The corridor smelled like rain-damp concrete and old disinfectant. Students flowed past him in a tide of uniforms and rumors, voices like distant surf. Xiao Yu moved through the crowd like he carried his own little storm — head low, shoulders tight, every step an inch of effort. Today, the world felt sharp at the edges.
His shoulder clipped someone and the sound of a voice cut through his head like ice.
"Well, well—looks like things didn't work out between you two after all," a mocking voice purred, velvet and poison combined.
Xiao Yu didn't bother to look. He kept his gaze trained on the tiles, on the pattern of light beneath his shoes. His voice was small, tired. "I'm not in the mood to exchange words with you."
Yu Mian's heels clicked, measured and bright. "I told you to fade into the background quietly," she said, as though reciting a command. "You didn't listen. Don't blame me for what happens next."
A laugh that sounded like a broken bell escaped from Xiao Yu — thin, brittle. He straightened his shoulders as if to walk away and then let the words fall, soft and final: "You win. I'm done fighting."
He turned and kept walking.
The garden lay at the far edge of campus, tucked behind a low brick wall where ivy threaded like a secret. Chinese lanterns swung above a small stone path, their paper skins catching the afternoon like a promise. It should have been pretty. It should have been quiet respite. Instead, Xiao Yu found it hollow, a stage for the sick little play his life had become.
Shiroi's voice slid into his mind like a silvery thread. Host — I sense the presence of a foreign object.
Xiao Yu paused. "Where?"
Just a little bit ahead, Shiroi answered. There was a note of urgency — different from his usual flippant commentary. The spirit flitted in front of him in a puff of downy white, hovering with a seriousness that made the hair on Xiao Yu's arms stand up.
Xiao Yu arched a brow, half exasperated, half curious. "Shiroi, this is a garden. What exactly am I supposed to be looking for?"
Shiroi pointed with an invisible fingertip to a shadowed alcove near the roots of an ancient camphor tree. "There. Secluded. Off the path."
Xiao Yu approached the corner with the slow, reluctant steps of someone being led to an examination. The ground was soft with fallen petals; the air smelled faintly of damp earth and something metallic just beneath the sweetness. He knelt.
Nestled in a depression of moss and soil was a small object, half-buried and catching the light like a trapped star. It looked almost foolish to exist here — ordinary in shape, unnatural in presence. A tiny spinner, ornate and slightly heavier than it looked; a central disk inlaid with a symbol that made his skin prickle.
Shiroi hovered closer, eyes narrow. "That's it. Don't drop it."
Xiao Yu's fingers trembled as he reached. The metal was cool, slick with a thin film of dirt. For a moment his mind supplied jokes — fidget toy, lost kid's trinket, prop for a viral clip. But the way the spinner seemed to pulse under his touch told him this was not simple.
"Shiroi, are you sure—?" His voice was swallowed by the air.
Pick it up, Shiroi said, and there was an edge to his tone Xiao Yu had never heard before.
His fingertips closed around the object.
The world made a sound like a struck bell. Cold threaded up his arm, then through his chest, then across his skull. Lights exploded behind his eyelids. He tried to swallow air but his throat closed as if the space inside him had been suddenly hammered flat.
"Shiroi!" he managed, before sensation collapsed into white fire.
He went down like a puppet with cut strings. The last thing he registered was the fragile chirr of students' laughter miles away, and then he was gone.
—
In a place that had no name — not limbo, not heaven, not server — Shiroi's fluff unraveled into static panic. He was everywhere at once: a dot of white light, a ringing in the void, a tiny voice screaming into a cage.
Host is unconscious, Shiroi hissed into the only line that mattered.
Akai answered before the command had fully formed. His form was a bright red spark, always brisk, always too efficient. The childlike orb was already interfacing with the systems that stitched worlds together. "There's been a bug detected," Akai said, voice precise and devoid of surprise. "It was implanted the instant Master's soul trembled. A third party has overridden the sequence. We can't proceed like this."
Shiroi's fluff puffed small and sharp. "What do you mean, overridden? We planted the object — we vetted it — I scanned it ten times yesterday!"
Akai's red glow dimmed a fraction. "Not that object. The implant. Someone inserted a parasitic program simultaneous to the soul's resonance. The network labeled it X. It masked itself in the momentary echo and nested in the host's pathway. When your host touched the item, the override executed."
Shiroi's voice turned ragged. "We have to pull him out. Now. Eject. Emergency eject. I can't — I can't watch him rot inside a frozen loop."
Akai's circuits hummed like someone juggling knives. "I'll connect to the main server. I'll create an opening." He flickered, hands — if a sphere had hands — moving like a conductor. Streams of code unfurled, red threads seeking a seam. "When the aperture forms, you get the host. We cut him loose, fast. No delay."
Shiroi's wingsbeat was a million small beats of terror. "Do it. Do it now."
For a while the only sounds were the metallic taps of Akai's code and the soft, wrong silence of a space that did not belong to either of them. Firewalls arced, collapsed, rerouted. The mainframe — an impossibly old architecture with layers like the rings of a tree — hummed, resisted, then yielded.
"Eject now," Akai said.
Shiroi lunged.
The pull was violent. He felt himself grabbing at Xiao Yu's mind like a rope, fingers of memory, fingers of sensation. Xiao Yu's consciousness hung in threads — scenes, the hum of the garden, the snap of falling, the blur of white. Shiroi wrapped everything he could into a sliver of code and hauled.
But the host didn't come free.
"Host is still unconscious!" Shiroi gasped, the world in his ears like a storm.
Akai's red light blinked. "I'm seeing resistance in the pathway. Extra flags. External encryption. Whoever planted X anchored it deeper than a simple injection. This is a containment protocol, layered and disguised as a shard of narrative. Removing it needs total access, which we do not have without risking systemic collapse."
Shiroi felt hollowed and tiny. "We have to try something else. We can't stay here, watching him trapped in that place while someone else rewrites the rules."
Akai's glow brightened, a little cold smile in the data. "We'll attempt a manual override. I'll open a secure conduit to the host's interface. When we do, you must extract any intact memory clusters you can — the parts that identify the world markers. We will compress them back into a stabilizing shell."
Shiroi fumbled with the protocols Akai crafted. His small form blinked faster than a heart trying to calm itself. Lines of emergency code bled into the network. For a harrowing span time they all but poured their essence into the effort: Akai steady, surgical; Shiroi frantic and hopeful.
Then the system hiccuped.
"Eject," Akai said—this time the word was a command and a prayer.
Shiroi hurled himself into the aperture. He found the host and clung, dragging at the threads of consciousness, pulling at images — the camphor tree, Yu Mian's mocking mouth, the small glint of metal. He tried to yank those images free, to lock them away so Xiao Yu could wake with sense intact. He felt memory cluster after cluster slip through his grasp like fish.
When at last Shiroi tumbled out of the tunnel back into the nameless space, he was smaller, breathless with virtual exhaustion.
"Host is still unconscious," he reported, voice splintered.
Akai did not pause. "Assess the implant. Can you detect its signature?"
Shiroi shivered his fluff. "It's complex. It identifies as X. Traces of code are… unlike any we've seen. Non-native. Not our kind. It writes in a dialect that scrambles back-end reads and masks retrieval attempts. Whoever wrote it knew the soul's harmonics."
"Do you have any decoded fragment?" Akai asked, fingers already typing again to pull shards.
Shiroi closed his eyes — a ridiculous human gesture in a place of code — and willed the fragments to cohere. A small image arrived, jagged and ugly: the spinner, the symbol on its disk, a single character burned into its edge. An angular X.
"X," Shiroi whispered. The sound was too human.
Akai's crimson glow pulsed as if he were considering a risk. "We can't track the origin without exposing the host's location. Whoever did this is either inside the network or has deep access. We must assume they can see some of our actions."
Shiroi felt the weight of that assumption like a stone. "We have to move," he said. "If X can anchor one world, they can anchor another. We can't let the same thing happen again."
Akai's light narrowed. "Agreed. We will choose the next world and harden it. I'll write a defensive lattice around the next object. We will scrub all inbound vectors. And… we will hide the next seed in a place X would not think to probe."
Shiroi nodded, every fluffed inch of him blank with relief and a new cold fear. "Do we tell the host anything? He's stuck out there, and if we move the operation without him—"
Akai's voice softened in a way that made Shiroi tilt his head. "No. We cannot engage the host while an active parasite remains. It could feed on his attention and anchor deeper. We will isolate the world, bury our tracks, and prepare to intervene physically when the host wakes."
Shiroi let the words settle like a layer of dust. He imagined Xiao Yu — small, dramatic, fragile — lying in a world with a foreign voice speaking through his bones. The image made him ache.
Akai made the final call. "Select the next world. We will fortify it. We will not let this happen again."
Shiroi nodded, determination hardening into something like steel. He looked at that single image again: the spinner, the sun caught on metal, the carved X. He committed it to memory in case it might ever be needed.
As the two guardians began the quiet work of choosing and sealing, in the unwholesome silence the red and white lights of their forms flickered like distant, stubborn stars — two tiny sentinels preparing to fight a shadow with rules they still barely understood.
They had to move quickly. The hosts were lives. The worlds were fragile. And whatever had written itself as X had just made very clear that someone else was playing the same game — and willing to cheat.