Ring 8, Sector 41 – Abandoned Pagoda-Roof Garden, 04:02.
The city is screaming.
Every billboard in the lower rings loops the same thirty-second clip: a silver-eyed ghost erasing Razor-Jin's arm, then punching a hole straight through ten floors of the Red Lotus Arena. Bounty counters climb in real time—200 million… 350 million… 500 million credits. Dead or alive (preferably alive, for dissection).
Liàn Xing stands on the edge of a floating pagoda garden that hasn't been maintained since the last corp war. Bioluminescent lotus flowers drift lazily in zero-g ponds. Cherry-blossom holograms rain pink light that dies against his silver circuits like snow on hot iron.
Zhenxing sits cross-legged in mid-air, kicking her feet.
"Host, you're viral. Like, 'collapse-the-servers' viral. Half the dark feeds are calling you a new Void Cult messiah. The other half think you're a glitch in the matrix."
He doesn't answer. His eyes are fixed on the horizon where azure interceptor drones are forming a closing net. Golden gunships from Heavenly Sword Court streak in from the east. Somewhere above, the cold white signature of Moonlit Ice Palace cruisers is descending through the layers like falling stars.
He is cornered, bleeding starlight, and has maybe ninety seconds before the sky falls on him.
That is when she arrives.
A single figure steps out of a ripple in the air itself—cryo-teleport, top-tier restricted tech. White combat hanfu that looks painted on, reactive frost-armor shifting between solid and liquid states. Long black hair bound in a high tail with glowing cryo-filaments. Skin so pale it drinks the neon instead of reflecting it. Tubes of azure fluid pulse beneath translucent sleeves, pumping liquid-nitrogen coolant directly into her veins to keep her alive.
Lan Shuyin, direct heiress of Moonlit Ice Palace. Rumoured to be Foundation Establishment at seventeen. Rumoured to be dying.
She stops five meters away and studies him the way a surgeon studies a new disease.
"You're leaking cosmic radiation at levels that should have cooked your soul already," she says. Voice perfectly flat, like a blade made of winter. "Yet you stand. Curious."
Zhenxing waves cheerfully. "Hi, future waifu! Ten out of ten, would dual-cultivate."
Lan Shuyin's eyes flick to the star spirit. Killing intent drops the temperature twenty degrees in a heartbeat. The lotus pond flash-freezes solid.
"Class-9 forbidden entity. Confirmed." She returns her gaze to Liàn Xing. "You have sixty seconds before joint strike teams from all three sects arrive. After that, even I cannot guarantee extraction."
Liàn Xing finally speaks. His voice is rough from disuse and old screams.
"What do you want?"
She tilts her head. Frost spreads from her boots in perfect fractal patterns.
"Your starlight frequency is the exact inverse of my yin poison. One direct qi transfer at close range could stabilise me for a decade. Maybe permanently." A pause so small only he notices. "In exchange, I offer sanctuary, resources, and a seventy-two-hour stay of execution from Moonlit Ice Palace kill teams."
Zhenxing whistles. "She wants to get in your meridians, host. Literally."
Lan Shuyin ignores the spirit, steps closer. Close enough that he can see the faint blue cracks spreading from the corners of her eyes—her body literally freezing itself from the inside out.
"I am not asking for charity," she says quietly. "I am offering a transaction. Refuse, and you die here. Accept, and we both live long enough to burn the heavens down."
The first interceptor drone crests the rooftop, railgun spooling.
Liàn Xing looks at her outstretched hand—pale, perfect, trembling by a millimetre.
He takes it.
The moment skin touches skin, the world goes white.
Pure starlight pours from his palm into her meridians like a supernova collapsing into a black hole. Lan Shuyin's breath catches—the first sound of genuine emotion anyone has ever heard from her. Her cryo-tubes reverse flow violently. Ice-blue fluid turns warm silver for three full heartbeats.
She staggers, eyes wide, lips parted in something that might be wonder.
Liàn Xing feels it too—her yin qi flooding back into him, cold as the void between stars, vast as an ice age. For one infinite second their dantians resonate, two broken halves snapping together into something momentarily whole.
Zhenxing fans herself dramatically. "Well. That was indecent."
The resonance ends as suddenly as it began.
Lan Shuyin straightens, cheeks tinted the faintest rose beneath the frost. The cracks around her eyes have vanished.
"Contract sealed," she says, voice steady again. "You are now under my personal protection."
She snaps her fingers.
A circular teleport array of absolute-zero ice erupts beneath their feet, swallowing them whole an instant before the first railgun round turns the rooftop garden into glowing slag.
They reappear inside a private cryo-chamber high in Moonlit Ice Palace territory—walls of living ice, air so cold breath crystallises mid-exhale.
Lan Shuyin releases his hand like it burns.
"Rest," she orders. "In six hours the tribunal convenes. They will vote on whether to dissect you for the Celestial Seed."
She turns to leave, pauses at the threshold.
"Thank you," she says, so quietly he almost misses it.
The door seals behind her with a hiss of frost.
Zhenxing flops onto a floating ice lotus, grinning like a cat.
"Host, you just got adopted by the richest dying girl in the Nine Heavens. Also, your virginity is in serious danger."
Liàn Xing collapses onto the cryo-bed, exhausted but alive.
For the first time in eighteen years, the future does not taste like defeat.
Far away, Zhao Shentian watches the bounty feed on his hover-bike HUD and laughs into the wind.
"Found you," he whispers, banking hard toward Moonlit Ice territory. "Wait for me, rival."
And in the Void Court, the Consort closes her eyes and smiles with a mouth made of collapsing galaxies.
"Three little stars, all gathering in one place. How delicious."