Inside the Special Intensive Care Ward of the Long Nation's City First Hospital in the southwest, the atmospheric pressure was suffocatingly low. Outside the window, the post-storm sunset cast a tragic, rust-red light across the sterile white bedsheets.
Fengxi stood quietly before the bed, her small frame draped in the oversized black trench coat. In the corner of the room, the translucent clone of the Golden Loong, radiating rolling waves of ancient heat, let out a low rumble: "Mortals approach. I do not wish to encounter them. Dost thou depart?"
Fengxi looked down at the elderly woman whose eyes were slowly blink-opening on the bed. Within her heterochromatic dual pupils, twin micro-vortexes tore and pulled frantically under a weight of immense psychological constraint. Without turning toward the loong, she simply shook her head. Some debts of fate had to be faced.
"I shall return. Should any deviation occur within the laws, the totem upon the nape of thy neck shall instantly grant thee perception." With a fluid twist of its colossal frame, the Golden Loong left no sonic boom; it vanished as if cleanly erased from the canvas of reality, slipping into the spatial rifts of the Divine Realm.
Before its departure, a sudden beam of golden light merged into Fengxi's throat and cerebral cortex.
Instantly, the bedside monitor—which had been flatlining with a monotonous, mechanical tone—saw its core values leap madly toward the healthy green zone. The Loong Saliva Diluent was cruising through the old woman's marrow, safely reconstructing necrotic tissue and withered blood vessels block by block. More importantly, the warm orange Orange Orb hovering before her face pulsed with a gentle brilliance. This was a "Wish" personally sealed by the Goddess, a divine override that welded the elderly woman's life force into a state of vibrant rejuvenation.
The old woman turned her head with slow, measured strength, piercing her gaze directly into Fengxi. Her lips, fully restored to a healthy crimson flush, moved slightly, uttering a name so minuscule yet etched into her very bones: "Zhizhi..."
The voice was whisper-light, carrying an absolute intuition that transcended species and crossed all karma. She needed no one to explain the flawless young skin before her. She only knew that the little creature who used to wag its tail over a single bite of a strawberry cookie had forcefully snatched her back from the jaws of Death.
"How do you know I am... Zhizhi? I have changed completely into this form," Fengxi's voice trembled, and for the first time, a fracture appeared in the cold, clinical facade of her heterochromatic eyes. I can speak the tongue of the Long Nation now? Sensing the lingering warmth of the golden light in her mind, her heart swelled with a sharp bitterness.
"There is a deity with you, right?" Tian mother's voice was remarkably clear, her gaze entirely void of fear. "The Goddess showed me many memories... in that boundless, terrifying darkness, every corner was filled with the shadow of thee begging Her to save my life..." The elderly woman wept, extending her calloused hand to tenderly touch Fengxi's pale, bloodless cheek. "My child, thou hast suffered so much."
Leaning against the edge of the bed, Fengxi's tears finally broke through their floodgates. The agonizing headaches from Sato's foul, invasive memories had not made her cry; the crushing exhaustion of executing the Beast God's cleansing missions alone across the ruins had not made her cry; but before the only elder bound to her by a blood-covenant, and before the very Beast God who had rained down wrath upon the entire world yet granted absolute, tender protection to her alone, she sobbed like an ordinary human child.
Clack.
The sensor doors of the intensive care unit slid open violently under a heavy force.
Tian Shuangxin stood at the threshold, clutching a thermal box that leaked the sweet, comforting scent of fresh strawberry cookies. She was trembling, worn to the bone by prolonged anxiety and grief. Yet the exact microsecond she took in the sight of her mother sitting upright, fortified by the warm orange glow of the hovering Orange Orb, the thread of her restraint snapped entirely. She collapsed heavily to her knees beside the bed.
"Mama... thou art awake... I am sorry, I failed to protect Zhizhi..."
Fengxi forcefully compressed and evaporated the human tears at the corners of her eyes. She stood up slowly, straightening her spine until it stood as rigid as a steel spike driven deep into the wasteland.
"You... are you Zhizhi?" Tian Shuangxin rose shakily, her fingers subconsciously reaching into the air to grasp the invisible Red Thread of destiny, only to find the thread had already embedded itself completely into the primary magnetic field of the ward.
Fengxi turned around slowly. The Beast God has shown me such mercy; how shall I ever repay The Great One? Within her heterochromatic pupils, there was no longer any trace of a cowering rodent's fear; there was only the absolute, freezing clarity of an executioner's truth. "The Long Nation provides the 'Medicine,' and I provide the services of a 'Cleaner.' The first stage of purification is complete."
Yet, before the three of them could even wipe away their tears, a sharp, piercing air-defense siren erupted across the entire hospital complex without a single microsecond of warning!
Woooo—! Woooo—!
The high-pitched wails signaled the Long Nation's highest-level emergency alert: [Class-S Special Foreign Hostile Intrusion].
The heavy ward door was kicked open a second time with brutal, smashing force. Blue Tiger Commando Captain Chen Haoran lunged inside, his tactical hazmat suit slashed with raw, mathematically precise tears that leaked dark-red blood from his left arm. Clutching a heavy tactical electromagnetic sidearm, he barked, "Ms. Tian! The B.E.N. tracking cells have breached our perimeter. This time, it's the Leviathan syndicate!"
His sharp gaze shifted, locking momentarily onto the unfamiliar five-foot-tall girl in the oversized trench coat, completely unaware that this adorable frame housed the soul of Zhizhi.
Turning back to Tian Shuangxin, Chen Haoran continued frantically, "Their black-market extraction operatives utilized completely non-metallic, insulated hydraulic heavy crossbows. They've already forcefully penetrated the subterranean first basement! Old Wang was pinned directly to the elevator shafts by an armor-piercing heavy bolt—he's gone! Their objective is to capture you and force Zhizhi to surrender the baseline genetic sequence assets of Subject Zero!"
"Leviathan." Inside the depths of Fengxi's heterochromatic eyes, the twin micro-vortexes began to rotate with a manic, murderous velocity.
Those pests again. It was this exact network of syndicates that had hunted her so ruthlessly, forcing her to flee into the sanctuary of the Divine Realm in the first place. Her mind operated at high-dimensional speeds, sorting through the foul memories inherited from Sato—unlocking the classified, blood-soaked archives detailing how this specific syndicate specialized in biological asset collection on rainy nights.
Outside the window, the pristine azure sky was suddenly torn apart like a scrap of rag handled by a titan, clamped down instantly by dense networks of ink-black storm clouds. The rain crashed down without a microsecond of warning, carrying a pungent stench of iron rust and the viscous, heavy density of karmic tears.
Although the Beast God had dismantled the global screens of judgment, the legacy of Golden Ingots and Orange Orbs remaining on Earth had transformed into a brutal, life-claiming poison for mortal schemers. Operating within the blind spot of the divine ceasefire, these hidden parasites had armed themselves with primitive mechanical weaponry, eager to violently strip away high-dimensional genetic assets.
"They seek the 'Subject Zero' sequence within my flesh," Fengxi's lips curved into a soft, mechanical smile that was cute yet freezing enough to turn bone marrow into absolute ice. "Mortal greed truly refuses to wait for even a single second."
"Ms. Tian, take the old lady and evacuate through Manual Fire Escape No. 3! The Loong Shadow sequence has already established a defensive wall downstairs!" Chen Haoran roared, the blood from his arm dripping steadily onto the linoleum.
"No. There is no need to run."
Fengxi lightly brushed the dust from her black trench coat, stepping rhythmically toward the massive glass window that faced the raging storm outside. Under the stunned, horrified gazes of Chen Haoran and Tian Shuangxin, Fengxi extended her fair, slender right hand. With her palm perfectly smooth and open toward the void before her, she slammed her five fingers downward into a fist.
"Gale, rise."
BOOM————!!
The entire structural framework of the City First Hospital building shuddered violently. This was no chemical detonation driven by gunpowder; it was a forced, high-dimensional inversion of the local [Air Density and Gravitational Constants] executed through Fengxi's authority as the Wind.
Within a one-kilometer radius, a spiraling vortex of centripetal wind blades exceeding two hundred kilometers per hour tore through the hospital corridors, service elevator ducts, and ventilation shafts, driving deep into the earth.
Inside the outpatient complex, over a dozen elite Leviathan commandos—encased in non-metallic high-strength composite exoskeletons and hoisting hydraulic high-pressure crossbows—didn't even have a fraction of a second to pull their triggers. The non-metallic armor they took such immense pride in proved as brittle as sodden paper paper before those transparent wind blades.
Psh! Crack!
The sounds of hydraulic lines rupturing, skeletal frameworks snapping, and internal organs violently gasping and vaporizing within the sudden vacuum joined in a horrific, muffled symphony. Wherever the wind swept, the operatives' bodies were thrown like ragdolls by the vacuum pressure, the severed lines of their exoskeletons spraying blinding mists of engine oil and crimson blood.
On the roof of the main complex, the elite B.E.N. cell commander, codenamed "Black Panther," stood shrouded in the shadows of a mechanical ventilation unit, his fingers gripping an orange chemical flare designed to fire via a spring-driven firing pin, completely independent of electrical circuitry. Looking through his high-precision infrared scopes, his pupils contracted sharply as the heat signatures of his entire strike force below were neutralized and erased at a visible velocity.
"Curse it... this isn't a biological mutation. This is a baseline erasure of reality!" For the first time, a destructive, primal terror surfaced within Black Panther's emerald-green eyes.
He yanked the pin, launching the chemical flare into the night sky. But within the absolute domain locked by karmic law, the flare rose a mere three meters before entering the pocket of total vacuum. With the air density reduced to zero, the light failed to refract; the chemical compound turned into a dead, pitch-black fire in mid-air, falling uselessly into the mud and rain below.
Fengxi pushed open the window and leapt from the ledge.
Her thin black trench coat snapped fiercely in the two-hundred-kilometer gale, unfolding like a pair of dark wings. Under the awestruck, frozen gazes of wounded military personnel and cowering survivors below, she hovered with absolute, flawless precision at the exact center of the blood-splattered hospital plaza.
Any stray droplet of blood, spray of engine oil, or fragment of sheared alloy bullet was forcefully pulverized into microscopic dust the exact millisecond it drew within three feet of her body. Not a single grain of filth could touch the pure, porcelain-doll visage of her face.
She tilted her head, looking at the mangled Western death-commandos convulsing violently in the vacuum of their suffocation, the ghostly green abyss in her right eye burning to its absolute peak.
"Sato's memories tell me that the lives of you pests are worth thirty thousand dollars per gram. Heh, quite expensive..."
In a split second, inside the Long Nation's Underground Joint Command Center, the radar operator stared at the screen as the warning dot turned from blood-red to a dead gray within a ten-thousandth of a second, signifying the absolute annihilation of the hostiles. A trail of cigarette ash dropped onto his hand as he reported to the elder at the sovereign seat with a trembling voice:
"Chief... at the City First Hospital coordinates... the hostile special forces have been entirely cleared by physical means. The 'Cleaner'... vacuumed the air out of the entire sector within a single second."
The elder Chief leaned on the mahogany desk and stood up slowly, his straight frame radiating the absolute majesty of a battle-hardened general. He pressed his pen down, signing his name on the final line of a Class-A top-secret red-headed decree:
"[Transmit the order across the entire realm! From this moment forth, the 'Cleaner' is officially recognized as a First-Class Pillar of the Long Nation. Any entity attempting to lay a finger on his genetic asset shall be deemed as declaring war upon our national destiny. No warnings shall be issued; execute immediate, saturated, and absolute annihilation.]"