- Safe House · Scent of Rust
Qian Yiyan did not return to the Astrological Bureau.
Instead, she plunged into a dilapidated accounting office downstream on the Bian River, thick with the stench of mold. Behind the counter, a gaunt old man looked up from a mountain of ledgers; the pupils behind his spectacles were as murky as two rusted sewing needles.
"We're closed."
"Chancellor Lü's old accounts, Tianxi 4 to Tiansheng 4, the triple ledgers for Xingzhou, Luoyang, and Bianjing." Qian Yiyan's words flew like a cleaver through noodles, each one edged with steel.
The old man's brush paused.
Three breaths later, he pushed aside a heavy shelf; dust cascaded down, revealing a hidden door behind it.
In the secret chamber, a canal transport map thick with cinnabar marks hung on the wall, while the table was piled with yellowed star charts—incongruous and eerie.
"Chen Ku. Kept Chancellor Lü's off-book accounts for thirty years." The old man poured two cups of ink-black tea. "Astronomer Qian, that smell on you is even stronger than my aged tea bricks."
"What smell?"
"Rusted blood, mixed with ash from incense." Chen Ku sniffed, as if savoring a poison. "Same as the registrar who died in the Luoyang warehouse three years ago... just before he breathed his last."
Qian Yiyan's heart tightened.
She spread out her father's mineral vein map.
"This isn't a map of veins." Chen Ku's withered finger jabbed directly at the silk; old ink stains lurked under his nails. "This is the blood vessels beneath the Song realm. Rust spawns from the mines and spreads along the waterways—grain boats, silk boats, weapons boats—wherever they go, the rust silently clings."
His fingernail stopped at the Luoyang node, which was slowly shifting from greyish white to an ominous dark gold.
"In the Luoyang warehouse are piled three-tenths of this winter's provisions for the Hebei frontier forces..."
Before he could finish, the door sounded with three long knocks and two short—an unmistakable signal.
Chen Ku's expression did not change. He swiftly slid open another crevice in the wall: "Cao Sanlang is here. This favor will cost Chancellor Lü dearly."
Qian Yiyan slipped inside. Just before the crevice sealed, she heard Cao Yan's low voice:
"Elder Chen, pass a message—this morning the Empress Dowager met with two Nanyang merchants to discuss a deal for pearls from the Eastern Sea. But those two lodged at the courier station, burning lamps till midnight, and they weren't studying jewelry patterns..."
"They were studying star charts."
The wall closed completely.
In the darkness, the rust-mark on Qian Yiyan's left shoulder burned like fire.
Eastern Sea pearls? Star charts?
In her mind flashed the shadow of Eternal Cosmos that Lu Baoyi had once mentioned...
- Hospital Room · The Price of Truth
Lu Baoyi stared at the stark white wall of the hospital room. The metalized index finger of his right hand tapped a faint Morse code on his knee.
*--- --- ---* Gear in place.
Lin Wan had just stuffed a charger disguised as a power adapter into the socket behind his headboard.
The door opened. Zhou Keran entered. The edge of the skin patch behind her ear still bore a faint, unhealed blue glow—the physiological punishment for her breach yesterday was ongoing.
"Dr. Qin needs you to sign the latest cognitive function assessment report."
"How far has your side actually dug into the original ethics review report of the Sowing Plan?" Lu Baoyi did not take the document, cutting straight to the point.
A nearly imperceptible flicker passed through Zhou Keran's eyes: "That's top secret—"
"Top secret's edges," Lu Baoyi interrupted, his voice terrifyingly calm. "Did any blood stain them? The five ethics committee members who signed off that year all died within twelve months. Did the death reports all say the same thing: they were fortunate to glimpse the truth of the harvest season before the end?"
Dead silence.
Zhou Keran's breath seemed to halt for half a second. The blue light behind her ear flared; her body trembled almost imperceptibly.
"…How do you know that?"
"My father's messy leftover data had all kinds of scraps." The corner of Lu Baoyi's mouth twitched, but it wasn't a smile. "Is the deal still on? You give me the scraps of that report, and I'll dig out the backdoor Dr. Qin hid deep in the system, the one specifically monitoring your ideological purity—so next time you want to speak a bit of truth, you won't have to shake in pain."
The silence stretched too long.
Long enough that Lu Baoyi almost thought this dangerous probe would completely collapse.
Then, with lightning speed, she produced a silver chip the size of a fingernail from her sleeve, inserted it into her tablet to read, then withdrew it and gently placed it on the bedside table.
"Read only once. Self-destruct in ten minutes." Her voice was so soft it seemed about to shatter. "Also… in half an hour, Dr. Qin will personally take you to sub-level three for a full-body high-precision rule-contamination scan. That machine will attempt the first targeted resonance excitation of the Mirror-Seed in your brain."
She paused, lifting her eyes to meet his, her gaze unreadably complex:
"He said it's to collect valuable data on the resonance threshold of Twin Entities."
A lab rat. Live experimentation.
"Thanks." Lu Baoyi pocketed the chip, grinning a smile with no warmth. "Personal question, Engineer Zhou—that thing behind your ear, when it triggers, does it hurt?"
Zhou Keran's hand was already on the door handle. She did not turn back.
"Better than when I have to say things that aren't true."
The door closed.
Lu Baoyi immediately connected the chip to his personal terminal via the relay.
The report was fragmentary, but the key information was chilling:
【…Final consciousness record of the first-generation receptor (Qian Weiyan) before full transformation shows: when the Rust-Seed devours the host's existence, it preferentially consumes high-intensity negative emotions—fear, despair, unwillingness—as nourishment. Conversion efficiency is 370% of the calm state…】
【…Encrypted recording of Ethics Committee Member A (deceased) on his deathbed: This is not sowing, it's feeding. We are using the pain and fear of the living to fatten those… things from The Other Side.】
An icy cold churned in his stomach.
Qin Zhaoyang's line—"the will erupting from a receptor under extreme fear and resistance—that is the Top-level nourishment most craved by the rule-seed"—was not a metaphor.
It was literal feeding.
He quickly Extract key passages. Before the chip's self-destruct countdown ended, he used a special encoding fragment from his father's data package to forge an encrypted data packet on the edge layer of Xihe's internal network:
"Northern Song · Luoyang · Longmen Mountain main vein node, dark-gold conversion rate accelerating abnormally, suspected large-scale Targeting infusion. Recommend elevating observation level."
Sender signature: Amber-Observer 07.
The fishhook, quietly dropped into the water.
- Coded Words · Three-Way Game
When Qian Yiyan emerged from the crevice, Cao Yan had already left.
Chen Ku handed her a note, Cao Yan's forceful handwriting: Third day, Chen hour, Sanli Slope outside West Water Gate. I'll show you fireworks.
"Fireworks?"
"Cao Sanlang didn't spell it out." Chen Ku slowly gathered the star chart copies. "But I've glanced at the Cao family's recent reports on military equipment losses at the border—three batches of crossbows dispatched from Luoyang warehouse, upon arrival and unboxing, were so rusted the strings couldn't be drawn."
He lifted his head; behind his spectacles, his eyes were sharp as needles:
"The rust is using the Song's own hands to deliver itself to the front. The Cao family… can't sit still."
Qian Yiyan tucked away the note.
Suddenly, five urgent knocks pounded on the secret chamber door.
Chen Ku's expression shifted. He swiftly slid open another hidden panel: "Go! Through the old Bian River drainage ditch!"
Qian Yiyan slipped in. Just before the panel closed, she heard Zhao Yunbi's voice—still warm, yet now chilling to the bone—from outside:
"Elder Chen, routine inspection by the Astrological Bureau. I hear Astronomer Qian is here Check old archives? The Empress Dowager has some instructions that require my personal delivery…"
The panel sealed completely.
Qian Yiyan hurried through the pitch-black, narrow passage, a cold smile on her lips.
They came fast enough.
A safe house? A joke.
- Museum · The Trap Opened
Lu Baoyi sat in a wheelchair, "accompanied" by Qin Mu to the Donghai City Museum.
The pretext was laughably flimsy: "The stable magnetic field of artifacts from specific eras helps soothe the cognitive Disorder caused by rule contamination."
Lu Baoyi knew full well: last night's bait data packet had hooked a fish. Beneath the museum lay a Northern Song bronze star chart, one of Amber's known markers. Qin Mu was racing to secure or destroy it first.
Sub-level three, constant temperature and humidity artifact storage area.
Cold as a morgue. Harsh white light illuminated rows of cold metal safes. Qin Mu entered a lengthy code, opened one, and取出 a flat bronze box.
He opened the lid. Inside lay a palm-sized bronze plate. The engraved star chart was completely scrambled—as if someone had smashed a normal star chart and randomly pieced it back together.
"A heterodox star chart privately engraved during the Northern Song Tiansheng era." Qin Mu, wearing special gloves, carefully lifted the plate. "The Astrological Bureau confiscated most of these and melted them down for coinage; this one slipped through."
Lu Baoyi stared at the plate.
At its bottom was an extremely shallow engraving—three equilateral triangles overlapping. Identical to the pattern on his father's private lab seal.
"Can I touch it?"
"Need isolation—" Before Qin Mu could finish, Lu Baoyi's metalized right index finger had already pressed against the icy bronze surface.
In that instant, the bronze plate came alive.
The scrambled star chart flared with dark-gold light. The luminescence flowed like living fluid, sketching in the air a three-dimensional mineral vein profile—precisely the Longmen Mountain vein, dotted with dark-red points, while at its center a single point flashed madly with blinding gold.
Exactly matching his forged data packet.
But before anyone could grasp the details, the projection twisted violently. The entire storage area's lights began flickering wildly. On all the safes' metal surfaces, as if smeared by an invisible hand, a rapidly spreading layer of greyish rust appeared.
"Rule contamination leak!" Qin Mu immediately pressed his earpiece, his voice sharp. "Initiate Alpha isolation protocol! All personnel evacuate immediately—"
This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
The nearest safe door exploded.
Not a physical explosion—a tearing of space itself. The air in front of the door shattered like glass, cobwebbed with cracks, and behind the cracks was a bottomless, dark-red corroded void.
A terrifying suction seized them.
The closest Xihe security guard barely managed half a scream before his entire body was yanked toward the rift by an invisible force. Midair, he began rusting visibly—skin greyed, limbs stiffened, in moments turning into a human-shaped rust sculpture, then swallowed completely into the rift.
In that instant, Qin Mu's reaction lagged by half a beat.
He did not first pull Lu Baoyi's wheelchair back. Instead, he fixed his gaze on the whole process of being swallowed and rusted, his pupils seeming to light up like Precise instruments, lips moving faintly. In his eyes there was no fear—only shock, a Passion desire to record, and a suppressed instinctive nausea.
"…So this is the live morphology of complete conversion…" His murmur was low, as if verifying theoretical archives.
The next second, his professional mask snapped back into place.
"Fall back!" He yanked Lu Baoyi's wheelchair backward, barking into his earpiece: "Confirmed Alpha-level contamination event! Execute spatial severance protocol!"
Too late.
From the first exploded safe, the shattering of space spread like plague. A second, a third… the entire row of safes "exploded" one after another, revealing the same despairing corroded void behind each.
They were encircled.
"It's a trap…" Lin Wan drew her gun and stood in front of Lu Baoyi, her voice shaking. "Someone pre-set rule-contamination bombs here, waiting for us to trigger the bronze plate!"
Qin Mu frantically operated his tablet: "Attempting to stabilize the space structure in reverse. Need time—"
"No time." Lu Baoyi stared at the void closing in, exuding a cloying, rusty-sweet odor. His metalized right hand clenched.
He could feel the Mirror-Seed in his right arm raging wildly, dark-red points darting at unprecedented speed—a hungry excitement.
It craved proximity to the Rust-Seed.
Even if proximity meant being devoured.
"Lin Wan," Lu Baoyi took a deep breath, "wheel me straight to the front of that biggest rift."
"Boss, you're insane?!"
"Do it!" Lu Baoyi growled, then looked at Qin Mu. "Dr. Qin, ready your records—I'm going to actively excite the Mirror-Seed, try to blast a path open with rule counterforce!"
Qin Mu's pupils shrank sharply: "Forcible excitation may cause irreversible cognitive structural damage! You could permanently lose—"
"Better than turning into rust scraps right now!"
Lin Wan gritted her teeth and shoved the wheelchair toward the largest rift at the center. The void was inches away; the iron-rust stench mixed with sweet rot was almost suffocating.
Lu Baoyi closed his eyes, concentrating all his Consciousness on his right arm.
Imagine yourself a mirror. A mirror that can reflect every rule-error in this void—
The Mirror-Seed responded.
Dark-red light burst from within his right arm, forcibly coalescing before him into a blurry, rippling mirror surface. The mirror faced the void; the chaotic, Frenzy rule currents were reverse-dismantled and reconstructed within it.
Like untangling a completely knotted mess by reversing the knots.
The rate of spatial Crackling visibly slowed.
The price hit instantly.
Lu Baoyi felt something violently ripped from his mind—memories of Lin Wan. Her face blurred; her name evaporated from his consciousness, leaving only an empty concept of "an important person to protect."
He clenched his teeth, holding on with all his might.
The mirror surface gradually solidified. The void's expansion was temporarily halted; even in the central area, fine healing signs appeared—those glass-like spatial cracks began, piece by piece, to reverse-anneal.
"It's working!" Qin Mu stared at the real-time data, his voice trembling with disbelief. "But Mr. Lu's cognitive stability readings are plummeting! He can't hold much longer!"
Lu Baoyi could no longer hear the outside world.
All his energy was focused on sustaining that fragile mirror. Just as he felt his mind about to be completely hollowed out, reduced to blankness—
The long-dormant jade pendant in his bosom suddenly erupted with searing heat.
Not the familiar resonance.
A violent, almost brutal infusion of information.
Chaotic, massive, carrying the earthy smell of the veins and ice-cold battle intent—all of it slammed into his consciousness. The vein map, the precise coordinates of the dark-gold node, the Superposition analysis of the canal routes, and a crystal-clear Decision.
Qian Eyes?!
With what little reason remained, Lu Baoyi latched onto the Analysis algorithm of the core node coordinates at the heart of the information stream. Then he took his own remaining knowledge—the correspondence between Liu Ren algorithm and spatial topology—mixed it with a fierce unwillingness, and hurled it all back:
"Qian Eyes! Catch it!"
The instant the information surged back.
The jade pendant completely shattered.
Not physically exploded—the resonance channel overloaded and collapsed with a violent tremor.
Lu Baoyi's vision went black. In his ears, the metallic rusting "crack" was so loud it seemed to hammer directly against his skull.
- West Water Gate · Rust-Blood Explosion
Qian Yiyan lay prone in the withered grass behind an earth slope, beside her the equally low-crouching Cao Yan.
Below the slope was a Remote side road, where about a dozen men looking like merchant guards rested. Carts were covered with thick oilcloth, but the wheel ruts were abnormally deep.
"That's them." Cao Yan's voice was barely a whisper. "From the Luoyang direction. Not carrying goods—earthen jars. Every jar contains high-concentration rust-seed culture fluid."
Qian Yiyan stared fixedly at the guards.
Their movements carried a dissonant stiffness, their eyes hollow. When one inadvertently pulled at his collar, greyish skin showed at his neck—infected? Or something worse?
No time to probe further.
The jade pendant in her bosom suddenly burned like red-hot iron.
A chaotic,粗暴 information stream, freighted with alien algorithmic structures, savagely slammed into her consciousness. Forced insertion.
The impact made Qian Yiyan's vision swim; in her ears, a piercing shriek of porcelain scraping metal detonated; the sweet-tangy smell of rust rose in her nose. Her consciousness was like ice struck by a hammer—crazed with cracks.
But amidst the soul-rending pain, the core part—the Analysis algorithm for node coordinates—branded itself into the deepest layer of her mind, bypassing understanding, becoming direct intuition. As if she had struggled for ten years and, at the brink of life and death, arrived at this conclusion herself.
The price: she briefly forgot Cao Yan's name, retaining only a Vague concept of "a blade-wielding ally."
The pain receded like a tide. Her pupils refocused.
Almost instinctively, she superimposed the algorithm in her mind onto the memorized vein map. The previously Vague color differences sharpened instantly—
Dark red = active Rust-Seed, greyish white = dormant contamination, dark gold = being infused!
The direction of the convoy ahead pointed straight to the node that had just turned blinding dark gold on the map: the western suburbs of Bianjing, the Imperial Powder Works.
"They're not targeting frontier weapons…" Qian Yiyan's voice was ice-cold. "They're targeting Bianjing's powder depot. If the Rust-Seed erupts in the powder—"
"The entire western city will become a rule-twisted rust hell." Cao Yan finished, his eyes now as cold as an unsheathed blade. "The Empress Dowager is playing with fire; the Liao are pouring oil directly onto her bed."
He slowly rose, drawing the plain military saber at his waist.
"Astronomer Qian, watch closely—this is how the Cao family hands a blade."
The words fell, and he was already leaping down the slope like a pine plunging off a cliff. Before the blade fully cleared its sheath, the chilling killing intent had startled birds from the woods.
The merchant guards instantly alerted, but Cao Yan was too fast—the moment the true blade-light emerged, the throats of the two foremost guards burst with blood-lines. Not severed, but pierced with precision—the blade-tip punctured throat-bone, killing silently.
Qian Yiyan moved at the same instant.
She did not draw her iron spike. Her right hand's fingers vaguely grasped, Trigger the frenzy energy mixed from astral force and Rust-Seed in her left shoulder's mark, and seized at the oilcloth of the nearest cart from across the air.
"Star-Erosion · Tide Calling."
A greyish ripple of rust spread from her palm. The moment it touched the thick oilcloth, the linen instantly powdered as if exposed to decades of sun and wind, revealing the layers of earthen jars beneath.
The jars' mouths were sealed with yellow talismans. The twisted patterns drawn in cinnabar on the talismans glowed with an eerie dark-red under the pale moonlight.
Cao Yan was already among the guards like a tiger into sheep. His saber-play had no flourishes—all were pure killing techniques honed on border battlefields: neck-slash, heart-thrust, knee-slice. Each stroke drew blood, each step trod corpses. In five breaths, six guards lay dead.
But the remaining ones suddenly halted in unison.
Simultaneously, they tore open their own chest garments.
What was revealed was not skin, but completely rusted torsos—greyish metallic texture, surfaces riddled with honeycomb holes, and within the holes, something dark-red writhed slowly.
"Living corpse puppets…" Cao Yan clenched his jaw, saber held before him. "The Liao shamans' blood-contract puppet art!"
All the puppets opened their mouths at once, emitting a raspy, metal-scraping roar. In the roar, from the rust-holes in their chests, dark-red rust-dust clouds sprayed out, instantly enveloping a ten-yard radius.
The fog carried a powerful existence-erasing effect.
Qian Yiyan's vision blurred; she nearly forgot even the shape of the slope she was crouching on.
"Hold your breath!" Cao Yan growled, his saber flashing repeatedly, trying to disperse the rust-fog. But the fog was nearly incorporeal; the blade merely stirred it slightly.
Qian Yiyan gritted her teeth, again activating the rust-mark on her left shoulder. This time not releasing outward, but compressing inward—forcing the Rust-Seed's energy back into her own astral circulation, then expelling it through the iron spike.
The tip of the spike lit up with unstable dark-gold light.
She leaped into the rust-fog, her form like a swallow flying逆风, the iron spike becoming dots of cold light, repeatedly stabbing at the holes in the puppets' chests. Each strike exploded a small dark-gold halo, forcibly中和 the Rust-Seed's activity.
The puppets' movements visibly slowed.
Cao Yan seized the fleeting gap. His saber became a silver whirlwind of minced flesh, in one fluid motion chopping through three puppet heads.
But the last puppet, even as its head flew, the largest hole in its chest ejected a glob of dark-red matter directly at Qian Yiyan's face.
Too late to dodge.
Cao Yan lunged sideways, using his back to shield her from the blow.
Thud—
The dark-red matter sank into his shoulder blade. Instantly, that patch of skin greyed, and rust began spreading at visible speed.
"Cao Yan!"
"Forget me!" Cao Yan gritted his teeth, reversed his blade and shattered the headless puppet, staggering back, but his gaze locked on the carts. "The cart… going to explode!"
Qian Yiyan turned to look at the earthen jars.
She took a deep breath, compressing all the energy she could muster—remnant astral force, the agitated Rust-Seed, and that strange spatial-topology cognition from the algorithm Lu Baoyi had forced into her—into the tip of the iron spike.
The spike-tip blazed blindingly, emitting a strained whine.
With her last strength, she hurled the spike.
The spike became a dark-gold meteor, piercing through all the jars on the first cart, its momentum undiminished, then nailing through the second, the third…
Jars shattered.
Dark-red, viscous, blood-like rust-seed culture fluid gushed out, mixing in midair, reacting violently, and then…
Exploded.
Not a fire explosion—a rule Disintegration.
A dark-red light-mass appeared out of nowhere, expanding, contracting, expanding again with terrifying speed. Where it passed, sand and gravel turned to dust, vegetation instantly to ash, light twisted and swallowed. Within a ten-yard radius, space briefly became a rule vacuum.
Silent, shockless, pure "erasure."
Three breaths later, the light-mass dissipated.
In its place was a hemispherical pit, three yards deep, its walls smooth as a mirror, reflecting the pale moonlight.
The carts, the puppets, the jar fragments… all gone.
As if erased from the world by an invisible eraser.
Qian Yiyan collapsed to her knees, exhausted. The rust-mark on her left shoulder had now spread to just above her heart; the entire left side of her chest had lost sensation. She coughed up a mouthful of blood-flecked rust-colored dust.
Cao Yan knelt beside her, one knee on the ground. The greyish rust on his shoulder blade had spread across his entire back. He propped himself up with his saber, barely keeping from falling.
"These fireworks…" He forced an ugly smile. "Pretty, aren't they?"
Qian Yiyan did not smile.
She struggled to lift her head, looking toward Bianjing city. There, atop the Astrological Bureau's observation tower, a blinding golden pillar of light suddenly shot into the pitch-black night sky.
Within the light, a vast, twisted star-chart phantom flickered.
At its center, corresponding to Luoyang, a glaring dark-gold light detonated.
And the jade pendant in her bosom went completely cold, like stone.
- Reverberations · Time Stolen
The same moment, a thousand years away.
Inside the museum storage area, Lu Baoyi slumped in his wheelchair. The metalization on his right arm had spread to his collarbone. In his mind, memories of Lin Wan were reduced to scattered fragments.
The fragile mirror had dissipated. The spatial Crackling temporarily halted; the terrifying rusted void slowly receded.
Qin Mu was rapidly recording data, his expression unusually grim—the resonance overload seemed to have triggered unknown Chain store reactions.
Lin Wan rushed to his side, eyes red: "Boss! Are you okay? Do you know me? Who am I?"
Lu Baoyi stared at her, blank for three seconds, then the corner of his mouth twitched into a weak, defiant grin:
"Lin… Wan. My assistant. Paycheck… probably due."
He could still joke—meaning he wasn't completely gone.
Lin Wan didn't know whether to laugh or cry.
At that moment, Zhou Keran's urgent voice came through Qin Mu's tablet: "Dr. Qin! System detects abnormal high-energy resonance—Mr. Lu's and the Northern Song receptor's Intensity of resonance just exceeded the safety threshold, triggering the Sowing System's adaptive adjustment protocol!"
"What adjustment?" Qin Mu demanded.
"The harvest procedure… has been recalculated." Zhou Keran's voice held an almost imperceptible tremor. "Remaining time changed from four hundred nine days to three hundred ninety-nine days."
Time had been stolen—ten full days.
Because their resonance had been too intense, the system判定 the crop was ripening faster.
Lu Baoyi heard it, but he had no strength left for anger.
He lay limp in the wheelchair, using the last shred of consciousness to sense the jade pendant in his bosom—utterly cold, no longer pulsing.
Then he heard it.
Not rain. Not the metallic "crack."
A bizarrely double-layered, severely distorted voice—
One layer was Qian Yiyan's voice, yet it carried the exhausted tone of his father Lu Yuan on his deathbed: Son, don't believe any of the stories they tell you…
The other was his own voice, yet freighted with the sorrow and Rejection of Qian Weiyan's phantom: Yan'er, flee… never look back…
This voice residue tore open an extremely fine cognitive rift. A sliver of cold, Mechanical data ghosting flashed through:
【…Error… historical thread cross-contamination… retrieved fragment of Yuan-Yan Protocol data (status: severely damaged / strongly active remnant)…】
【…Warning: This fragment carries high-entropy narrative contamination, may distort receptor cognitive baseline, leading to identity disorder… Suggested Disposal: immediate execution of deep memory pruning, or… accelerate harvest Process to eliminate variable…】
The Remains of a shadow vanished in a flash.
But those four characters—Yuan-Yan Protocol—drove like poisoned ice-spikes deep into Lu Baoyi's consciousness.
His father Lu Yuan. Qian Yiyan's father Qian Weiyan.
There had been a protocol between them?
Before his eyes, a virtual screen automatically popped up with a red alert:
【Detected abnormally strong resonance and historical data contamination. Harvest procedure adaptively adjusted. Remaining time: 399 days.】
【Warning: Twin Entity Intensity of resonance has triggered system Gaze. Subsequent resonance behavior may further accelerate harvest Process.】
【Recommendation: Maintain physical and rule-level distance.】
The corner of Lu Baoyi's mouth twitched, pulling at the numb muscles of his face.
Maintain distance?
To hell with distance.
He raised that heavy, cold, inhuman metalized right hand, slowly clenched his fingers into a fist, and then, facing the void before him—facing that invisible system that had stolen their time—he slowly raised his middle finger.
Tiansheng 4 · Western Suburbs of Bianjing
Qian Yiyan, supported by Cao Yan, reluctantly pulled herself to her feet.
She took one last look at the fading golden pillar above the observation tower, then down at the jade pendant in her bosom—no longer warm.
In the distance, Dense hoofbeats approached—the Imperial City Command's riders, alarmed by the silent explosion.
Cao Yan clenched his jaw, the rust on his shoulder making his voice tremble slightly: "You go first. I'll hold them off for a while."
Qian Yiyan did not move.
She pulled out the vein map, her gaze fixed on that Blindingly bright dark-gold node at Luoyang.
She spoke softly, as if to herself, or to that person a thousand years away who might still perceive the slightest echo:
"Three hundred ninety-nine days."
"Not enough to slay all demons and scour the lair."
"But enough…"
She tucked away the vein map, turned, and melted into the deep night. Her back was straight as a blade, even though the blade was already covered in cracks and rust.
"To drag the fisherman down with me. "
And deep within her consciousness, an equally cold, formless interface silently updated its data:
【399 days】
Time had been stolen.
But some things could not be stolen.