Past nine at night, and every light in Arc City was already burning.
The whole city looked like it had just been fished out of a sea of neon, the traffic on the main roads pressed into a single glowing river.
On the big screen outside the mall, an ad for Honkai Impact 3rd looped on repeat — the silhouette of a white-haired girl flickering across the glass curtain wall, radiating that unmistakable 'money is burning' production value.
Su paused at the street corner for a couple of seconds, absently tugging his coat collar closed.
The gesture, paired with his face, managed to look fragile and hesitant even here in the back alley.
No helping it. The day's shocks had simply been too much.
The lecture at Arc City University. That miHoYo studio that looked, from every angle, like some kind of den of sorcery. The pile of connections around Su Yu, each more absurd than the last as he dug deeper.
And that line — 'exactly how many bowls of soft rice are you eating' — and the utterly defeated look on Su Yu's face when he said it.
His head was still buzzing. And of course, this was exactly the moment he had to go handle something that couldn't see daylight.
The alley was narrow, a thin wash of neon leaking in from outside, making the ground gleam.
At the far end hung an unassuming old sign, the shop's name short, as if picked at random.
No one was out front touting for customers. Warm light spilled faintly through the glass door, jazz drifting lazily inside — a slow, unhurried rhythm, perfectly suited to discussing things that couldn't see daylight.
Su pushed the door open and went in.
The place wasn't crowded — a few patrons scattered here and there, none of them talking loudly.
Behind the bar stood a woman, sleeves rolled to the elbow, head bent as she polished a wine glass.
The light fell across her profile, tracing out very clean lines.
Cioara.
Schicksal's handler for their covert network and intelligence operations here in Arc City.
Su walked up to the bar without sitting, tapping his fingers lightly on the counter twice.
"Got any ice water?"
Cioara set the glass back on the rack without looking up.
"Depends how cold you want it."
"Just enough to clear my head."
"We don't sell drinks here. We sell information."
The classic recognition code.
Su pulled out a barstool and sat. Cioara turned, plucked two ice cubes from the bucket with tongs, and dropped them into a glass.
The ice clinked crisply against the sides.
As she slid the glass across, she casually tucked a neatly folded drink menu underneath it.
The menu was thin.
Too thin to be a real drink menu — more like something made deliberately for show.
The moment Su picked it up, one touch told him there was something hidden inside.
A micro storage drive was tucked in the fold — slim, but finely made.
"A briefing on that batch of drugs from the underground black market," Cioara said flatly. "Shipping routes, recent contacts, and the spots that might get hit in the next two days — it's all in there."
"Thanks."
Su tucked the item into his pocket and took a sip of the ice water.
A bone-deep chill shot straight down his throat, jolting his nerves and finally clearing his head a little.
But he didn't get up right away.
The light behind the bar leaned warm, catching on the glass so even the condensation showed clearly.
Su held the glass and said nothing for a long while — long enough that the young couple at the far end of the bar paid their tab and left, and he was still sitting there, unmoving.
Cioara didn't rush him.
She switched to a different glass and kept polishing, as if this kind of late-night brooding was something she'd long since gotten used to.
After a moment, Su finally looked up.
"With how deep Schicksal's intelligence network runs here in Arc City right now — can it find out what actually happened to Su Yu? What changed him?"
Cioara's polishing hand paused for half a beat.
If someone could have handed Su a god's-eye view right then, he would have found this whole handoff almost too funny to bear.
Here he sat, perfectly upright, convinced he'd finally tapped into Schicksal's covert network in Arc City, ready to use the might of a vast organization to fish his best friend out of the mire he was drowning in.
What he had no way of knowing was that the very woman gathering intel, running contacts, and passing along reports for Schicksal had already, behind everyone's back, sent her resume to another boss entirely.
Same as Bronie.
If anything, even more of a seasoned double-dealer than Bronie.
Schicksal still paid her salary as usual. Assignments still landed in her hands as usual. She still handed her reports up the chain as usual.
The only difference was which details she chose to include, which to leave out, which to elaborate on, and which to gloss over lightly. She now had a second yardstick in her head for measuring all of that.
And that yardstick didn't answer to Otto. It answered to Su Yu.
So right now, watching Su sit here at the bar in the middle of the night out of sheer worry for his buddy, the first thought that popped into Cioara's head was —
Amusement.
This little punk really had hit the jackpot.
First a wealthy sugar mama in Eden, and now a mother hen checking up on him at midnight.
The ice water at this bar was practically starting to taste like family affection.
"If Schicksal's files are accurate," Cioara said, setting the glass back down, her tone deliberately casual as she stoked the fire, "isn't he your college buddy? And you're using Schicksal's resources to investigate your best friend?"
Su gave a bitter little laugh. "It's exactly because I know him so well that I can't stop worrying."
As he said it, he turned the glass a half-rotation, the ice inside clinking softly.
"I know exactly what kind of person he used to be."
"The moment trouble so much as brushed against him, he'd want to dig a hole and bury himself in it. Avoid the spotlight whenever possible. Play dead whenever possible."
"He'd talk big every day about landing a rich woman and coasting through life, but the second anyone actually stepped toward him for real, he'd retreat ten steps at the speed of light."
Su paused, his tone sinking.
The warm light over the bar shone down, a ring of water droplets glinting around the rim of his glass.
"But the Su Yu I met today — he's not that person anymore."
"How so?"
"Too sharp." Su stared at the ice in his glass. "Connections, skills, capital, fame — even medicine and acupuncture, he can just pull those out too... That's not normal growth anymore."
"It's like someone got forcibly pried out of their shell and shoved outward — pushed into a position he would never, under normal circumstances, have chosen to stand in."
He paused, then finally voiced the thing troubling him most.
"I suspect he went through something devastating. Or got hit with some kind of shock I can't even imagine. People don't just turn from a slacker into... dried, salted slacker jerky for no reason."
Cioara nearly lost it right there and laughed out loud.
She bent down, pretending to reach for a bottle, the corner of her mouth still twitching upward.
Shock?
That word wasn't exactly wrong.
Except these days, that kid's daily routine looked less like suffering shock and more like personally administering it, in shifts, to the whole world's nervous system.
She didn't bother explaining further. She simply pulled a file out from under the bar and slid it across to Su.
"Everything public. Should give you enough to start with."
Su picked up the file and opened to the first page — his brow never relaxed again after that.
The founding date of miHoYo Studio, its funding trajectory, its list of key personnel.
Its collaboration with Anti-Entropy Entertainment's Welt Yang, and the impact data from their crossovers.
Industry opinions on Su Yu. The financial sector's rating of miHoYo. Trending search counts. Public sentiment trends. Version update timelines.
And one page specifically flagged.
Extreme Treasure Hunt.
Su Yu. Elysia. Wilderness treasure-hunting competition. Champions.
Someone had even ruthlessly tucked in two behind-the-scenes screenshots from the show.
One showed him starting a fire with his bare hands in a rainstorm-soaked jungle. The other showed him bursting into motion at the reef's edge, hauling something heavy.
Even as still photos, those muscle lines and that motion were absolutely not something an office shut-in who made a living pounding a keyboard could produce.
Su flipped page after page.
The more he read, the worse his expression got.
He'd thought the shock he'd taken during the day at miHoYo had already been more than enough of an education. But it turned out cold text on a page could be even more lethal than seeing something with his own eyes.
Su Yu was, without question, a top-tier celebrity now.
And a winner through and through.
Standing right at the center of the spotlight, every light in the room aimed at him.
But the more brilliant the resume got, the more Su's unease grew, spreading like weeds.
This didn't feel like an honor roll to him. It felt like a death sentence in disguise.
A smooth, round stone that should have been sunbathing quietly in some corner had suddenly been ground into a peerless weapon and hung out at the eye of the storm. Everyone else was admiring how sharp it gleamed. Su just wanted to ask how much flesh had been ground away to get it there.
Cioara watched the look on his face, turned the glass in her hand a half-circle, and finally spoke. "You really do care about that kid, don't you."
Su blinked, caught off guard.
Then he lowered his head, rubbing his thumb gently along the edge of the file, as if pulled into some distant memory.
A few seconds later, the tension at the corner of his mouth finally eased, and a faint smile surfaced.
"We've known each other a long time."
"Oh?"
"Kevin's the oldest of us, and stubborn as a rock. He looks like some untouchable ice sculpture most of the time, but when things actually go wrong, he charges in faster than anyone, always planting himself in front. I'm the middle one — used to watching a little longer, calculating one step further ahead. Su Yu's the youngest, and the biggest coward when it comes to trouble. Back in school, whenever real trouble came knocking, it was always me and Kevin scheming up ways to push him somewhere safe."
His voice softened as he said it.
"You can laugh at me for being a busybody, but the way I see it, he and Kevin stopped being ordinary friends a long time ago. Brothers born of different parents — that's about the closest way I can describe what we have."
Cioara leaned against the bar, watching him.
"Seeing him soar so high these days — of course I'm happy for him," Su sighed. "But I'm more afraid of what he had to pay, forcing himself to grit his teeth and make it this far — some brutal price none of us even know about."
Cioara couldn't help herself and shook her head, laughing.
"You three brothers really are something else, each one more interesting than the last."
She flipped the glass back onto the rack, her tone turning lazy.
"You and Su Yu both keep a good eight hundred little schemes and secrets tucked away in your heads. Meanwhile Kevin Kaslana, who looks like the toughest fighter of the three of you, ends up being the simplest, most straightforward one in the group."
Hearing that razor-sharp summary, Su actually stopped and thought about it seriously for a couple of seconds.
In the end, he had to admit, with despair, that he couldn't argue with it.
"If you're that worried," Cioara asked, "why not just go ask him directly?"
Su shook his head with a bitter laugh. "Forget it."
He straightened the file back into order, slowly and carefully.
"What right do I have to dig to the bottom of things? After all... I've been keeping the two of them in the dark too, about the kind of high-risk work I do that can't see daylight."
Quiet settled back over the bar.
The slow jazz kept flowing dutifully in the background. Outside in the alley, the occasional passerby's heels tapped lightly against puddles before fading again into the night.
Su put the file away, pulled out a bill from his pocket, set it under the glass, and stood.
"Thanks for the ice water and the intel. I'll carry out the plan as scheduled."
Cioara didn't stop him, didn't see him out.
She just watched Su turn, push open the door, and disappear into the flowing night beyond the alley.
The moment the door shut, the glass shivered faintly.
The shop went completely quiet.
Cioara set down the glass in her hand, reached under the bar, and pulled out another, smaller communication device.
It was thin as a black card, and one glance told you it was no ordinary piece of tech.
She didn't hesitate for even a moment before dialing the number.
One ring.
The line picked up fast.
"Hello?" It was Su Yu's voice on the other end.
Cioara leaned against the bar, watching the neon outside that still hadn't quite faded, her voice lazy, laced with the aftertaste of having just watched a very good show.
"Hey, you little punk."
"What's up?"
"That good buddy of yours just came by to pick up some 'goods.'"
The line went quiet for half a second.
Then came a soft, sharp intake of breath.
"You're kidding."
"Congratulations," Cioara said, twirling the device in her hand, eyes full of mischief. "He's now firmly convinced you've suffered some massive psychological trauma. I'd bet he's on his way right now, seriously debating whether to go buy a turtle at the night market so he can brew you some folk remedy for kidney tonic and mental clarity."
On the other end, Su Yu fell into a long two seconds of speechless despair.
Two seconds later, out came a complaint dripping with world-weary exhaustion.
"...I'm now seriously starting to suspect that the people around me most in need of psychological counseling aren't my starving, needy players — it's this crew of brothers of mine with their limitless capacity for wild speculation."
Listening to the long-suffering sigh on the other end of the line, Cioara finally couldn't hold it in anymore and burst out laughing.
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