The stairwell's voice-activated light had been dead for so long the building had stopped expecting it to come back.
Lu Jin climbed by muscle memory, palm sliding over a dusty handrail that felt like grit glued to metal. Air scraped through his chest. Each breath came out thin, the way a cheap pump wheezed when the seal started to fail.
Third floor.
A new smell waited there—sharp, chemical, loud enough to drown out the old mold.
His phone's flashlight cut a narrow cone across his door.
The battered green security door had been repainted.
Not neatly. Not carefully.
Red streaks sprawled across it, still wet, creeping down from the peephole like something trying to escape. A puddle had already formed at the base.
Eight crooked characters, slapped on like a threat that didn't need spelling lessons:
PAY YOUR DEBT. WE'LL HARVEST PARTS FOR INTEREST.
Lu Jin stood with the calm of someone who'd run out of spare panic weeks ago.
No yelling. No shaking hands.
Just a quiet inventory of problems.
He took his key out, angled it around the wet paint, and slid it into the lock.
"Brother Biao's got better intel than my doctor."
His voice came out rough, like it had been sanded down.
Door. Click.
Inside, no lights.
Neon from the street leaked through the blinds and painted the room in thin stripes—cheap color over cheap furniture. He crossed to the coffee table and set down a wrinkled A4 sheet like it was a receipt.
Because it was.
A receipt for time.
[Patient: Lu Jin]
[Diagnosis: Accelerated Cell Death Syndrome (ACDS) — Late Stage]
[Estimated Survival Window: 132 days (± 48 hours)]
A calculator sat nearby, greasy from use. His fingers knew it better than they knew comfort.
"Diagnosis came at 3:00 PM."
Tap. Tap.
"Six hours ago."
Subtract.
He glanced at his banking app.
The number looked embarrassed to exist.
"Balance…" A pause, half a second too long. "320.50 FedCreds."
No drama in the way he said it.
Facts didn't care.
"One shot of the worst black-market Gene Suppressant runs 300 FedCreds."
That one sentence held his entire week hostage.
"Skip it, and I don't make it to Sunday."
He let the remaining math hang in the air.
"20.50 FedCreds for seven days of food."
The room answered with silence and the refrigerator's tired hum.
The debt still waited on the other side of the door, dripping red.
"And I still owe Brother Biao 210,000 FedCreds principal."
Interest didn't deserve mention. Interest wasn't a number. It was a lifestyle.
A cough clawed up his throat. He covered his mouth with a tissue.
When he pulled it away, dark red had bloomed in the paper.
He tossed it into the trash.
It landed on top of several others.
Any way he ran the equation, the ending stayed the same.
Starve.
Suffocate.
Or get "uninstalled" by a loan shark with a toolbox.
He sank into the old sofa. The springs didn't resist. They just accepted him, like the rest of the city did.
Benzene from the fresh paint drifted in every time the door's seal breathed. Disinfectant clung to him anyway, an aftershave for the terminally ill.
This was supposed to be it.
In a world where neon towers and slum rot shared the same sky, a D-grade gene worker in the Undercity died the way ants did—quiet, replaceable, and swept up later.
Then his phone vibrated.
Not a normal buzz.
This was frantic, rapid-fire, like something trapped inside the device was trying to punch its way out. Heat followed it, angry and immediate, burning through his pocket and into his skin.
Lu Jin swore under his breath and yanked the phone out.
The screen wasn't a screen anymore.
Static swarmed across it—tight clusters of noise that chewed through icons and time and all the little lies phones told to keep you calm. The casing grew hotter, enough that it wanted to slip from his grip.
"Great," he muttered. "Now Biao's running hardware-level extortion."
He held the power button.
Nothing.
The static collapsed inward, tightening into a black whirlpool that looked too deep for a piece of glass.
Silver-gray text carved itself into the center.
[Loading: Deep Space Echo]
[Scan: Compatible Host detected]
[Dimensional anchor: Calibration in progress]
Lu Jin stared at it.
"What the hell is this?"
His first thought: malware.
His second thought: the kind you didn't fix with a factory reset.
He started to stand, already reaching for tools out of habit—
The phone lit up.
Not brighter.
Different.
The glow hit the room like a window cracked open in the wrong reality. The speakers erupted with wind—real wind, the kind that didn't come from a cheap sound file. The temperature in the room didn't change, but his skin disagreed. A chill worked under it anyway.
The static cleared.
A landscape unfolded.
A wasteland under a sky the color of old metal, buried in a storm that never got tired.
Snow—heavy, dirty, almost lead-colored—lashed sideways. The image was clean enough to make him uncomfortable. He could pick out the granular texture of ice on rust.
The camera drifted upward.
And there it was.
A corpse of steel.
A giant mech lay half-swallowed by frozen earth, spine arched like a ruined bridge, ribs of armor torn open and corroded into honeycomb scars. It looked less like a machine and more like the fossil of something that had died trying to crawl out of hell.
[Location: Wasteland Zone K-11]
Lu Jin's grip tightened, not from fear.
From suspicion.
This was too sharp. Too detailed. Too expensive.
He dragged a thumb across the screen.
The view zoomed with obedient smoothness, slipping past the mech's massive leg into a sheltered depression near its foot.
Something small moved there.
Or tried to.
He zoomed again.
A girl.
Fifteen, maybe sixteen. Hard to tell under the layers of ruin.
She'd wedged herself under a fallen armor plate like it was a roof. A torn gray cloak clung to her frame, more holes than fabric. Her face had gone pale in that specific way skin did when heat had been bargaining too long.
Purple-black radiation mottling climbed one side of her cheek in a pattern that looked almost deliberate—like the wasteland had signed her.
Frost had crusted onto her lashes.
Her breathing was so shallow it barely counted.
One hand—raw, cracked, swelling with frostbite—gripped a broken dagger. The blade had snapped, but her fingers refused to learn the lesson.
Lu Jin let out a dry laugh that didn't reach his chest.
"Nice CG."
His eyes stayed on her anyway.
"If this is a charity ad, you picked the wrong target. I'm on my own expiration schedule."
Red data flickered above the girl like a brand.
[Proxy: Li Xing]
[Status: Near Death — Hypothermia / Radiation Infection / Severe Dehydration]
[Proxy Countdown: 00:29:58]
His expression didn't change.
His stomach did.
Because the phone didn't stop there.
In the top-right corner, new text appeared.
His text.
[Host: Lu Jin]
[Status: ACDS — Late Stage]
[Exact Host Countdown: 132 days 04:21:06]
The seconds ticked down.
Lu Jin snatched the diagnosis sheet off the table.
Same number.
Same window.
His doctor had said "around four months."
This thing said 132 days and then kept counting like it owned the clock.
No normal virus pulled a death timer out of your genes.
A cold that had nothing to do with weather slid up his back.
"This isn't—"
The thought broke off.
On screen, Li Xing's lashes twitched.
Her eyes cracked open a fraction, unfocused and gray with exhaustion.
Life didn't glow in them.
It clung.
The kind of look that didn't belong to heroes.
The kind he'd caught in his bathroom mirror the day he got diagnosed.
Not romantic. Not poetic.
Just a creature refusing to fold.
[ALERT: Proxy vitals below critical threshold]
The display flashed. A shrill alarm hammered the speakers, sharp enough to make his chest tighten.
Then the storm view got hijacked by a pop-up.
It didn't look like an emergency alert.
It looked like a sales screen.
Cheap typography. Aggressive spacing. Too clean for a dying girl.
[URGENT NOTICE]
[Proxy is within minutes of death by dehydration]
[First Transaction Offer — Limited]
[Item: E-Grade Purified Water (500ml)]
[Standard Price: 998 Echo Credits]
[Offer Price: 6.00 Echo Credits]
A smaller line appeared beneath, colder than the rest.
[Wallet Link: 1 Echo Credit = 1 FedCred (bound transfer)]
And then the part that mattered.
[Non-Intervention Result: Contract Asset forfeiture]
[Forfeiture Consequence: Host-side synchronized disposal procedure]
[Time Remaining: 00:05]
Lu Jin stared at that last line.
Disposal procedure.
The system had the tone of a loan shark offering a "flexible plan."
He laughed.
It came out brittle, scraped dry by the paint fumes and the blood he'd been swallowing all week.
"I'm dying," he said to the phone. "And you're shaking me down for six credits."
The absurdity landed hard enough to almost feel like relief.
Almost.
But his eyes kept drifting back to Li Xing's face.
Not because she was pretty.
Because the light in her gaze was slipping, and he recognized the exact moment when someone started letting go.
Six credits.
One cup of instant noodles tonight.
Or the difference between swallowing pain and wearing it.
Tomorrow's suppressant shot didn't care about six credits, except that the world did.
The timers sat on the same screen like twin nooses.
His: 132 days.
Hers: twenty-nine minutes.
And the system had the nerve to put a discount sticker on a human being.
If it's real…
That thought slid in, sharp and unwelcome.
Lu Jin's mind didn't do hope. It did margins.
In a boardroom, someone would call it "risk assessment."
In the Undercity, it was called being alive long enough to regret something later.
A dead end had trapped him: disease, debt, hunger, men with tools.
No exit.
No loophole.
No third option.
Unless—
Unless this was a new kind of trap.
Or a new kind of rule.
And if it was a rule…
Rules had exploits.
His forearm ached in dull pulses where old IV bruises hid under skin. The shortfall of medicine had already begun its countdown inside him, even without the phone's help.
The system's payment button pulsed with mechanical insistence.
00:03.
Lu Jin swallowed against the metallic taste in his throat.
"Insane."
He didn't say it like a complaint.
He said it like a test.
His thumb came down on [PAY] hard enough to feel the glass flex.
[Transaction accepted]
[Deducted: 6.00 Echo Credits]
[Transfer channel: Bound wallet → Authorized]
[Deploying supply to dimensional anchor…]
Out in the storm, a pinpoint of light appeared.
Small.
Real.
It cut through the blizzard like a match struck in the dark.
And the system added one last line, clinical and final:
[Contract initialized]