from the formation, scanning her body from head to toe, like a cosmic, very intense MRI machine.
The scholars around the circle started murmuring to each other, their whispers growing agitated and restless.
Jinhai, standing outside the circle, folded his arms across his chest. His silver-white armor gleamed.
"Well?" he asked, his voice sharp and impatient.
"What is the diagnosis?"
The head scholar hesitated, running a nervous hand through his long beard.
"Your Highness… we are detecting an anomaly."
"That's comforting," Xue muttered, resisting the urge to check her nonexistent phone for signal bars.
"Her spiritual signature," the old man continued, his voice barely a whisper, "does not match any known human record—not even the most advanced cultivation masters."
He paused, looking genuinely awestruck.
"It resonates… with divine frequencies—the pure lightning essence of the Azure Dragon. Impossible, unless…"
"Unless what?" Jinhai demanded, taking a half-step forward.
"Unless she is carrying the mark of Heaven itself," the scholar finished, trembling slightly.
Silence fell over the Hall.
Xue sighed, crossing her own arms.
"Great.
Does this 'Mark of Heaven' come with any paid time off or health benefits, or is it just more existential dread?"
The moment she finished speaking, the jade pendant pulsed again, brighter than ever.
A powerful surge of blinding, blue-white energy burst outward from her feet, completely flooding the spiritual array.
The celestial mirrors lining the room glowed fiercely, and the strange, ancient symbols began racing across their surfaces like rapidly moving data streams.
"Shut it down! Stop the flow!" a frantic scholar cried, holding his head.
"I'm not doing anything!" Xue shouted back, holding her hands up in surrender.
"I swear I didn't touch the main server!"
But the energy continued to build and surge. Suddenly, the complex geometric shapes of the ancient array started rapidly rewriting themselves.
They morphed, twisted, and rearranged into something sleek, modern, and mathematically recognizable.
Xue, the programmer, recognized the pattern immediately, her eyes widening in a mix of terror and professional admiration.
"It's running a script," she whispered, utterly mesmerized.
"It's coding the magic!"
Jinhai's gaze snapped from the swirling energy back to her face, his eyes narrowed with shock.
"What did you just say?"
Before she could form a coherent explanation—or apologize for the cosmic hacking—the light vanished completely.
The powerful formation dimmed, and the energy receded, leaving behind only quiet silence and one very peculiar artifact: a single, perfectly formed lotus flower made entirely of glistening, blue-white crystal, floating harmlessly in her open hands.
Jinhai stared at the crystal lotus, then back at Xue, his expression shifting from suspicion to utter astonishment.
"You… you took the elemental qi of the array, and you shaped my personal Frost energy."
Xue blinked down at the glowing lotus, still warm in her palm.
"I did what now? I thought I was just rebooting the system."
"You fused pure lightning and pure frost without shattering the balance of the array," he explained, his voice low with disbelief.
He looked at her as if she were an unsolvable, beautiful, terrifying equation. "No human has ever achieved that degree of elemental stability before."
She looked from the ice lotus to his intense, handsome face, a faint smile touching her lips.
"Well," she said slowly, with a knowing shrug.
"Maybe I'm just really good at cross-platform integration."
His brow furrowed again, that familiar line of confusion deepening.
"I don't know what that combination of words means, Lady Lin, but it sounds profoundly dangerous."
Xue smiled slightly, holding the crystal lotus closer.
"It usually is, Your Highness."