Chapter 13: Ice Shards Everywhere and Bleating
The bomb disposal expert squatted in front of the C4 for nearly half a minute without getting up.
Daisy felt something was wrong.
It was minus fourteen degrees in the Underground Room, while a twenty-six-degree evening breeze blew on the surface of New York in September; five meters of soil created a forty-degree temperature difference. Her multifunctional watch popped up a blue text warning, but she didn't look at it. She knew whether she was cold or not.
"Agent Johnson." The bomb disposal expert spoke. His voice wasn't tense; it was the kind of blankness one feels when searching one's mind and failing to find a corresponding entry.
"Come over and take a look."
Daisy walked across the icy floor. She slipped twice and steadied herself by grabbing the shoulder of an ice sculpture.
The moment her palm touched the ice shell, she pulled it back. It wasn't because she was afraid of sticking to it, but because the shoulder of the person beneath the ice shell was slowly rising and falling.
Alive.
Thirty-one frozen Russian adult males—she had counted them when she came in. They were all alive.
There was mist in their nostrils, extremely slow, occurring only once every few seconds. It was the hibernation state from textbooks.
A robber who didn't kill.
She squatted down. Her flashlight shone on the pile of C4.
The explosives were still there. The packaging was intact, and the amount hadn't decreased.
The problem was with the wires.
At the end of each wire, where it connected to the detonator, the cross-section of the copper core was overly smooth.
Daisy took the magnifying glass from the bomb disposal expert and lay on the ground.
It wasn't cut by a knife.
A knife cut would leave curled edges. Pliers would leave burrs. Laser burning would leave heat discoloration.
This cross-section had nothing.
The crystal arrangement of the copper core was complete, the molecular structure was continuous, and there was no evidence of any external force intervention at the microscopic level. The wires hadn't been cut.
It was three millimeters shorter at the connection point.
It was as if it had been that length since it left the factory.
Daisy returned the magnifying glass to the bomb disposal expert. The two looked at each other, neither speaking.
Twenty-three years of bomb disposal experience. Seen timed, remote-controlled, chemically triggered, and light-sensitive ones. Never seen wires shorten themselves.
"Baa."
The sheep woke up.
The flashlight beam swept over. It was white, round, with half a gold chain trailing on the ground from its neck. It had a hundred-dollar bill in its mouth, chewing vigorously, the corner of the banknote already softened by saliva.
Daisy walked over and pulled out a portable biological scanner.
A blue laser swept around. The results appeared in three seconds.
DNA sequence: Ovis. Domestic sheep subspecies. Female. About eight months old. Gene map complete, no abnormalities.
Second-level analysis. Cell-level deep scan.
Histone modification patterns. Epigenetic markers.
These things didn't record the species, but the experience. Genes could be changed, but experiences couldn't.
This eight-month-old female sheep had a complete forty-three-year life of a human male written in its cell nuclei.
Daisy flipped the scanner over to look at the factory serial number on the back, confirming she hadn't taken the wrong one.
She hadn't.
She stood up, her leg hitting the corner of a table, but she felt no pain.
Her mind cycled through all known technical methods. Gene editing couldn't change epigenetic markers. Nanoscale biological reconstruction—such technology didn't currently exist on Earth.
Only one word remained.
She didn't say it out loud.
---
A few hundred meters away. The rooftop of an unfinished building.
Arthur sat on the edge, his legs dangling over the twelve-story height. In his right hand, he held a piece of cold pizza; the cheese was so hard it wouldn't even stretch.
Within the coverage of his Magic Perception, every movement in the Underground Room was captured frame by frame.
That female Agent lay on the ground looking at the wire cross-section. She looked for a long time. He could sense the adrenaline concentration in her body steadily rising. It wasn't fear, but the high excitement of professional instinct being activated.
Interesting.
He took a bite of the pizza. Chewed.
Those ice pieces, even if taken back and tested a thousand times, would still be H₂O. magic changes temperature, not matter.
But that wire cross-section...
He admitted that the processing method was a bit of a show-off. Freezing the wires to block the current was a physical insurance, which was enough. But he added one last touch, using micro-spatial folding to directly erase the three-millimeter copper core at the wire connection from reality.
Unnecessary? Not really.
What if the ice melted? Someone like Ivan, hard-headed, might have survived, crawled up, and pressed it again. Spatial erasure was the real foolproof insurance. If that section of the wire didn't exist, the explosives would never detonate. Physical laws wouldn't allow it.
He watched the female Agent in the Underground Roomcircling the sheep with the scanner.
The scanner's electromagnetic signal was very clear in his perception network. A custom S.H.I.E.L.D. model, with decent sensitivity. Being able to read epigenetic markers meant the hardware level was at least ten times the current civilian limit on Earth.
But no matter how sensitive, it couldn't read the principle of Polymorph.
Because Polymorph was not under the jurisdiction of science.
The female Agent hit the table corner when she stood up. Her adrenaline spiked again.
Arthur took another bite of the pizza.
---
Underground Room.
Daisy squatted in front of that vitrified ground.
She aimed the scanner at the scorch marks. Residual temperature data popped up; the scanner shrieked, its range blown.
She manually pushed the limit to the maximum.
The number froze: instantaneous peak temperature, 5778K. Within a margin of error of plus or minus 50K.
The surface temperature of the Sun.
She didn't rush to get up. She shone the flashlight to the side.
Half a meter from the edge of the scorch marks, a few hundred-dollar bills were scattered on the ground.
Not burned.
Not even curled edges.
5778K. Right next to the banknotes. The paper was fine.
This meant the energy boundary of that fireball was a hard cut. No temperature gradient decay. No thermal radiation diffusion. It was a line: Sun inside the line, room temperature outside.
No known form of energy on Earth could achieve this.
Footsteps came down from the stairs. Leather shoes stepped on the ice, making a crisp sound with every step.
Phil Coulson walked in. His suit jacket was open, his tie crooked; it was clear he had been pulled out of bed. But his walking rhythm wasn't disrupted. A habit formed from twenty years of field work.
Daisy handed the scanner to him.
Coulson took it and flipped through it. DNA data. Temperature data. Microscopic photos of the wire cross-section.
When he flipped to the last page, he changed his grip. From one hand to two.
"Not a Mutant." Daisy spoke.
"No."
"Not an Inhuman."
"No."
"And not that Kamar-Taj stuff either."
"No." Coulson returned the scanner to her. "Kamar-Taj's energy signatures are archived in our database. Dimensional energy, dark matter manipulation, Mirror Dimension. It doesn't match this at all."
He paused.
"But."
Daisy looked at him.
"I received a call twenty minutes ago." Coulson's voice lowered by half a tone. "From Kamar-Taj. Their Sorcerer Supreme sensed an abnormal fluctuation in the direction of New York while meditating tonight. In their own words, someone released energy in this dimension that doesn't belong to the law system of this Universe."
The Underground Room was quiet for two seconds. The sound of cracking ice filled the void.
"They asked if we knew who it was."
Daisy's watch popped up another line of blue text. She didn't look.
"Do we know?"
Coulson put his hands in his trouser pockets.
"No. But starting tonight, we need to know." He scanned the ice sculptures everywhere and the sheep that was rubbing its butt against a table leg. "Threat rating jumps directly to potential Omega-level independent entity. Encrypt all data, send directly to Fury."
He turned and walked toward the stairs. After two steps, he turned back.
"How do we handle that sheep?"
Daisy squatted on the ground scraping ice fragments. She scraped very carefully, putting them into a sealed bag piece by piece.
"It will naturally change back when the transformation effect wears off. Probably."
"Probably?"
"How would I know? I'm not even sure what this ability is called."
Coulson thought for a moment.
"Take it back and lock it up first. Get it some forage."
"Should we reserve its right to legal counsel?"
"...Take it away."
The sound of leather shoes went up the stairs, getting further and further away.
---
On the rooftop.
Arthur stuffed the last bite of pizza into his mouth.
Dry. Hard. The tomato sauce had formed a crust.
But he wasn't thinking about the pizza.
Magic Perception captured a new set of information. It didn't come from the Underground Room, but from a further direction. North of Midtown Manhattan.
A wave of energy fluctuation.
So weak it was almost covered by the city's background noise. If he hadn't fully expanded his perception network to monitor the dynamics in the Underground Room, he wouldn't have noticed it at all.
That energy wasn't human. Nor was it Chitauri.
And it definitely wasn't the aura of void creatures like Dimensional Hounds.
It was... orderly. Controlled. Carrying a kind of ancient and deliberately restrained rhythm.
Someone was observing tonight's scene.
Not S.H.I.E.L.D.
Not those Agents in the Underground Room.
It was a third pair of eyes.
Arthur threw the pizza box into the trash can nearby, stood up, and patted the dust off his pants.
That energy quickly retracted and disappeared into the energy background noise of Manhattan, vanishing completely.
The other party knew he was watching, so they actively withdrew.
"Interesting."
He pulled up his hood, picked up the cash transport case, and walked down the fire escape from the rooftop.
The direction of that energy was Greenwich Village.
Chapter 14: Reverse Target Locking and Promotion
The progress bar reached twelve percent.
The tablet was screaming.
It was the sound of a capacitor discharging—a sharp, short "buzz."
Daisy pulled her hand back.
The screen went black.
When it lit up again, it wasn't the S.H.I.E.L.D. interface. It wasn't Windows. It wasn't anything she recognized.
The entire screen had been swallowed by blue.
Not the blue of an LCD panel. This blue had depth, layers; looking into it, she could see things moving. Some kind of fluid was slowly churning inside the screen.
Characters floated out from the blue.
They weren't code. They weren't any computer language.
Curved, nested—each symbol looked too neat to be handwritten when viewed individually, yet together, they didn't follow any grammatical rules on Earth. They weren't laid flat on the screen's surface; they had depth, some in front, some behind, some near, some far.
Daisy stared at the runes. Light spots seared into her retinas for two seconds.
The runes moved. They rearranged. Rotated. Folded.
Finally, they formed a line of English text.
"Stop looking, little hacker."
Daisy didn't panic.
From the rise of the wave to S.H.I.E.L.D., in her ten years of penetration testing, she had seen more than a hundred provocations. Every top hacker had a signature. It was a kind of social etiquette: You can't catch me, but I'll let you know I was here.
Her ten fingers slammed onto the virtual keyboard. She was typing so fast, her fingers were a blur.
She didn't touch that line of English. If the opponent dared to display it, they weren't afraid of her intercepting the packet. She dove straight into the system's core and checked the process list.
It was empty.
It hadn't been cleared.
It was that no external process had ever existed.
Daisy changed her approach. She checked the network protocols. The firewall was intact, all data ports were closed, Wi-Fi was disconnected, Bluetooth was off, and cellular signals were blocked in the Underground Room.
There was no entry point. No path. No trace of any data packets entering or leaving.
That line of text had appeared on the screen out of thin air.
Her fingers paused for half a second.
"What's going on?" Coulson walked over.
"Someone has taken over my tablet."
"By what means?"
"There are no means."
Coulson didn't speak.
"I can't explain it," Daisy said, gritting her teeth. "It's like someone reached directly into this device and flicked the transistors on the circuit board with their finger."
Before she even finished speaking.
The tablet's casing turned cold.
It happened ridiculously fast. Daisy's left hand was still supporting the back, and under her fingertips, she felt a hard, angular sensation spreading from the edges toward the center.
Frost.
Ice crystals sprouted from the aluminum frame. The patterns were ten times more regular than natural frost; it wasn't water vapor condensing, but something piling up molecule by molecule.
Three seconds.
Her fingertips went numb and stung.
Daisy let go with all ten fingers at once.
The tablet slipped from her hand.
It didn't hit the ground immediately.
The screen flickered. The English text was gone.
It had been replaced by a simple drawing.
Drawn with just a few strokes. A round little sheep, with two small black dots for eyes. In the top right corner, a speech bubble contained a single character.
"Baa."
Then the tablet smashed onto the concrete floor.
The screen shattered. The frost on the aluminum casing crumbled, and ice chips splattered onto Daisy's pant leg.
Coulson stared at the fragments for three seconds.
"He's not a hacker."
Daisy didn't respond.
"He doesn't need a network at all."
Daisy remained crouching, unmoving. Her ten fingers were bright red from the cold, and the skin on her fingertips had white marks from mild frostbite.
She confirmed two things.
The other party had been watching her the whole time.
And, the other party was actually quite good at drawing sheep.
---
Queens. An abandoned warehouse.
Arthur shook his hand. The residual blue light on his fingertips scattered into a few tiny dots, drifted for two seconds, and then extinguished.
Remotely controlling electronic devices wasn't exactly a high-end technique. Using Magic Perception to lock onto the electromagnetic field distribution inside the target device, then using arcane energy to directly toggle the transistors on and off. The principle was exactly the same as hacking, the only difference being he didn't need a network.
He sat down at the wobbly folding table in the corner.
Stacks of U.S. dollar bills were piled on the table. He counted them twice. Six hundred thirty-seven thousand and four.
Plus what he had before, it would be enough for a while.
He pushed the money aside and pulled out something else.
A dimensional crystal.
It was the size of a fingernail, pitch black, with a sheen flowing across its surface. It was the loot dropped from killing that dimensional hound.
Arthur pinched it and infused it with arcane energy.
The crystal lattice loosened.
Click.
It shattered.
No light. No heat. No special effects.
Only a stream of information, clean to the extreme, drilled into his palm, passed through his muscles and bones, and pierced straight into his mana core.
The system panel lit up brilliantly.
[Congratulations to the host for reaching Lv.20!]
[Unlocked: Cleanse (Support: Dispels low-level curses and toxins)]
[Unlocked: Arcane Wisdom (Buff: Spell Power +10%, duration 30 minutes)]
His mana pool expanded in an instant. The feeling of resistance to the flow of magic in his body disappeared for the most part, and the arcane energy in his blood vessels became fast and smooth.
Lv.20.
A ten percent spell power bonus. In Azeroth, this was a figure stacked up by thirty talent points. Put here, Frost Nova used to freeze a whole street, now it could freeze one and a half.
But Arthur didn't have time to process this good news.
Something went wrong with his mana core.
The moment he absorbed the energy from the dimensional crystal, his core produced a violent pulse. An uncontrolled one. The fluctuation of arcane energy penetrated the warehouse walls, the air above Queens, and all the media above New York that had been touched by magic.
Ripples spread outward layer by layer.
Anything sensitive to magic would receive the signal at this moment.
An energy signature that didn't belong to this Universe, vast and completely foreign.
He couldn't stop it. The mana core losing control during the instant of leveling up was a built-in system mechanism.
"...Exhibitionist system."
Within three seconds, Arthur stuffed the money and crystal fragments into his backpack and expanded his Magic Perception to scan the area. Nothing was moving toward him within a two-kilometer radius for the time being.
He shouldered his backpack and left through the back door. His sneakers stepped through dirty water without making a sound.
But he knew that the term "for the time being" had a very short shelf life in New York.
---
At the same moment.
Manhattan. Greenwich Village.
The third-floor meditation room of the New York Sanctum.
The rune copper mirror on the wall moved first. Water ripples appeared out of thin air on the mirror's surface, expanding outward in circles. The hourglass in the corner stopped. The sand in the upper chamber hung suspended in mid-air, not a single grain falling. The sandalwood smoke in the air froze, twisted into a spiral, and hung there for two full seconds before dissipating.
The woman sitting cross-legged on the cushion opened her eyes.
Ancient One.
The eye of agamotto on her chest was spinning.
She hadn't activated it. The stone was spinning on its own. Green light burst from the gaps in the metal, spinning faster and faster, accompanied by a sound between a hum and a moan.
The Time Stone was sounding an alarm.
Ancient One had held the position of Sorcerer Supreme for hundreds of years. In her hands, this stone had experienced invasions from the Dark Dimension, Dormammu's probes, and countless repairs to reality fissures.
The number of times it had sounded an alarm on its own could be counted on one hand.
She stood up. Walked to the window.
No ritual was needed, no magic circle was required. Her perception pierced directly through the glass, through the streets, and across the Manhattan skyline.
Direction locked. Seventeen degrees east of north.
Queens.
That energy had already dissipated, but its lingering resonance still swirled in the air. Ancient One read it three times.
She had flipped through the theories of dark matter manipulation in the thousands of volumes of scriptures at Kamar-Taj, studied the spectrum of dimensional energy, and recorded the energy patterns of hundreds of known systems. None of them matched.
She used the eye of agamotto to look at the timeline in that direction.
The green light pulsed a few times.
There was nothing.
It wasn't that she couldn't see clearly. It was that on the timeline in that direction, from beginning to end, this energy signature simply did not exist.
It wasn't there in the past.
It shouldn't be there in the present.
In all the futures she had observed, it wasn't there either.
But it was right there. Real. Vast. Taking root in this Universe.
Ancient One withdrew the power of the eye of agamotto. The green light extinguished. The meditation room returned to silence. The sand in the hourglass began to fall again.
She did not sit back down on the cushion.
She turned and went downstairs.
The doors of the New York Sanctum were pushed open from the inside in the dead of night.
Chapter 15: Dark Alley Confrontation in Queens
It was late September in Queens, 6:00 PM, and the sky hadn't completely darkened yet.
The energy from the direction of Greenwich Village hadn't reappeared for four days. It had been withdrawn so cleanly that not even a trace could be filtered out from the background noise of Magic Perception.
The other party knew they had been detected and proactively retreated.
This kind of restraint was harder to deal with than hostility. Arthur kept this matter in mind but didn't actively seek them out. Barging into an unknown powerhouse's territory with a Level 20 status panel wasn't called bravery; it was called suicide.
There were more practical matters at hand.
He held a kraft paper bag in his left hand, containing two twenty-ounce Tomahawk steaks—Angus Black Beef, cut at that boutique butcher shop on Fifth Avenue. A small patch of blood had seeped through the bottom of the bag, staining the kraft paper a deep brown.
He was already very familiar with this neighborhood. Which alley led to the subway station, which convenience store had blind spots in its surveillance, and which intersection's traffic light had been broken for three months without repair—all had been marked one by one by Magic Perception during his nighttime activities over the past two weeks.
The proprietress of the pizza shop waved to him through the glass window.
Arthur nodded. He had bought pizza at this shop seven times, paid in cash, and didn't engage in small talk. The proprietress only knew him as a quiet Asian young man living alone who always ordered double cheese and no pineapple.
In New York, no one cares if their neighbor is a superhuman, as long as you don't use a vacuum cleaner at three in the morning.
He turned the street corner.
The passive scanning range of Magic Perception had nearly doubled after reaching Level 20, covering a radius of four hundred meters with a refresh rate of sixty times per second.
Most of it was noise. Electromagnetic radiation, subway vibrations, the idling engines of a fire station several blocks away—gray low-frequency clutter, automatically filtered.
Three hundred and twenty meters away. Slightly to the east. The location he had marked as Abandoned Alley C7.
A cluster of biological energy sources.
The intensity wasn't high, around Level 8 to 10. However, the waveform was extremely disordered, and the energy output far exceeded the body's load limit, fluctuating wildly with signs of imminent collapse at any moment.
Arthur's walking pace slowed for half a beat.
He continued walking. His speed didn't change, but his direction shifted by fifteen degrees.
---
Two minutes later.
The entrance to Alley C7 was very narrow, with the two walls less than 1.8 meters apart, and the space above was sliced into fragments by fire escapes and clotheslines. The streetlights couldn't reach inside, leaving it pitch black beyond five meters.
Arthur didn't walk inside.
He leaned against a utility pole opposite the alley entrance, switched the steak bag to his right hand, and stuffed his left hand into his hoodie pocket.
Magic Perception at full power.
Inside the alley, eight biological entities.
Six people. Adult males, high heart rates, adrenaline pumping. Four carrying metal—guns. Two Glock 17s, one Makarov, and an old Tokarev. The magnetic field characteristics of the barrel bores gave away the models.
One of them had residual traces of mana on him. Frost-type.
Left by himself.
A straggler from the group in the Underground Room.
The seventh energy source, the one that first triggered his perception.
Not an adult.
Heart rate 140. Body temperature 39.2 degrees Celsius. An unknown protein in the blood was replicating at high speed, violently rewriting the host's DNA sequence. Muscle fibers throughout the body alternated between spasms and remodeling.
A mutating teenager.
Unlike the external injections used by HYDRA, this was an endogenous gene modification triggered by a biological medium.
A spider bite.
Old jacket. Black-rimmed glasses. Two pinprick-sized puncture points on the back of the neck. He had bumped into him once on a Queens street ten days ago.
Movement came from deep within the alley.
The sound of a slide racking. Metal clashing.
"...Where the fuck did you learn those moves?" A voice in Russian-accented English, rough enough to grate on the ears.
A young voice, nasal and trembling: "I didn't, I really don't know how, ugh!"
A muffled thud. The kind of a fist hitting a stomach.
"This little brat just broke Andre's nose. A scrawny chicken like him," another voice said with a laugh.
"Tie his hands. Don't let him move again."
Chains rattled.
Arthur's attention bypassed those six people and fell on the deepest part of the alley.
The eighth one wasn't human.
Tied to a fire hydrant with a chain. Four-legged. Canine silhouette. Size far exceeding normal dog breeds, over five hundred pounds.
It had two hearts.
Directional perception scanning cut in.
Seventeen segments of base pair fragments that didn't belong to any species on Earth had been forcibly stuffed into this dog's gene sequence. No vector, no leader sequence, just violent insertion. The genetic framework was stretched out of shape, with traces of rejection reactions everywhere.
The energy characteristics of those seventeen base pair segments were something he had seen in the sewers three days ago.
Chitauri waste. Plus a catalyst made of low-quality dark magic.
A defective product under Level 10.
But it was more than enough to kill a feverish teenager whose muscles hadn't finished remodeling yet.
The chain was unfastened.
The sound of claws scratching the ground came out. Very heavy, five hundred pounds of weight stepping on gravel, nails sinking into the asphalt.
A very short cry. Not a bark. Something between a canine's growl and a reptile's hiss.
The teenager's voice changed. The nasality was gone. All that remained was terror.
"Wait, wait wait wait! What is that thing?!"
Within the perception net, the mutated dog broke free and accelerated toward the boy. Its initial speed exceeded sixty kilometers per hour and was still climbing.
The boy's body reacted.
A kind of instinctive evasion beyond human limits, swerving the body 0.3 seconds before the attack. Spider-Sense. The signal was correct.
But the body couldn't keep up.
He had a fever. His muscles were still remodeling. Spider-Sense gave the correct command, but the execution end lagged.
He dodged the front claws.
But he didn't dodge the pounce.
Five hundred pounds collided with one hundred and ten pounds.
Arthur placed the steak bag on the ground.
He raised his left hand. His index and middle fingers were pressed together.
A pinprick-sized blue point of light condensed at his fingertip.
[Frostbolt]. Limit-compressed version. The Frostbolt, which should have been the size of a fist, was compressed to the size of a rifle bullet. The frost energy density increased thirty-fold, and the flight sound was compressed to the ultrasonic frequency range.
Inaudible to the human ear.
The point of light left his fingertip.
Ninety meters. 0.2 seconds.
Hit point: right front limb shoulder joint.
A precise structural strike. Not a headshot, not disemboweling, but stripping away the ability to move.
Thirty times the density of frost energy poured out at the point of impact.
There was no sound.
Ice began to spread from the right front limb. A white frost surface expanded along the fur, covering muscles, freezing blood, and solidifying bones. Right front limb, spine, skull, tip of the tail.
Two seconds.
An ice sculpture hung in mid-air. In a pouncing posture, front claws extended, mouth wide open, with three rows of serrated fangs that didn't belong to any canine clearly visible in its mouth.
Gravity took over.
The ice sculpture crashed down. Shards of ice splattered everywhere.
The boy curled up in the corner, his face covered in blood and dirt, mouth open but making no sound. One eye peered through the gap between his fingers, looking toward the alley entrance.
There was nothing there.
The space beside the utility pole was empty.
The four gangsters with guns backed away simultaneously. One man's Makarov slipped from his hand, hitting the ground and misfiring, the bullet striking the wall and sending sparks flying.
No one looked toward the alley entrance.
The one who dropped his gun was the first to run. The remaining five scrambled and pushed each other toward the fire exit at the other end, the sound of the iron door being kicked open echoing three times.
Eight seconds.
Only shards of ice, bloodstains, and a boy curled in the corner remained in the alley.
Arthur crouched down, picked up the steak bag, and flipped it over to check the bottom. The blood hadn't leaked.
The energy release of the compressed-state Frostboltdecayed completely in less than 0.3 seconds; it wasn't in the same league as the mana pulse during a level-up. It couldn't be traced.
He prepared to leave.
Magic Perception pinged with a piece of information.
Among the shards of ice, inside the stitched layer of the mutated dog's frozen and broken leather collar, something was generating heat.
A metal tag.
Palm-sized. Silver.
A rune was engraved on the surface.
He had seen it in the sewers three days ago.
The rune was glowing. A dark red light seeped out from between the ice shards, and a rusty smell, like the scent of heating blood, wafted through the air.
A black liquid was oozing from the engravings.
Ruled out ink. Ruled out engine oil.
Blood. Warm, still-flowing blood.
Arthur slowly placed the steak bag back on the ground.
The energy characteristics of that rune in the ice shards and that black line in the sewers belonged to the same system. The same chain.
"...Not completely cleared out."
Chapter 16: Deeply Hiding Merit and Fame
The rune was still glowing.
Arthur didn't touch it; he squatted beside the broken ice and directed his [Arcane Perception] into it, scanning it twice.
"Crude."
He spat the word out in his throat, not for anyone to hear, simply stating a fact. The circuit only had two layers; if placed in Azeroth, it wouldn't even pass as an apprentice's assignment. The framework was built crookedly, and the structural flaws could be counted with a single glance.
But a line extended from within.
It was dark red, very thin—so thin it was like a strand of hair stretched to its limit—passing through the broken ice, through the ground, through the soil and pipes, heading west, all the way west, plunging into the bottomless depths of the New York sewer system.
An umbilical cord.
This rune was the terminal node of some ritual network, a signal transmitter that packed the mutant dog's biological data and transmitted it back to the caster in real-time. It didn't even have basic encryption—a naked signal, too lazy to hide, or perhaps they simply never imagined someone would trace the line back to them.
Arthur flipped the metal tag over.
There were words on the back; not runes, but an address. It wasn't carved deeply, but the strokes were clean, clearly carved with care, one stroke at a time.
"Sewer District 7, Maintenance Access D-14."
He wrapped the metal tag in a handkerchief, stuffed it into his pocket, stood up, and brushed the ice shards off his knees.
"Not even basic encryption."
This time he actually said it out loud, his tone similar to grading an unfinished assignment, carrying the weariness of a Professor grading papers.
Deep in the alley, the sound of panting remained.
That teenager, in an old jacket and black-rimmed glasses—the one who had bumped into him on the street ten days ago—was currently pressing his back hard against the wall, staring at his own palm, his fingers spread wide toward the wall, waiting for something to happen.
Nothing happened.
He changed his posture, clenched his fist, then suddenly opened it, fingers rigid, his expression as serious as if he were conducting a physics experiment.
Still, nothing happened.
Then, two gunshots rang out from the other end of the alley. He scrambled up the wall, palms and soles of his feet sticking to the brick surface, body suspended in mid-air. His posture was awkward; every few seconds, a finger would lose its grip, he would slide down a bit, then strain to hold on again.
Those remaining gang members had returned. With the Police in front and ice and bone fragments behind them, they had chosen to turn back. The four of them squeezed into the enclosed alley and fired blindly; bullets struck trash cans and the hood of a junked car, pure panic-firing, hitting whatever they could.
Arthur raised his left hand.
Four compressed [Arcane Blast]s detached from his fingertips, their energy values suppressed to the minimum, each creating an air pressure pulse on the ground beneath every person.
Pfft, pfft, pfft, pfft.
The four sounds merged into one.
The four of them lost their balance simultaneously; some slipped, some tripped over themselves, two collided head-on. Glocks flew out of their hands, and the back of a head knocked against a fire hydrant, a dull thud echoing between the brick walls.
Two seconds, all down. Not a single person saw what had happened.
The teenager slid down from the wall.
He glanced at the four limp bodies, then at his own palm, mentally connecting the two events. Ultimately, he chose to believe the version that excited him more. The corners of his mouth tugged upward, and the eyes behind his black-rimmed glasses lit up, as if someone had flipped a switch to the highest setting.
A silvery-gray thread shot out from his wrist, sticking to the window ledge of the opposite building. He gave it a tug; it held, and he swung upward.
"Alright, alright, as long as it works."
He crashed through a clothesline pole and snapped two antennas; brick dust and rust flakes rained down for a while, but he had already disappeared behind the roofline.
The alley fell quiet.
Arthur stepped out from the shadow, checked the four unconscious people one by one, squatted down, checked their pulses, and leaned in to listen to their breathing. It was steady; they were all alive, just destined for a long headache. When they woke up, they would likely each remember a different version of events, and no one would be able to explain exactly what had happened.
Sirens turned in from the next block, growing from distant to near.
He stood up, picked up the paper bag with the steak, turned into a parallel alley, and disappeared.
---
Washington, D.C., S.H.I.E.L.D. Data Analysis Center.
A red alert popped up on Daisy's screen. She was holding her coffee, preparing to take her third sip; upon seeing the line of text, her cup didn't move again.
Queens 109th Precinct report: Gunshots in an alley, four unconscious males, large amount of broken ice.
September.
Broken ice.
She set the coffee down and pulled up the thermal infrared imaging for that area, dragging the timeline back. Three minutes and seventeen seconds ago, the surface temperature had plummeted once, lasting for 0.01 seconds, with the peak nearing absolute zero. The color-graded image of that frame on the screen was icy white, completely consistent with the energy signature of the Underground Room incident.
Daisy took a screenshot, encrypted it, and threw the file into a private folder.
The folder icon was a sheep, white and chubby; it didn't quite match the things stored inside, but she had never intended to change it.
She took another look at the thermal imaging playback, rested her fingers on the desktop, and tapped her knuckles lightly.
In the alley, besides the four fallen heat signatures, there was another one, plastered against the wall. Its body temperature was slightly high, and the heat signature distribution was uneven, concentrated on the contact surfaces of the palms and soles. The age characteristics corresponded to a minor, and the method of movement was vertical climbing, heading toward the roof.
She took a separate screenshot of this signal, marked it with a question mark, and saved it in the same folder, right next to the broken ice image.
Then she opened the search box and entered the gene test report number of the mutant dog, tracing the procurement chain backward, peeling it back layer by layer—suppliers, middlemen, original sources. She clicked into every branch, detouring when encountering encrypted nodes, and noting down coordinates when hitting a dead end, waiting for data from elsewhere to fill the gaps.
She wasn't just looking for a record.
She wanted to know where it would appear next before it actually appeared.
---
Sewer District 7.
Maintenance Access D-14 was on the north side of Flushing Meadows-Corona Park. The lock on the chain-link fence was new and shiny, but the cut marks indicated it had been opened more than once; the metal burrs at the cut had already developed a slight oxidation color, meaning it had been in use for some time.
Arthur left the paper bag with the steak behind a water pipe outside the maintenance access and jumped down into the shaft.
There were dried muddy footprints on the concrete steps, deep and shallow, with chaotic sizes; more than one person had been here, and they had been here more than once.
The further down he went, the more wrong the air felt.
Starting from the third step, the scent of all organic matter vanished—the dampness of grass roots, the fishy smell of soil, not even the musty odor remained. There was only dryness, along with the astringent sensation of metal rust, scraping into his throat and drilling deep into his windpipe.
Then there was the light.
There were no lights at the bottom of the shaft, but something inside the concrete was radiating—not the kind that followed the visible spectrum, but on a magical level. It was dark red, seeping out, matching the energy signature of that rune, as if it were a different interface of the same system.
He walked one hundred and twenty meters west along the passage.
The walls had changed.
Things began to grow on the concrete surface—scattered little bumps. He reached out and touched one; it felt warm, and there was a sensation of liquid flowing inside. It was alive, transporting something.
Fifty meters further, the bumps merged into patches, turning from grayish-white to dark pink. The surface shimmered with a moist luster, elastic, and heaving.
It was breathing.
The sound came as well—a low-frequency hum that didn't pass through the ear canal but acted directly on the skull. A dull, heavy vibration came from the roots of his molars, as if something were plucking strings inside his bones, with the other end of the strings connected to some nameless place.
Whispers, speaking in a language humans were not meant to understand.
Arthur's [Arcane Mark] grew slightly warm; beneath his skin, there was a faint burning sensation—mental corruption. He recognized this; the brainwashing broadcast C'Thun played in the Temple of Ahn'Qiraj was much more stimulating than this. That one at least had some artistry; this was just pure cacophony.
He continued walking.
The passage turned at the one hundred and seventy-meter mark. Ahead of the corner, there was standing water on the ground, ten centimeters deep, grayish-brown, with no visible bottom.
The water surface was calm.
Too calm.
Arthur stopped and looked down at the water. When he shone his flashlight on it, the surface reflected the beam, the pipes on the ceiling, the wriggling tumors on the walls—it reflected everything that should be reflected.
It did not reflect him.
A sensory trap. Something on the other side must be watching this patch of water, waiting—waiting for the outline of a reflection to emerge, waiting for that moment to arrive.
Arthur turned off the flashlight.
Darkness fell, surrounding him on all sides, solid and heavy. Vision was completely useless here.
He crouched down, his index finger hovering above the water surface before slowly sinking in and gently stirring it.
Ripples spread out in circles, hitting the base of the walls on both sides, folding back to meet the next circle, overlapping, and then dissipating.
He waited, holding his right index and middle fingers together. A blue point of light, the size of a needle tip, condensed at his fingertips, pressed into the pads of his fingers. It didn't detach, it wasn't released; he just waited like that.
Just as the ripples on the water surface were about to subside.
"Pfft."
The water surface split open, and a crimson, fleshy tentacle the thickness of an arm shot out from underwater. Its surface was covered in dense, backward-facing bony spikes, and at the end was an open, circular mouthpart with rows of fine teeth growing inward. It moved faster than the speed of sound, the airflow compressing into an invisible wedge in front of it, aiming straight for his brow.
Chapter 17: The Blood Altar in the Sewer
The tentacle was fast.
The moment it sprang from the stagnant water, the air was torn open like a thin slit. Before the spray could even touch the ground, it had already reached eleven centimeters in front of Arthur's brow.
Its scarlet, fleshy surface, covered in barbs, oozed liquid. Every barb vibrated at a high frequency, and the droplets that flew off splashed against the stone wall, causing it to emit white smoke.
Strong acid.
Arthur did not move.
It was not that he could not move in time; it was that there was no need to.
The Mana Shield lit up.
The tip of the tentacle slammed into it.
There was no sound.
With over five hundred kilograms of kinetic energy and an impact area of less than four square centimeters, the impact pressure was enough to pierce a three-centimeter-thick steel plate.
Not even a single ripple appeared on the surface of the shield.
The tip of the tentacle began to decompose. The magicstructure within every cell constituting the tentacle was crushed by the high-concentration Arcane energy.
White ash.
Starting from the point of contact, it spread back along the tentacle at a speed of two meters per second.
A screech, so sharp it exceeded the upper limit of human hearing, came from beneath the stagnant water. The tentacle retracted, but the whitening spread faster than it could retreat. The nearly three-meter-long fleshy tentacle turned into a cloud of grayish-white powder within half a second, falling onto the water's surface with a soft patter.
Arthur looked down at his feet.
The stagnant water reflected his image once more. His own face was mirrored on the murky surface.
"Insect."
He took a step forward.
Behind the corner was a passageway less than two meters wide, sloping downward at a fifteen-degree angle. The walls, originally standard concrete prefabricated panels from the New York City municipal government, were now covered in something.
Sarcomas. Deep red, fist-sized spherical bulges with pulsating blood vessels on their surfaces sprouted from the seams of the walls, ceiling, and floor. The metallic smell in the air was so thick it could be scooped with a spoon.
There was light at the end of the passage. Green, flickering light.
Arthur took thirty-two steps. The passage ended. The space suddenly expanded.
A subterranean dome formed by natural erosion. It was nearly fifteen meters high. In the very center stood an altar.
Made of piles of white bones.
Skulls, ribs, vertebrae, pelvises—all human, bonded together by some sort of black substance into a platform two meters high and three meters square. There were grooves on the platform, and fresh blood flowed through them.
Five homeless people were kneeling before the altar, their hands and feet locked in iron chains. Three had already lost consciousness, one was crying, and the last was reciting the Lord's Prayer in a voice gone hoarse.
Fourteen living people formed a semicircle, wearing identical brown coarse hemp robes, hoods covering their faces, kneeling with their hands crossed and raised above their heads, emitting a continuous, low, trembling sound from deep within their throats.
Arthur paused at the entrance for a second.
[Magic Perception] scanned the dome and simultaneously automatically marked the maintenance structure of the green fire: Dark magic, low-tier, fragile. He did not interrupt. He wanted to see the complete spellcasting process.
The leader stood. He was half a head taller than the others, his robe nearly black, revealing half a face beneath the hood: male, in his forties or fifties, with deep-set eye sockets and yellow-green pupils. His left hand gripped a rusty dagger, while his right hand held a book.
A remnant. It was octavo-sized, with impressions of facial features on its leather cover, and black mist constantly oozed from the spine.
The priest turned around.
His yellow-green pupils stared at him, his expression filled with nothing but a devotion bordering on perverse ecstasy.
"Another lost lamb." It was English, but the stress pattern did not belong to any English dialect. "The Great Sleeper will be very pleased. Seize him."
Two followers beside him stood up, their movements stiff, pupils unfocused, and walked toward Arthur.
Arthur did not look at them. His gaze remained fixed on the remnant in the priest's hand.
The priest opened the remnant with a sense of ritual. The densely packed, blood-written runes on the left and right pages came to life the moment the pages were unfurled, rising from the paper to become a mass of black, fluid, constantly squirming matter.
It had no specific shape, but it had a will.
[Magic Perception] displayed an appraisal: Low-tier mental attack. Derived from the Dark Dimension. Damage type: Soul erosion. Threat level assessment—no threat posed.
The black mass shot toward Arthur's face. It had a guidance mechanism, automatically correcting its trajectory, passing through the Mana Shield, bypassing all physical barriers, and striking his consciousness core directly.
The priest laughed. His teeth were black.
"Two minutes. Then you will start biting off your own tongue and gouging out your own eyes with your fingers. I have seen it many times."
Arthur stood in place.
One second. Two seconds. Three seconds.
Five seconds.
His hands were still in the pockets of his hoodie, his posture unchanged.
His only sensation was a very slight fluctuation deep within his consciousness, and then it was gone. The Arcane Mark responded automatically, and the sea of Arcane energy at the base of his mana core swallowed the intrusion signal. The entire process was so quiet that the system panel only popped up a single line of gray text:
[Low-tier mental attack detected. Arcane Mark passive immunity has handled it. No action required.]
Gray. Lowest priority. It could not even be bothered to bold the notification.
But the energy channel between the caster and the target was still open. The moment the attack was absorbed, the channel did not break.
It rebounded.
The smile was still hanging on the priest's face.
Then his eyes shattered from the inside. All the capillaries ruptured instantly, the internal structure disintegrated from the inside out, and murky liquid and blood gushed from his eye sockets, followed by his nasal cavity, and then his ear canals.
Black blood—true, pure black, the kind congealed with remnants of dark magic—sprayed out simultaneously from all the orifices on his face.
He screamed and retreated, his knees hitting the edge of the altar, and he fell backward. The remnant slipped from his hand, its pages fluttering in mid-air.
Fourteen followers let out a simultaneous cry of sorrow and collapsed to the ground.
The dome went quiet.
The homeless people locked in chains curled into balls. The priest lay at the foot of the bone altar, his hands covering his eye sockets, which were no longer organs, emitting a muffled whimper.
Arthur walked in.
The soles of his shoes stepped through a pool of black blood, the sticky sound echoing throughout the dome. He stopped in front of the priest.
"The Old Gods I have seen in Azeroth."
He looked at the person on the ground, his tone flat.
"You, on the other hand, are not even as good as a janitorial apprentice in Dalaran."
He raised his right hand and splayed his fingers.
Blue light rose from his palm, spreading along his arm and throughout his body. The buff aura of [Arcane Wisdom] fully blossomed, increasing spell power by ten percent, raising the mana cap by five percent, and simultaneously boosting the underlying parameters of all spells.
The light illuminated the entire dome.
The green fire was completely extinguished; the radiation pressure of the Arcane energy disintegrated the dark magicstructure that maintained the green fire. The bloodstains on the bone altar began to evaporate, and the sarcomas on the walls bubbled on the surface under the blue light, withered, and hissed as they retreated into the cracks in the stone.
Arthur lowered his hand and scanned the area.
The altar. The remnant. Fourteen unconscious followers. One blinded priest.
He glanced at the five chained civilians, flicked his fingers, and a thin film of Arcane energy quietly covered them, shielding the five and insulating them from the energy overflow that was to follow.
He pushed his hood back.
"Shield tested, immunity tested."
"Time to test AOE."
Chapter 18: Arcane Cleansing
When the blue light flared up, the sarcomas on the walls were the first to buckle.
Those pulsating, dark red spheres began to shrink and shrivel under the radiation of the Arcane energy. A few burst open directly, and the liquid that splashed onto the ground hissed with white vapor.
Arcane Wisdom is not light. It is a field. A high-purity Arcane force field radiated continuously outward with Arthur at its center, crushing and decomposing the dark magic residue clinging to the air.
The visibility in the dome cave changed from murky to clear within three seconds.
Eleven of the fourteen believers collapsed.
The remaining three were still kneeling. Their hoods slipped off, revealing two men and one woman. Their pupils were unfocused, their lips were moving, and the low-frequency tremolo did not stop.
But their bodies were wrong.
The veins on their arms bulged and turned black, and hard lumps of varying sizes protruded from their skin. Their nails fell off, and grayish-white bone spikes grew from the nail beds. Their cervical vertebrae bent backward to an impossible angle, and the tremolo in their throats turned into hissing screeches.
Three semi-finished products. Levels five to seven.
They stood up.
The first one charged over. It was three times faster than an ordinary person, its claws stained with its own blood.
"Perfect."
Arthur struck his staff against the ground.
A circle of fine cracks appeared on the floor of the dome cave, Arcane energy spread along the contact point, and stress marks extended in all directions.
[Arcane Blast]. Rapid-fire.
Three deep blue energy bodies detached from the tip of the staff in succession within half a second.
The first shot hit the knee of the one charging at the front. Its entire left leg evaporated from the knee joint down. The moment it fell, the second shot arrived, striking its spine dead center. A hole the size of a washbasin was blasted through its back, revealing the ground beneath.
The third shot didn't hit a person. It hit the ground.
The stone slab beneath the remaining two mutated believers shattered and collapsed at the center of the Impact, and the two things still charging stepped into thin air, falling into a half-meter-deep pit. Arthur raised his hand and fired two more shots, and two flashes of blue light shone in the pit.
Silence followed.
Four shots, and the mana pool dropped by four percent.
There was movement on the ground.
The priest was not dead yet.
The eye sockets, now devoid of eyeballs, were no longer bleeding, as black scabs had sealed the wounds. He lay on his side at the foot of the altar, his left hand groping along the ground until his fingertips touched the fallen scroll.
His lips were moving. In the dual-layered voice, the track belonging to the human had already vanished.
The scroll opened.
The blood-red runes on the pages lit up. Black energy poured out from the pages and condensed into a translucent barrier in front of the priest, its surface flowing with purplish-red patterns, while tiny dark particles continuously precipitated from the inside.
Dimension-contract-level defense. The caster fed the rest of their lifespan into it in exchange.
"Trading life for a shield." Arthur walked toward the altar, his pace unchanged. "A bad deal."
He drew a half-circle in front of him with his left hand. The Water molecules in the air were heated to a plasma state, and an orange-red Fireball formed in 0.8 seconds.
[Fireball].
The textbook version. No compression, no modifications. But under the buff of Arcane Wisdom, the stats of the basic magic were pushed to their design limit.
The Fireball left his palm.
The moment it collided with the Dark Dimension barrier, the barrier's recognition system couldn't find any dimensional tags in the invading energy. It was pure thermal energy output, the kind that didn't owe anything to any Dimension Lord, and there were no corresponding interception entries.
It pierced through.
The Fireball punched through the center of the barrier. Radial cracks bloomed outward from the point of penetration, and the entire barrier collapsed within two seconds.
It hit the priest's waist.
The explosion radius was two meters. The orange-red light engulfed the area at the foot of the altar, debris and ash were pushed outward by the heat wave, and the Mana Shield automatically deflected the airflow.
The firelight dissipated.
Everything below the priest's waist had turned to charcoal and white ash. The cross-section of the spine was clearly visible, the bone burned to a porcelain white.
Arthur did not withdraw his hand.
He waited.
Three seconds later, things began to grow from the cross-section of the spine. Deep red granulation tissue emerged, moving quickly, each strand carrying a network of micro-blood vessels. The lumbar vertebrae were reshaping, and the outline of the pelvis had already appeared.
The solution was etched into his muscle memory.
He took a half-step back with his left foot. He swept his staff horizontally.
[Frost Nova].
White frost mist spread from beneath his feet, sweeping across the floor, walls, and ceiling.
The homeless man chained up flinched, but then was fine. There were no traces of frost on the unconscious believers either. The energy threshold was locked right there, set by Arthur before he cast it.
But those rapidly growing regenerative tissues—
"Click."
A crisp sound.
All the regenerative tissues instantly crystallized in the environment of minus 170 degrees. The granulation tissue turned into red icicles, and the blood vessels solidified into purplish-black thin lines.
No matter how much the dark magic was urged, it couldn't make a lump of crushed ice grow organs.
"Crackle."
The frozen regenerative tissue peeled off from the spinal cross-section and shattered on the ground.
This time, it was dead for good.
Arthur turned to look at the altar.
The scroll lay nearby, cover down. Neither the explosion nor the freezing had damaged it.
He bent down to pick it up.
His fingers were seven centimeters away from the scroll.
The scroll moved.
Autonomous, gravity-defying movement.
It bounced off the ground and hovered vertically at a height of two meters. The pages flipped automatically, the rustling sound echoing back and forth in the dome cave. The blood-red runes on each page began to glow, turning from dark red to bright red, bright red to scarlet, and scarlet to—
Black.
Absolute black. Even the blue light of Arcane Wisdom was devoured when it shone upon it.
The scroll stopped at the last page.
Space cracked.
Above the scroll, a 1.2-meter-long vertical fissure tore open the three-dimensional structure. Fragments constantly peeled off from the edges, hissing upon contact with the air.
Inside the fissure, it was black.
Living black.
A "hand" reached out.
An aggregate of dark matter roughly in the shape of a palm. At the end of each of the five "fingers" grew a cluster of compound eyes, with hundreds of eyes of varying sizes squeezed together, their irises ranging from deep purple to dark gold, and their pupils circular, vertical, cross-shaped, or spiral.
All the eyeballs turned toward Arthur simultaneously.
The temperature in the dome cave returned to room temperature from sub-zero within one second. The effect of Frost Nova was still active, but that chill had been completely wiped away by something, and even the frost mist in the air had vanished.
A voice appeared.
It did not travel through the air. It appeared directly inside every stone in the dome cave, appearing within the crevices of Arthur's bones.
"Humble insect."
Three of the five homeless men had their noses bleed simultaneously. The one still whispering stopped, their vocal cords completely destroyed the moment those four words rang out.
The remaining sarcomas on the walls pulsed again, at a frequency three times faster than before.
That "hand" covered in compound eyes continued to reach out. For every centimeter it emerged, the fissure grew by a centimeter.
Arthur took a step back.
The Magic Perception panel popped up forty-seven warnings in that last second. Thirty-nine were red.
The remaining eight were a color he had never seen before.
Purplish-black.
In the threat level assessment bar, only three characters remained where the numbers were originally displayed.
[???]
Arthur gripped his staff tightly.
"Finally, something decent has arrived."
Chapter 19: Not Even Worth a Cast Time
That hand-shaped aggregate was still reaching outward.
The gravity inside the dome was skewed. Not by much, but his inner ear was already struggling to adjust. The sensation of standing had turned into standing on a tilting deck. Light bent at the edge of the rift, and the afterimages of the green Fire were dragged into long streaks.
The last conscious person among the five vagrants collapsed as well. It was more absolute than just fainting. The fuses in their brains had blown. The human nervous system could not process the information that space was shattering.
Hundreds of compound eyes blinked simultaneously.
Pressure slammed down.
A ripple ran across the surface of the Mana Shield. The shield was still holding, but its magic structure instinctively shrank back in the face of something from a higher dimension.
Water droplets seeped from the stone walls of the dome. It had nothing to do with temperature differences. The molecular structure of the rock was beginning to loosen under this magnitude of pressure.
A line of small text squeezed out at the bottom of the system panel: [Suggestion: Do not engage in a battle of wills with the target. The energy level gap is significant. It is recommended to terminate the projection by physically destroying the vessel.]
The vessel. The fragment.
That tattered book with the human-skin cover was the anchor point. Without it, the projection could not stand in this dimension.
Arthur shifted his gaze away from the compound eyes and landed on the fragment hovering in mid-air.
Two meters high. His staff couldn't reach it.
That voice sounded again. This time, it wasn't just four words. It was saying something long. The language belonged to no known system; each syllable carried a load, attempting to weld fear and submission directly into the listener's neural circuits.
Arthur listened for three seconds. "C'Thun at least had a battle anthem. You, on the other hand, don't even have any BGM."
Hundreds of compound eyes contracted in unison. It increased its output.
The sound escalated from a tremor in the marrow of his bones to a tearing at the soul level. The remaining tumors on the walls burst, and the splashed liquid froze in mid-air, arranging itself into concentric runic arrays that closed in on Arthur.
His five senses blurred for 0.4 seconds. The system popped up a line of gray text: [High-tier sensory deprivation attack detected. Arcane Mark passive immunity has processed. Blocked.]
Gray. Lowest priority. It wasn't even worth bolding.
The colors returned. The sounds returned. The temperature under his feet returned.
Arthur flexed his fingers. "Fine. I'm done wasting time with you."
[Blink]. No wind-up. No charging. No warning whatsoever. Arthur at Point A was deleted. Arthur at Point B was pasted. There was no process in between.
Point B was half a meter directly above the fragment. Hundreds of compound eyes turned simultaneously. But rotation takes time. Even if it only took 0.05 seconds. That was enough.
He gripped the staff with both hands, the tip pointing downward. Thirty-seven percent of his mana pool was drained in that instant, all of it poured into the blue crystal at the tip of the staff.
The crystal turned from blue to White. It was no longer a matter of brightness; the energy density had exceeded the upper limit of the visible light spectrum.
[Arcane Blast]. Zero distance. Instant cast. Full power.
The tip of the staff pressed against the cover of the fragment. White light swallowed everything.
There was no explosion. The speed of the energy release exceeded the speed at which air molecules could transmit vibrations. Sound didn't have time to form.
The human-skin cover evaporated. The pages evaporated. The blood-red runes evaporated. The binding threads evaporated. The anchor point was gone.
The rift began to collapse. That hand covered in compound eyes twisted, shattered, and disintegrated within the collapsing force field. Hundreds of eyeballs widened to their maximum simultaneously. It shattered.
A rain of dark golden light showered down from the top of the dome. Each droplet was dimensional energy residue squeezed out as the rift closed; they bounced silently off the stone walls and hung in the air for a second or two before extinguishing.
Gold dust filled the sky. In a sewer.
Arthur landed. He knelt on his right knee, bracing himself with his staff. He wasn't trying to look cool. He had just fallen from two meters up.
The dome fell silent. Completely silent. No whispers, no tremors, no signals of any kind from the Dark Dimension. The rift had vanished completely, leaving not even a trace.
The tumors on the walls, having lost their energy supply, withered, turned gray, and fell off at a visible rate, clattering onto the ground.
The system panel was flooded with notifications. Experience points skyrocketed. Priest, dimensional projection, anchor point, source of mental corruption, plus the bonus for destroying a dimensional projection above his level for the first time—a total of 6,750 points poured into his experience bar in one go.
Golden light shone from beneath his feet. One. Two. Three. Four. Lv.16. Lv.17. Lv.18. Lv.19. The fourth golden light was brighter than the previous three.
[Level Up: Lv.19 → Lv.20. Obtained assignable attribute points: 20.]
[Lv.20 Milestone Reward: Unlocked new skill [Cleanse]. Purifies low-tier toxins, curses, and mental corruption. Casting range: 10 meters. Cooldown: 8 seconds.]
The capacity of his mana pool had increased by nearly forty percent compared to ten minutes ago. That one Arcane Blast had drained over thirty percent of his old pool, but his new pool had already climbed to over sixty percent through passive regeneration.
"Four levels." Arthur stood up and brushed the dust off his knees. "In Azeroth, four levels is enough for me to walk from the starting village to Sentinel Hill."
He turned to look at the five vagrants chained up. They were still breathing, but their faces were gray and pale. Residual mental corruption remained in their bodies; if he didn't clear it, they would be half-crippled even after waking up.
"Let's clean out the trash first." He opened his right hand. [Cleanse].
Pale green light fell upon them. The dark red magic residue deposited on the first vagrant faded and dissipated. Their complexion turned from gray-white to a normal, healthy color.
Eight-second cooldown. Next one. Forty seconds later, all five people were cleansed.
The old man who had been reciting the Lord's Prayer earlier turned over and let out a loud snore. He was sleeping more soundly than he had in the past month.
Arthur withdrew his hand. Scattered in the gaps between the white bones after the altar collapsed were three dark purple crystals the size of fingernails. System identification: Old God Energy Fragment, Rare quality, can be used for magic research and equipment enchanting.
He put them in his pocket.
He walked over to the nearest vagrant and flicked a miniature Fireball at the padlock on the chains. The lock core melted, the chains came loose, and they clattered onto the ground with two metallic sounds.
Five locks, five Fireballs. After finishing this, he prepared to leave.
Then he heard a sound. Extremely faint. The high-frequency hum of electric motors driving rotors. His perception threshold, raised after leveling up four times, fished this sound out from the ambient noise.
Above the dome, at the seven o'clock position. A ventilation duct with a diameter of twenty centimeters, hidden in the shadows behind the grille. A quadcopter. Carbon fiber body. A miniature high-definition camera on the bottom.
There was a logo on the side of the body. An eagle. A shield.
Arthur didn't turn his head. He slowly raised his face. His gaze traveled fifteen meters, nailing itself precisely onto that pinhole-sized lens.
His right index finger tapped gently on the staff twice. He didn't destroy it. This time, he didn't destroy it. He just stared at that lens. He watched for three seconds.
Then he withdrew his gaze, picked up his staff, and walked toward the passage, stepping over broken ice and ash. With his back to the camera. Unhurriedly.
The real-time feed from the drone was being transmitted through an encrypted channel back to a desk three thousand kilometers away.
In the footage, the figure in the hoodie walked further and further away, growing dimmer and dimmer, until finally, they melted into the darkness at the end of the passage.
Trident Tower. Daisy Johnson stared at the screen, a breath caught in her throat.
He saw the drone. He didn't destroy it. That was more unsettling to her than if he had destroyed it.
Last time he burned the mainframe, it was a warning. Blowing up the hummingbird was to drive them away. This time, he left it.
"Coulson." She pressed the comms button. "Yes." "He knows we're watching." The other side of the communicator was silent for two seconds. "And?" Daisystared at the empty passage on the screen. "And he didn't do anything about it."
Chapter 20 Stop Peeping, Little Hacker
S.H.I.E.L.D. Triskelion Headquarters. Third basement level. D-7 Monitoring Room.
Twenty-six screens arranged in three rows, blue light reflected on Daisy Johnson's face. She had been staring for four hours. Since the 0.01-second absolute zero anomaly in Queens was marked as a red alert, she had dumped all available satellite resources into thermal imaging scans of the New York sewer system.
Four hours with no results.
Then the drone found it.
The footage was captured through the gaps in a ventilation duct grille. The angle was bad, the resolution compressed to the limit, but enough to see what was happening in the dome—bone altars, believers lying on the ground, five homeless people chained up.
And the person standing in the middle.
Dark hoodie. Holding a staff of unknown material in his right hand. Enveloped in blue light.
Daisy's fingers hovered over the keyboard, unmoving.
She watched that person strike the ground with the staff. A ball of blue light shot from the tip, hitting a mutant believer. The believer's upper body vanished. No transition—one frame it was there, the next it was gone.
The drone's thermal imaging module overloaded and rebooted at that instant. By the time the image recovered, all three mutants had fallen.
Daisy pulled back the cruise tracking record to replay it frame by frame.
0.48 seconds. Three shots. Three targets.
"This isn't a conventional energy weapon." She bit on a red licorice stick, muttering indistinctly. "Asgardian? No, the spectrum is different. Chitauri? Even more wrong, Chitaurienergy is dirty, this... is too clean."
She clicked on the spectrum analysis window. The instrument returned a string of question marks.
Unknown energy type. Not in database. Cannot be classified.
Daisy bit through the licorice.
The person in the footage was moving. He walked toward the altar. A mass of orange-red light formed in his palm—the thermal imaging module showed the local temperature soaring from room temperature to 1,400 degrees in 0.3 seconds.
Then the temperature returned to zero.
Then dropped to minus 170 degrees.
The temperature curve drew a crazy ECG on Daisy's screen. 1,400 degrees. Minus 170. Time interval: four seconds. Same person. Same hand.
"What the hell."
The licorice dropped onto the keyboard.
The next scene made her forget the licorice.
A crack opened in space. Something covered in eyeballs reached out from the rift. The drone's gyroscope started throwing errors—the direction of gravity had shifted. The camera feed showed fisheye distortion.
The person in the dome stood underneath it. Looking up at that hand.
He vanished.
The screen was empty. Not running away—vanishing on the spot. The drone's motion tracking algorithm couldn't find him. Thermal imaging couldn't find him. Acoustic detection couldn't find him.
0.05 seconds later, he appeared directly above the rift.
White light.
All of the drone's sensors overloaded simultaneously. The screen turned pure white, lasting for a second and a half. When the image recovered, the rift was gone. The thing covered in eyeballs was gone. Golden rain of light was falling in the dome.
Daisy Johnson stared at the screen. Mouth agape.
12 seconds.
It took her 12 seconds to digest what she had just seen. Then she did the first thing a top-tier hacker should do when facing an unknown target—run facial recognition.
The drone's lens zoomed to maximum focal length from behind the grille. Beneath the hoodie was a young Asian male face. Daisy captured the clearest frame and tossed it into the federal database for comparison.
FBI. CIA. Department of Homeland Security. Interpol. Immigration. Social Security.
All returned: No matching records.
This person didn't exist.
Not the "no criminal record" kind of non-existence. It was the "this face isn't in any database" kind of non-existence. No driver's license, no passport, no SSN, no birth record.
A ghost.
Daisy bit her lip and started expanding the search range. Stark Industries' leaked database. Dark web biometric marketplaces. She even hacked into the Russian Federal Security Service's border surveillance.
Zero results.
She was about to try cross-referencing iris data—
The person on the screen looked up.
Not looking up casually. It was precise, slow, with the composure of a cat playing with a mouse, turning his gaze toward the ventilation duct.
Toward the drone lens.
Daisy's fingers stopped.
On the screen, those eyes, across a distance of 15 meters, a 20-centimeter diameter ventilation duct, a carbon fiber body, and a layer of bulletproof glass lens, looked straight at her.
Not looking at the drone. Looking at her.
Daisy couldn't articulate the feeling. The signal traveled from the Queens sewer to the satellite, relayed from the satellite to the encrypted channel at Triskelion Headquarters, passed through seven layers of firewalls and four signal scrubs, and finally projected onto the LCD screen in front of her.
Physical distance over 40 kilometers. Half of New York in between.
But a chill ran down her spine.
The person smiled slightly. A small movement. His right index finger lifted, a point of light condensing at the tip. Blue. Very small. No more than two centimeters in diameter.
He pressed that point of light onto the drone lens.
The image froze for a frame.
Then the keyboard in front of Daisy grew hot.
Not a metaphor. The surface temperature of the keyboard rose by three degrees in half a second. Not heating up—something was flooding in through the data cable.
"What—"
Her main screen went black.
The second screen on the left went black. The third on the right. The top row all went out. The bottom row all went out.
26 screens went dark in sequence within 1.5 seconds, like dominoes.
The monitoring room plunged into total darkness. Lasted 0.7 seconds.
Then the screens lit up.
Not a normal boot screen. 26 screens simultaneously lit up with a blue backlight—not the standard LCD blue, but a deeper, flowing blue, similar to the bioluminescence of deep-sea creatures.
Runes.
Growing from the bottom of the screens. Scrolling up line by line, faster and faster. Not 0s and 1s. Not any programming language. Each symbol looked alive—some rotating, some pulsing, some splitting into smaller symbols and recombining.
Daisy reflexively reached for the emergency power-off switch.
Her hand reached it. Pushed it.
No reaction.
She pulled the network cable. The RJ45 connector popped out of the port.
The runes on the screens didn't stop.
Physically disconnected from the network. The signal wasn't transmitting through the cable. These things were already local. And not just on the display level—Daisy saw the status lights on the side of the main tower turn blue, and the cooling fans were spinning at an abnormal frequency.
Her last struggle was pulling the power cord.
She ripped the main power cord from the wall socket. Sparks flew.
26 screens were still lit.
The blue runes were still scrolling.
No power. No network. No known energy supply.
What were the screens using to stay lit?
Daisy sat back in her chair.
The scrolling speed of the runes slowed down. Converging from the edges of all screens toward the center. Thousands of symbols seemed to find their respective positions, locking, forming.
Finally, all 26 screens displayed the same line of text.
English.
Standard Times New Roman font. Centered.
"Stop peeping, little hacker."
Daisy stared at this line of text for five seconds.
Then she laughed.
Not a happy laugh. It was the laugh of someone realizing their true position in the food chain, mocking her own previous absurdity.
She took her phone out of her pocket. The phone screen was blue too. The same text.
"Fine." She flipped the phone face down on the desk, her voice tight. "You win."
The text on the screen lingered for three seconds. Then the blue light faded. All screens returned to normal. System self-check complete. Data intact. Server logs showed no intrusion records.
Like nothing had happened.
Except for the ambient temperature. The air in the monitoring room was two degrees colder than before. Daisy couldn't pretend nothing had happened—her hands were still shaking.
She took a screenshot. The last frame before the text disappeared. Then she dragged the screenshot into a private folder encrypted so heavily even Fury couldn't open it.
The folder was named "Blue Eyes".
Meanwhile.
Queens sewer.
Arthur withdrew his finger from the drone lens.
The energy consumption of the runes wasn't high—equivalent to one-third of a Frostbolt. But the effect should be enough. He made a rough estimate of the propagation efficiency of Arcane energy in digital channels: signal latency about 0.2 seconds, energy decay rate 17%, acceptable.
The task force was four minutes away.
He picked up three fragments of Old God energy from the altar ruins, stuffed them into his backpack along with the cash he had scavenged from the gangsters. He melted the homeless people's chains with a micro-Fireball—the locks were cheap goods, couldn't even last five seconds.
After doing this, he stood up.
His body outline began to blur.
Not light refraction like an invisibility cloak. It was Arcane energy forming a refractive field on his skin, conducting all bands of electromagnetic radiation around his body to the back. Visually, he became a patch of air.
Thermal imaging. Acoustic detection. Infrared sensing.
All failed.
Invisibility combined with Blink. He vanished from the sewer. The S.H.I.E.L.D. task force that arrived four minutes later only found five unconscious homeless people, eleven unconscious believers, and a floor full of crushed ice that couldn't be written into a report.
Abandoned warehouse.
3:17 AM.
Arthur threw his backpack onto the cot and walked to the sink to turn on the faucet. Water flowed over his fingers, washing away blood and ash. He cupped a handful of water to wash his face.
Then his right wrist caught fire.
Not real fire. It was the Arcane Mark.
The deep blue rune pattern that had been embedded in his wrist bone since the moment of transmigration was heating up. The temperature climbed at a rate of 10 degrees per second. 40 degrees. 50 degrees. 60 degrees.
Arthur's movements stopped.
The faucet was still running. Water splashed into the stainless steel sink.
He lifted his right hand.
The rune was glowing. Not the usual faint fluorescent blue—it was a white-hot glare, shining through skin and muscle tissue, outlining the contours of his wrist bone.
Magic Perception activated automatically.
Information flooded in like a tide. Source direction: South-southwest. Distance: Approximately 12 kilometers. Corresponding landmark—
Manhattan. Greenwich Village.
Arthur recognized that location.
A three-story brownstone building. A unique emblem at the entrance. It looked like the private residence of some retired Professor.
New York Sanctum.
What was being released there wasn't an attack, wasn't a probe.
It was a scan.
A massive network woven with Kamar-Taj magic, expanding outward from Greenwich Village as the center. A golden, ancient Magic Perception network with the energy signature of the Vishanti trinity.
It was looking for him.
Because the Arcane energy fluctuations triggered by his level-four jump tonight were too great. In this Universelacking magic resources, the energy radiation produced by a level 20 Azeroth mage fully releasing Arcane Wisdom, compared to the background noise of this World—
Was like setting off a string of firecrackers in a silent room.
The perception network was contracting. Positioning accuracy was improving.
Arthur turned off the faucet. Wiped his face with his sleeve.
"Coming faster than I estimated."
He turned to look out the window. The Manhattan skyline outlined a jagged silhouette in the dark blue of early morning. In a certain direction, his Magic Perception caught a trace of golden light—extremely faint, but the structure was extremely precise.
That wasn't something a machine could make. That was a perception network woven by someone who had lived for hundreds of years, using their life's cultivation.
Serious.
"Fine." Arthur picked up his staff. "Kamar-Taj."
He had researched this name when he was in Azeroth—a footnote in the cross-dimensional index of the Dalaranlibrary. A native magic organization of the Earth dimension. Sorcerer Supreme. Vishanti contract system.
2012. The current Sorcerer Supreme—
Ancient One.
His mouth twitched slightly. His fingers tightened on the staff by half an inch.
The temperature of the mark was still rising. The front of the golden perception network was less than three kilometers from the warehouse.
The contraction speed was accelerating.
Arthur twisted his neck. His right hand pressed against the white-hot mark.
"Want to find me?"
He pulled up his hood.
"Then don't make me wait too long."
He pushed open the warehouse's iron door and walked into 3 AM New York. Behind him, on the dusty window glass of the warehouse, reflected the golden arc of light that flashed across the direction of Greenwich Village in the distance—
Someone had opened a door.