His sister's eyes were wide and pleading. It was a look she'd perfected over seventeen years, a weaponized vulnerability that could bypass all his firewalls.
"Please, Xian? Just this once."
The webnovel she was obsessed with, Ascension of the Azure Sword, had been abandoned by the author mid-cliffhanger. For three months, the comments section was a wasteland of weeping and rage.
Li Xian leaned back in his chair, affecting an air of supreme arrogance. "You want me to hack a notoriously unstable publishing platform, breach a private author account, and risk a permanent IP ban… all because your sword hero is stuck in a demon pit?"
She nodded, her lip trembling just enough.
He sighed, the performance over. Of course he'd do it. "Fine. But you're buying pizza for a week."
A triumphant grin flashed across her face.
Li Xian cracked his knuckles and turned to the monitor. "I'm not going to steal his manuscript. I'll just… leave a strongly worded message. Directly on his dashboard."
The cursor blinked on the login screen, a patient, rhythmic pulse.
He bypassed brute force. Amateurs used brute force. He found a flaw in the site's password reset protocol, a tiny logic gap that let him reroute the token to a temporary inbox he controlled.
It took less than five minutes.
The author's dashboard materialized, a stark interface of black and gray. Li Xian's fingers flew across the keyboard. Your readers are waiting. They invested time. You owe them an ending, even a bad one. Don't just—
A single, resonant chime echoed in the room.
The sound came from nowhere near his speakers. A deep vibration struck right behind his skull.
The world snapped to white. An absolute void.
His lungs seized.
Cold.
It was a paralytic cold that sank past skin and into bone. Water flooded his nose and mouth, a brutal, gagging invasion.
Panic screamed through his mind. The body was alien—small, weak, unresponsive.
Method, not panic.
He forced its feeble arms to move, scraping against something solid and rough. Wood. Splinters dug into his fingertips. Using the massive pillars of a dock for cover, he clawed his way into the shadows beneath the pier.
His head broke the surface. He gasped, sucking in air thick with the stench of rot and oil. Each breath was a ragged, wet tear. He coughed, spitting a stream of foul river water that tasted of mud and iron.
Water lapped against the pilings. A single lantern cast a sickly yellow glow above.
Heavy footsteps creaked on the wooden planks over his head.
Two men stood at the edge of the dock, their shapes dark against the lantern light. They peered down into the black water.
"See anything?" one asked, his voice flat.
"No. Current's fast tonight," the other replied. "The body will wash up somewhere downriver by morning. Or not at all."
There was a casual finality in his tone that chilled Li Xian more than the water.
"Good. The River Gate Sect wants this handled quietly. One missing barge, one dead foreman. Pin it all on the disposable son."
The first man grunted. "Did you get the foreman's seal pouch? Zhao was supposed to have it ready."
"He did. No one will connect this back to the Guild."
A silence stretched, broken only by the sloshing of the river. Li Xian pressed himself against the slimy wood, barely daring to breathe.
"Wait five breaths," the first man said. "If he doesn't float, we leave."
Every instinct screamed at him to flee, to swim away into the darkness.
His body remained frozen, a shadow in the water. His mind went to work, logging the data.
The first speaker's boots were worn at the heel, scuffing the wood. The second had a nervous habit of shifting his weight, left to right, right to left. One gave the orders, the other confirmed them.
When the five breaths passed, they turned and walked away without a backward glance.
His humor, once light and playful, returned as something frozen and sharp. They thought he was a loose end. An error to be deleted.
He would not run. He would go back.
Clinging to the dock, Li Xian hauled the pathetic, shivering body from the water. He staggered back towards the warehouse he'd been thrown from, each step an agony.
A portly man with a nervous sweat on his brow met him at the door. Foreman Zhao.
"You're alive?" Zhao's eyes darted around, his relief immediately curdling into fear. "Get out of here. You weren't on this shift. You saw nothing."
He tried to shut the door.
Li Xian's teeth chattered, but his voice was steady. "The midnight barge had seven seals, not six. The log will be wrong."
It was a guess, a calculated probe into a system he didn't understand.
Fear flashed in the foreman's eyes. It was the crack in the firewall. Zhao's composure broke, and he pulled Li Xian inside, his grip surprisingly strong.
He pointed toward a small, lamplit office in the back.
"The ledgers are in there," the foreman whispered, his voice trembling. "Don't talk. Don't be seen. Just find what you need and disappear."
The office smelled of damp paper and cheap ink. Li Xian found the ledger easily. He flipped to the entry for the midnight barge, his dripping fingers smudging the page.
The handwriting was too clean. The ink too fresh.
The timestamp was impossible. It was logged an hour before the barge was even scheduled to arrive. A forged entry, designed to create a clean record before the crime even happened.
As his thumb brushed against the pristine ink, a voice whispered directly into his skull. It was a soundless pressure, a needle of pure want.
FEED…
Agony spiked behind his eyes. He gritted his teeth, grabbing a spare sheet of paper and a carbon slip.
With shaking hands, he made a quick rubbing of the entry, then folded the evidence and shoved it into his pocket. A subtle dissonance emanated from the very fabric of the paper, deeper than the fresh ink.
The taste of blood and metal filled his mouth again, stronger this time. The headache was a physical weight, pressing inward.
He slipped back out of the warehouse, melting into the thick river fog.
It was clear now. Someone wasn't just covering their tracks. They were actively rewriting the official record, patching reality itself.
He didn't know what the invasive whisper in his mind was. He only knew two things with absolute certainty.
It was starving. And it was a part of him now.
"So this world keeps accounts," Li Xian thought, the cold air doing little to cool the strange heat building behind his ribs.
"Good."
"I'm here to audit it."