Twelve hours.
Sparks had sat in that peeling gaming chair for twelve solid hours.
Outside the window of the rental unit, the sky had gone black long ago. What came through the gaps in the floral shower curtain was no longer sunlight but the glow of the sound-activated lamp in the corridor of the apartment block across the way, the one that never switched off. It blinked on and off like a firefly running out of battery.
The Red Bull cans on the desk had multiplied from two to five, and the plastic sticks from her lollipops had collected into a small heap that she'd swept aside next to the keyboard.
After the nuclear-blast growth of the afternoon, the live viewer count had settled at around one million two hundred thousand.
Sparks leaned back against the chair and rubbed her aching right wrist.
The progress bar of the Elation Point collection System inside her head had climbed from a single-digit percentage that morning to a number she wouldn't have dared dream of.
Twelve hours of streaming. One point two million people watching at once. Plus trending across every platform in the country.
The Emotion Points these Earthlings had handed over outweighed her past three years put together.
Agony and ecstasy in the same package.
The game had reached Chapter Eight.
Sparks had to admit it: whoever plotted this piece of junk actually knew what they were doing.
The everyday setup in the earlier chapters had looked bland enough, but every character's personality and every relationship had quietly put down roots. So when the conflict finally erupted, the emotional impact hit like a shove between the shoulder blades - no warning at all.
Not that she would ever say so out loud.
Her passionate mudslinging match with Su Yu had dragged in crowds of fans who came purely for the drama, and that was how a mesugaki streamer had rocketed into the stratosphere.
In an age where clout was king, a good spectacle always sold.
It had been thirty minutes since she ended the stream.
Sparks looked over the Elation Points stored in her mind. Still a very long way from the ticket price back to her own world.
It didn't make her despair.
She shut her eyes and pulled in a deep breath. The stream had done well - her follower count had gone from a few dozen at the start to more than seven hundred thousand in a single day.
Several thousand times the sum of her last three years.
The gifts piled up in her backend were enough for her to kick this cheap door off its hinges tonight, move into a top-floor apartment with a river view, and fit it out with a full set of the best streaming gear money could buy.
And just as Sparks was rolling her eyes around, calculating how best to blow this windfall -
A knock came at the door.
Unhurried. Even.
Nothing at all like the rent-collecting landlords in this decrepit building, who preferred to kick the iron doors with the flats of their feet.
Sparks opened her eyes. The corridor's sensor light died, then flickered dimly back to life.
She didn't move. Whoever stood outside waited five patient seconds, then knocked again in the same neat rhythm.
Knock. Knock. Knock.
Sparks pulled her feet off the edge of the desk, planted her fuzzy slippers on the floor, walked to the door, and put an eye to the peephole.
Three people stood in the corridor.
The one in front was a woman, twenty-five or twenty-six.
She wore a dark grey suit with impeccable tailoring, the shoulder line and waistline so precise they might have been measured out with a ruler. Her hair was gathered into a low ponytail, and small pearl studs sat in her ears. She held a black leather folder, and her nails were trimmed neat and painted with clear polish.
Behind her, planted like two iron towers, stood two men in black suits with comm earpieces.
The three of them, set against the peeling plaster, the old cardboard boxes stacked in the stairwell, and the sensor lamp flickering overhead, looked as out of place as a slice of truffle dropped into a cup of instant noodles.
Sparks opened the door.
The woman outside got one look at her, and the professional smile held for exactly half a second.
Sparks was still in that JK uniform, now crumpled into a wad, the ribbon tie shoved sideways toward her collarbone, the pleated skirt sat in for fourteen hours until not a single pleat survived. Her white twintails had come apart in every direction, the left one nearly unraveled into loose hair over her shoulder.
"Miss Sparks?" the HR director asked with a smile.
"Mm-hm."
"My apologies for calling on you so late. I'm the Human Resources Director of Taixu Media."
The woman drew a business card from the folder and offered it with both hands.
The stock was thick, the logo stamped in silver foil.
Sparks took it and gave it a glance.
Taixu Media.
Su Mei.
She strung the two pieces of information together.
Taixu Media - formerly one of the country's top-tier firms, later bought out by Eden and renamed. It had absorbed everything the old company had, and after the injection of new resources it was starting to look like it might take the industry's top seat outright.
Flagship signed talent: Elysia.
That streamer with tens of millions of followers across every platform.
Su Mei had been the company's marketing director; now she was second in command. Nominally second in command, anyway - in practice the only face she had to read was that of her patron, Eden.
She was Eden's, which was another way of saying -
She was Su Yu's.
It wasn't that Sparks knew anything about the underground romance between those two. It was simply that Elysia had already thrown her weight behind the studio in the most blatant way possible, ambassador title and all.
You wouldn't even need a brain to work out that Taixu Media and miHoYo shared the same pair of trousers.
"President Su Mei has a very high opinion of your potential." The HR director's voice stayed level and unhurried, every syllable crisply articulated. "This is the highest-grade contract Taixu Media has ever issued since its founding."
She turned slightly and signaled to the bodyguard behind her.
The bodyguard produced a document from his briefcase and passed it over.
The HR director took it and laid it out in front of Sparks, right there in the doorway.
Sparks looked down.
Gilt edges.
The cover carried the Taixu Media logo and the words "S-Rank Exclusive Signing Agreement," set in that expensive gold-foil stamping that caught the corridor's flickering sensor light and threw back splinters of gold.
"Please do give it your consideration."
Sparks looked at the contract and didn't reach for it.
"Come inside."
She turned lazily and wandered back into the room.
The two bodyguards stayed outside like a matched pair of door gods.
Sparks dropped back into her gaming chair.
"Read it out," she said, hooking both legs up onto the desk.
"I'm sorry?" The HR director blinked.
"The contract. You read it to me."
She fished a fresh lollipop off the desk, tore the wrapper off, and shoved it in her mouth.
"I've been staring at a screen for fourteen hours today. One more look at that tiny print you capitalists use to swindle people and my eyes are going to fall out."
The HR director paused, then flipped the contract open and began.
"Signing tier: S-rank exclusive. Term: three years, renewable by negotiation between both parties upon expiry."
"Streaming hours: no mandatory requirement whatsoever, entirely at your discretion. Monthly revenue quota: none."
The lollipop in Sparks' mouth traveled from her left cheek to her right.
"Revenue split: one to nine. Party A takes one. Party B takes nine."
"Handling of prior contracts: Taixu Media will supply a top-tier legal team to take full charge of dissolving Party B's existing contract with her current fly-by-night agency. All breach penalties will be borne in full by Party A."
Sparks' eyelid twitched. Even a Masked Fool like her felt a jolt of pure bewilderment.
A one-nine split.
Penalties covered entirely?
The contract she currently held with Sister Zhou's shady little MCN was fifty-fifty, with a three-hundred-thousand breach penalty.
For someone whose bank balance stood at 347.62, three hundred thousand and thirty million were physically indistinguishable quantities.
Either way, she couldn't pay it.
And now Taixu Media wanted to settle that enormous sum for her and hand her ninety percent of the profits on top?
Pie falling out of the sky like that usually pointed to exactly one conclusion. Fraud.
The HR director read on.
"Equipment upgrade: Party A will provide a complete set of industry-leading streaming hardware. Including but not limited to a professional-grade holographic camera, a million-yuan sound card, microphone, a custom gaming pod, and a water-cooled tower."
"Promotional resources: Party A guarantees a monthly platform traffic-promotion budget for Party B of no less than two million Shenzhou yuan."
The lollipop turned a full circle in Sparks' mouth.
"And most importantly…"
Here the HR director turned to the last page of the contract and deliberately slowed her delivery.
"In light of Party B's… distinctive luck during the open beta of Honkai Impact 3rd." She raised her head and gave Sparks a long look.
"Big Boss Su gave specific instructions to add a special supplementary clause to your contract - the [Bad-Luck Pity Fund]."
"Ten million yuan per annum, paid directly into Party B's personal account, earmarked solely as compensation for the psychological damages Party B sustains pulling gacha in-game."
Snap.
The HR director closed the contract, and the sound rang out with unusual clarity in the quiet little rental.
"Boss Su says that even if you eat full hard pity every single time, he'll make sure you live very comfortably in this city."
For two full seconds, the room was dead silent.
The ancient neon sign outside the window fizzled out, then stubbornly relit.
Its bloody red light knifed through the gap in the shower curtain and struck Sparks across the face.
Crunch.
The lollipop shattered.
Sparks swallowed the sugar shards, leaving nothing in her mouth but a bare plastic stick.
She didn't speak. She just sprawled there in the chair, limbs flung out, staring hard at the water-stained ceiling. The plastic stick jutted up at a steep angle from the corner of her mouth and bobbed twice, gently, with her breathing.
Ten million.
A pity fund for the cursed and luckless.
A clause that absurd could not possibly exist in any legitimate commercial contract template anywhere on this planet.
It was feed. Custom-blended for her by that man named Su Yu, after he'd watched twelve straight hours of her falling apart on stream.
Sparks' brain began to turn.
Not the usual performative, artfully profound "thinking" a Masked Fool put on for an audience.
This was the real thing - cold calculation with all the acting and all the chaos stripped away.
Clause one: a one-nine split. Taixu Media took essentially nothing. A pure loss-making deal.
Clause two: no quotas, no required hours. Absolute freedom. Stream when she liked, die when she liked.
Clause three: full coverage of her breach penalty. Hauling her out of the swamp with no conditions attached.
Clause four: a bad-luck pity fund. Ten million a year, simply given away.
Put the four together and you had a contract that was gorgeously tempting, carried almost no binding force whatsoever, and by any reading left Party A holding the losses.
Too perfect.
So perfect that every cell in her body started screaming alarms.
Sparks had knocked around this boring planet for three solid years. She had seen more filthy contracts than she cared to count.
She could recite the fly-by-night MCN playbook with her eyes shut: paint an enormous pie, then yank the net tight, chain the talent up like a dog with astronomical penalties and brutal revenue quotas, wring the last drop of marrow out of them, then kick them into the sewer.
Su Yu's contract ran the whole thing in reverse.
He wasn't binding her.
He was handing her absolute freedom.
He was even stuffing her pockets full of gold bars with manic enthusiasm. Why?
The answer practically leapt off the page.
Because that man had no need whatsoever to control her through laughable clauses written on paper.
Sparks pulled the plastic stick out of her mouth and spun it once between her fingers.
What Su Yu wanted was her.
More precisely, he'd set his sights on the chaos she embodied as a "white-haired mesugaki streamer."
That, and her terrifying capacity to detonate traffic, her talent for manufacturing conversation, and - the natural, incompatible, dramatically charged "antagonism" between her and Honkai Impact 3rd!
Look at the whole day she'd just streamed.
The snider Sparks got, the more excited the players became!
The harder her pulls crashed and the harder she broke down, the hotter the game burned!
That cross-screen "official flame war" between her and Su Yu was a script-free, twenty-four-hour, self-operating trending-topic generator. A perpetual motion machine of clout!
What Su Yu wanted was not some obedient model employee who clocked in on time.
That man had caught the scent of his own kind. He knew that with a Masked Fool chasing ultimate elation, chains were useless. All you could offer her was a bundle of explosives big enough and thrilling enough to be worth lighting.
And this gilt-edged S-rank contract was the lighter he'd handed over personally.
He was treating her as the sharpest knife he owned, one to slash open the stagnant boredom of this world.
And she, quite happily, was treating him as her own private luxury amusement park, and she intended to turn every last ride upside down.
They were each using the other as a high-end toy without a shred of restraint, and both of them knew it and relished it.
Sparks tossed the plastic stick into the trash.
No anger at being played rose in her.
What rose instead, from somewhere behind her ribs, was a tremor she couldn't suppress, one that crawled up the back of her scalp.
She almost wanted to laugh.
This man, in a world that didn't even know what Honkai energy was, had made a game called Honkai Impact 3rd.
And the quality of that game was first-rate even measured against interstellar civilization standards.
This afternoon he had, without blinking, dropped ten cold-cash Hyperions into her stream, purely to build her a stage that would set the whole internet on fire.
Tonight he had sent an HR director with a contract she couldn't possibly refuse - an open scheme - and imperiously laid down a golden road leading her straight into the Abyss.
Every step precise beyond measure.
Every move concealing a lethal follow-up.
The corner of Sparks' pretty mouth wrenched upward in a violent, uncontrollable twitch.
In gilded, dizzy Penacony, men like this were called the House.
In the Xianzhou Alliance, they were called the Chess Player.
And in Lady Sparks' personal dictionary, this was called a premium, high-value toy.
She sat up straight in the chair and pulled her legs back off the desk edge. The fuzzy slippers hit the floor with a soft thud.
"Pen?"
The HR director was startled enough by the sudden movement to freeze for a moment.
"Miss Sparks, don't you want to review the detailed terms once more? The non-compete provisions, the portrait rights attribution -"
"Nope."
Sparks put out one pale little hand, palm up.
"Pen."
The HR director produced one from an inside jacket pocket - Taixu Media's logo engraved on the barrel, the nib so smooth you could tell at a glance it hadn't come cheap.
Sparks took the pen and flipped to the last page of the contract.
The signature field sat blank, a line of small print beside it: "Party B Signature."
She didn't hesitate.
The nib touched the paper, and two characters went down fast and sloppy - "Sparkle."
After signing, she paused for half a second.
Then, beside a signature worth hundreds of millions, she drew something.
A twisted little doodle.
A round outline, two dots for eyes, one exaggerated curved line for a mouth.
Not only was the mouth crooked, it also had a great long tongue lolling brazenly out of it.
A mocking clown face.
The HR director looked at the doodle demolishing the gravity of the document, and that battle-hardened professional smile finally cracked right down the middle.
Sparks flipped the contract shut with a snap and threw it back at her like a dart.
The HR director caught it on reflex.
"Go back and tell my darling number-one gifter, Boss Su."
Sparks leaned into the chair back and laced both hands behind her head.
The neon's red glow washed over her face, and the four-leaf-clover patterns in her eyes rotated slowly through the guttering light and shadow.
"Sparksy adores his little gift."
She tilted her head, and the white twintails slid off her shoulders and spread across the torn leather of the seat back.
"But do me a favor and pass along one more message, word for word."
Her voice dropped lower.
"When you gaze into Elation, Elation also gazes into you."
Her gaze left the HR director and drifted to the window.
Beyond the gap in the shower curtain, the glass curtain wall of Arc City Tower stood tall against the night, its topmost floor still lit.
"Tell him - the prey's already in the cage. This game he calls 'Elation,' I, Lady Sparks, accept."
She looked at the stiffness on the HR director's face and cocked her head with a coquettish little tilt, her smile sweet and skin-crawling all at once.
"And make absolutely sure he stays as clever as he is right now. Because if he can't keep me entertained through this game, if he lets me play him to death without even trying…"
"I'd find that very boring."
The HR director stood there clutching the contract, red lips slightly parted, unable to produce a single word.
She had worked headhunting and HR for years and handled countless top-tier celebrities, every temperament under the sun, every flavor of eccentric arrogance.
But this.
A lunatic who held a contract worth over a hundred million, drew a clown's leering face in the signature field, and then had the gall to turn around and threaten and tease the boss of Party A -
That was, without question, a first in her entire career.
"Then… Miss Sparks, the contract is executed." The HR director cleared her throat and reassembled her professional composure. "We will arrange the top-tier equipment upgrade and the legal handover of your prior contract for you as swiftly as possible."
"Mm-hm."
"Apologies again for the late intrusion. I wish you… good night."
The HR director turned and left with the speed of someone fleeing a disaster. The sound of those expensive heels on concrete came fast and ragged down the silent corridor.
Then came the muffled boom of the stairwell fire door being shoved open and slamming shut again.
The little rental fell quiet.
Sparks sat alone in the battered gaming chair.
She lowered her head and looked at her hands.
Her fingers were still trembling faintly.
Not from fear.
From excitement.
An excitement she could not hold down.
Three years.
Three years in this world, spent as a cyber-beggar, a third-rate grifter, a nobody streamer nobody watched.
And at last she'd run into a lunatic who could keep pace with her wavelength.
Someone who understood her, indulged her, and was even willing to wash his own neck and lay it under her blade. A perfect opponent.
Sparks shot up out of the chair and crossed barefoot to the window.
She ripped the floral shower curtain aside and looked down on Arc City by night.
Close by lay the Old District, its residential blocks packed together as dense and broken as a slum.
Far off blazed the CBD's glittering, eye-searing towers.
On the very top of Arc City Tower, that one lamp that never went dark hung like an insufferably arrogant golden eye set into a bottomless night sky, watching her in silence.
She had no idea what the man beneath that light was scheming right now.
But she knew this with perfect clarity -
From the moment the sun came up tomorrow, the bloody, deranged hunt between her and that man would only just be raising its curtain.
Sparks let the curtain drop and turned back to the desk.
She picked up the plastic stick off the tabletop and spun it once between her fingers.
Then she gripped one end, aimed it at the mocking clown-face sticker she'd stuck to the desk at some point she couldn't remember, and jabbed down hard.
"Let's see it, Su Yu."
Her voice was barely audible, soft as the Devil whispering at her ear, and only she could hear it.
"In the end, will you - my clever, self-satisfied [Keeper] - manage to lock me in your cage forever with this expensive bowl of cat food…"
"Or will I tear that mask off your face with my own hands first, and drag you and this counterfeit world down into ultimate elation together?"
Outside, the neon flickered one last time and went out for good.
The tube had probably reached the end of its life.
The room sank into brief darkness.
Sparks felt for the switch on her desk lamp.
It clicked, and warm yellow light leaked out through the cheap plastic shade, throwing her shadow across the crooked pink soundproofing foam on the wall.
The shadow was very long.
Like some beast of the Abyss that had lain in wait in the dark, that had finally found prey worthy of it, and was slowly opening its blood-red maw.
At that same moment.
In the Director's Office on the topmost floor of Arc City Tower.
The wall clock ticked. The overhead lights were off, and only the pale blue glow of the monitor lit Su Yu's faintly exhausted face.
The phone on the desk lit up.
A high-resolution photo from Taixu Media's HR director.
It showed the final page of an S-rank contract worth hundreds of millions.
Beside [Sparks]' insolent signature sat a clown face with its tongue out, dripping mockery.
Below it was the HR director's slightly anxious message: "President Su, Miss Sparks signed. She also asked me to pass this on… she's walked into the cage, so whatever you do, don't let her break you."
Su Yu looked at that clown scrawl howling with laughter on his screen.
He didn't laugh the way a capitalist with the game already won might laugh.
Instead he sagged back into his chair, raised two fingers, and rubbed hard at the dull ache between his brows.
There was no arrogance in those deep eyes. Only the gravity of a man staring straight down into a bottomless chasm.
"What a piece of work. One slip and she'll blow every single one of us to pieces. Genuine high-grade hazardous material."
Su Yu understood better than anyone exactly what kind of monster he had just provoked.
A Masked Fool who regarded rules as nothing and fed on chaos.
Handing Sparks a contract with no restraints in it at all was no different from strapping a lit high-explosive fuse to his own chest and to the heart of Honkai Impact 3rd.
The moment Sparks felt like it, she could whip up a wave of outrage on her stream large enough to drown miHoYo's reputation.
The moment she felt like it, she could rip every carefully laid piece of Su Yu's plan into confetti.
It was a real gamble, the kind where you feed yourself to the tiger.
But Su Yu had no other option.
The barrier of the Imaginary Tree was too thick.
The Abyss of the Sea of Quanta was too cold.
To force an anchor onto Murata Himeko's soul as it dissolved in a high-dimensional dead end like that, ordinary tears and ordinary sentiment were nowhere near enough.
He needed a tsunami. A brutal one. An emotional detonation that would tear the whole internet's emotional thresholds apart and release ten times, a hundred times the energy!
And Sparks was the only detonator capable of setting that tsunami off.
Just as Su Yu drew a deep breath and moved to switch off the phone screen -
A System chime went off in the depths of his mind without the slightest warning.
[Ding!]
[High-dimensional chaos interference source "Sparks" has formally signed the Soul Contract! An extremely dangerous and irreversible "Symbiosis / Destruction" Bond has been established between Host and target character!]
[Congratulations, Host! Prerequisites for the hidden Community Bond have been fulfilled!]
With that frigid System voice, a burst of calamitous light detonated across Su Yu's retinas.
Inside that madly spinning halo, a broken tarot card, its edges laced with cracks, hung before his eyes as though it had been torn bodily out of a thunderstorm.
The face of the card was savage, taut with Destruction:
A towering spire snapped clean through the middle by crimson lightning falling out of the sky.
And amid the rain of falling rubble and the wailing crowd, a white-haired girl in a fox mask hung in midair beneath a red umbrella, laughing aloud in pure elation.
[Tarot Codex update complete!]
[Entry recorded: The Tower]
[Bonded character: Sparks]
Su Yu's pupils tightened a fraction, and his gaze dropped at once to the exclusive bonus attributes glowing crimson beneath this [The Tower] card, the card that stood for sudden upheaval and calamity.
[The Tower Exclusive Authority I: Carnival of Collapse (Traffic Collapse Point)]
Effect: So long as this character is streaming or otherwise publicly exposed, she is a source of calamity capable of triggering internet-wide storms. Any controversy, feud, or even extreme negative wave she sets off will defy conventional logic and, like matter collapsing into a black hole, be refined into terrifying mainstream-breaking heat for Honkai Impact 3rd! The collapse of the old order becomes the carnival of new traffic!
[The Tower Exclusive Authority II: Resonance of Calamity (Emotional Nuke Detonator)]
Effect: Grants this character the terrifying Authority of "emotional laceration and amplification." While players watch her stream, their psychological defenses become as fragile as the tower on the card face, and their emotional volatility threshold is amplified by 300%!
Note: Fervor becomes frenzy; grief becomes an Abyss of despair. In the Host's forthcoming "soul-crushing" story arc, she will serve as the single strongest amplifier for shattering player defenses outright and harvesting extreme emotion - tears, awe, prayer - at maximum yield!
Su Yu stared at the two attributes, monstrous things that all but qualified as a self-destruct weapon.
His grip tightened on the phone.
Yes.
This was precisely the power he had dreamed of, and precisely the power most likely to kill him.
He knew what a card named [The Tower] represented: ruin and uncontrollable catastrophe.
But three days from now, when Chapter Nine, "The Journey to Tomorrow," descended - when "Nightglow" rang out across Imaginary Space -
With Sparks serving as the [Emotional Nuke Detonator], the grief and the refusal to let go of tens of millions of players across the entire internet would blow open at a geometrically horrifying scale!
And out of the cracks in those thoroughly shattered defenses would burst a torrent of wish-force vast enough to shake anything and everything!
That would be the absolute power - enough to split open the rift and rip that red-haired woman back out of Death's hands by force!
For that, he would dance on a knife's edge.
Even if one careless step meant that crimson lightning called Sparks would recoil on him, skin and bone together, and shatter him to fragments in turn.
Su Yu would still find the taste sweet.
He rose slowly from the broad executive chair.
He walked to the enormous floor-to-ceiling window and looked out at Arc City's neon, brilliant as a sea of stars.
He could almost feel it: somewhere in a broken corner of the city, a Masked Fool was staring at him through the vast dark with lethal amusement and challenge in her eyes.
Su Yu picked up the cup of black coffee on his desk, long gone cold.
With the finality of a martyr, he raised it in an elegant, distant toast to that deep black sky.
"Since you want to watch this world burn…"
Su Yu murmured it softly, the words woven through with an unspeakable weight and a tenderness born of walking toward death:
"Then I'll use everything I have to build you the ultimate Tower - one high enough to make the whole world's tears boil for you."
"Come tear it all apart, Sparks."
He tipped his head back and drained the bitter, cold coffee in one swallow.
"A pleasure working with you… my dangerous Miss Devil."
And a dozen kilometers from Arc City Tower, in that shabby little rental -
Sparks, who had just skewered the clown sticker, tilted her head with a hunter's sharpness, and something strange flickered in the red depths of her eyes.
This lethal bargain between a madwoman and a gambler, staked on their own lives and on the emotions of every player in the world -
In that instant, in perfect unspoken accord, locked the gears of fate into place.
____
Two chapters a day for a whole month, thanks to a supporter over on Patreon! Want this for other stories too? Come check out my little shop on (P).
________________________________________
If you want more chapters, please consider supporting my page on (P). with 50 advanced chapters available on (P)
👻 Join the crew by searching Leanzin on (P). You know the spot! 😉