The tavern interior was a tomb of charred memories and bitter ash. Yao pushed past the splintered remnants of the main door, the acrid scent of wet cinders and burnt plastic coating the back of her throat. The main room was a skeletal wreck, but she moved with purpose, heading straight for the collapsed lean-to at the back—her former cell. The roof, miraculously, still held, though the supporting beams groaned like tired old bones with every gust of wind that whistled through the gaps. She paused, her eyes—sharp and assessing beneath Oaks's brow—scanning the precarious structure. It wouldn't hold long, but it would hold long enough. A quick glance over her shoulder confirmed the street was clear, the violent theater outside holding the crowd's attention. She ducked inside.
The space was a blackened husk, every surface coated in a fine, greasy soot that clung to her clothes and skin. Heat, residual and oppressive, still radiated from the cracked earth floor. Ignoring the danger, she dropped to her knees, her fingers deftly probing a specific section of the collapsed wall where the mortar had been deliberately weakened. With a soft scrape, she pried loose a cracked floor tile. Beneath lay her meager hoard: several small, heat-warped glass vials containing dried Blue Star Grass, a wax-sealed pouch of Silverroot powder, and a few other common alchemical reagents. The scents of bitter herbs and damp earth briefly cut through the smell of ruin. She gathered them swiftly, stowing them in the inner pockets of her tunic. Her hands moved with a practiced, desperate efficiency, scouring the area for anything else usable before methodically kicking soot and debris over the hiding place, obscuring its existence.
Outside, the "cleaning" was brutally efficient. Twenty-odd men, brutes who made their living by muscle and intimidation, were reduced to a moaning, broken heap in the mud. The leader's subordinates had done the work without breaking a sweat, their movements economical and final. True power, it seemed, didn't always need the flash of arcana; sometimes it was just superior training and the implicit threat of the institution behind them. The leader himself had barely moved, a silent obsidian pillar observing the proceedings. His eyes, hidden behind the visor, tracked Yao's entry into the tavern. After a calculated pause, he followed, his boots making no sound on the ash-strewn floor.
He found the "young master" in the burnt-out shell of the lean-to, seemingly fussing over the debris. Their eyes met in the semi-darkness.
Yao froze for a split second, allowing a flash of genuine alarm to surface—not for being caught in the act, but for the interpretationof the act. She then smoothed her features into an expression of awkward, guilty sanctimony. "I… I was just paying my respects," she stammered, gesturing vaguely at the ruins. "To my beloved."
The leader's unseen mouth likely curled in contempt. He bowed his head slightly, the picture of deference. "The matter outside is settled, Young Master. Are we prepared to depart?"
"I have an appointment with the Li Conglomerate's mining office," Yao said, brushing soot from her trousers with an attempt at nonchalance. "At the café in half an hour. We can leave after that. I'll be out shortly."
The leader acquiesced and withdrew. Outside, one of his men sidled up, nodding back toward the tavern. "And now?"
"We wait for the Young Master to conclude his… business."
"More cleaning up?" the subordinate murmured, using their slang for post-violence erasure—a common service for the nobility, but seldom performed by the principals themselves.
The leader's silence was confirmation. They all saw it: the brutal spectacle with the Maili family was a smokescreen. The real purpose was to sanitize the physical evidence of Oaks's crime. The kid was vile, but he wasn't stupid. Self-preservation was a cunning beast.
The café on the main strip was an island of sterile, artificial calm. Yao arrived with her entourage to find the Li Conglomerate representative already waiting, a man in a sharp, grey synth-suit that seemed to repel the district's grime. His courtesy was flawless, but it was the brittle, hyper-efficient courtesy of a man under immense pressure.
Yao was momentarily taken aback. She knew the Xie family had some standing, but the Li Conglomerate was a true behemoth, one of the three titans of the Brook Province Merchant Guild. For their local rep to be this punctual and polite… it was wrong.
The reason became clear with his first words. "We must, of course, conduct a thorough verification of all property titles and liens before proceeding with the valuation," he stated, his smile not reaching his eyes. "Standard procedure for assets of this… nature."
Standard procedure?Yao's mind raced. Since when did the purchase of some slumlord's holdings on a trash planet warrant this level of scrutiny? This wasn't about her. This was about them.
A memory, buried in the vast lore of Arcane Throne, surfaced. The year 1563 of the Eternal Glory Calendar. A new Minister of Economics had ascended in the Empire, a razor-sharp reformer with a reputation for eviscerating corporate overreach. His first major theater was Brook Province. The conglomerates were under siege, their books being audited with terrifying intensity. Industries operating on the fringes, like trash planet mining—notorious for environmental violations and labor abuses—would be in the crosshairs. Li Conglomerate wasn't being polite; they were being terrified. They needed this transaction to be airtight, a model of corporate responsibility, a shiny piece of evidence to wave at imperial auditors.
Yao understood. The man across from her wasn't a negotiator; he was a man trying to build a legal fortress. Here was an opportunity. With the Xie family's name as leverage, she could likely squeeze a better price, capitalizing on their fear.
She did not.
Two reasons crystallized in her mind. First, revealing she understood their vulnerability was dangerous knowledge. Second, and more importantly, the Li Conglomerate was a sleeping dragon. Annoying it for a few extra coppers was a fool's gamble for someone with her precarious, fraudulent standing.
So, under the leader's watchful gaze, she performed a new act: the suddenly humble, obsequious petitioner. She became the picture of cooperative fear, fumbling with documents, eagerly pointing out tax stamps and inheritance records, her earlier arrogance towards the Mailis completely vanishing. She was a mouse before a cat that was itself being stalked by a wolf.
The transaction proceeded with surreal smoothness. Assets valued at roughly twelve million coppers were liquidated for a flat eight million. A steep discount, but clean, fast, and legally pristine. A physical check was pressed into Yao's hand—no electronic transfers for trash planet denizens; another form of control, another reason the gas canister stash made perfect, grim sense.
The leader noted the check but showed no reaction. As they left, the Li representative removed a tiny recording device from his lapel, sending the file to his superior. The local manager, a man with a vast belly and weary eyes, watched the playback. "The Xie family of Jingyang has been climbing lately," he mused to his assistant. "Can't fathom why they'd bother retrieving such… refuse when the legitimate heir is reportedly exceptional."
"Green-blooded families lack the discipline of the blue-bloods," the assistant replied with a shrug. "Their affairs are always messy."
Outside, the representative boarded a sleek hover-skiff. As it hummed to life, he glanced down at the street where Yao and her guards were mounting their mechanical steeds. A thought, cold and unbidden, scratched at his mind: Strange. The Xie family can certainly afford a private skiff. Why send their bastard son back via land? Can't they even pay the X5 aerial transit tax?
No skiff meant a two-day hard ride to the central sky-dock to catch a commercial starliner. Two days of exposure. Two days of risk.
The first day's journey was uneventful, a monotonous rumble across hardened waste under a bruised sky. The leader's assessment proved accurate; the government road was clear of major threats. But Yao's mind was not. The representative's unspoken question echoed in her own thoughts, breeding a low, constant hum of anxiety.
That evening, in a modest but clean hotel room, Yao finally had a moment of privacy. She performed a meticulous, paranoid sweep for surveillance devices—both technological and arcane—and found none. Only then did she lock herself in the bathroom, her heart a trapped bird against her ribs.
From her pack, she withdrew the most macabre of containers: the funerary urn. The ashes were carefully isolated in a sealed bag; the real treasures lay beside them—the check, the S1 key, and her precious, dwindling herbs.
The check was a promise of future resources, but the S1 was power now. And power was the only currency that mattered on a potentially deadly road.
She set a water kettle to boil, her movements transitioning from nervous fraud to the calm precision of an alchemist. She calculated dosages based on Oaks's pitiful base stats. Constitution 3, target safe threshold 10. Deficiency of 7 points of somatic resilience. Two stalks of Blue Star Grass to reinforce musculoskeletal integrity, one gram of Silverroot to stabilize neural pathways during the gene-rewrite…
As the kettle hissed, filling the small room with the scent of steeping herbs—a smell both bitter and clean, like hope wrested from poison—Yao sat at the small desk, mentally drafting a budget. Eight million coppers. A fortune to a slave, a pittance to a noble. It had to be spent with surgical precision: basic protective gear, a reliable energy source for her small alchemical heater, a stockpile of common reagents for both healing and rudimentary combat potions. Every copper was a brick in the wall between her and exposure.
She turned on the room's wall screen, its glow cold and impersonal. A news channel droned on, reporting on the economic fallout from the "Frost Cicada" stellar storm. Ship losses, route disruptions. The leader hadn't lied about the event itself. An image of the affected star lanes flashed on screen. Yao's finger hovered over the power button, then froze.
Her eyes locked on the route map. B-Route. Incident date: the 13th. The day of the fire. The day she'd become Oaks.
A cold, logical part of her brain, the part that had memorized star charts and trade routes for profit, clicked into place. If they were avoiding the Frost Cicada, and the incident happened on the 13th on B-Route… and they arrived in town days before the 13th… then they had already avoided it. Their reason for not having a skiff… is a lie.
Why lie?
The anxiety crystallized into a sharp, cold fear. This wasn't about corporate politics or noble embarrassment anymore. This was a trap whose jaws she couldn't yet see. She was a piece on a board, and someone was playing a game she didn't know the rules to.
The kettle clicked off. The time for thought was over.
With a steady hand born of desperation, she poured the steaming, murky concoction into a cup. It tasted of earth and iron and resolve. She drank it down, feeling the heat spread through her limbs, a comforting burn that promised strength. Then, without ceremony, she placed the S1 key on her tongue. It was cool, smooth. She swallowed.
The world dissolved.
Not into darkness, but into a void where darkness was a tangible thing. All senses vanished—sight, sound, smell, the feel of the floor beneath her. Only consciousness remained, adrift in a black ocean, focused on a single, immense pressure. It was a wall. A lock. And it was being assailed from within her own being. Thud. Thud. THUD.Each impact was a universe of pain concentrated into a psychic hammer-blow. It wasn't physical agony; it was the torment of her very essence being shattered and reforged. She bit down on a scream, her real body on the bathroom floor probably convulsing, nails digging into tile grout. Silence. You must be silent.
An eternity passed in three minutes.
Then, a sound. Delicate, crystalline. A chime like a tiny bell shaken in a vacuum.
In the void, a single point of light blossomed. Pure, white, and impossibly bright. It illuminated the faint, ghostly outline of a tree—a sapling with a single, glowing root. The first page of the Gene-Sequence. Unlocked.
Information flooded her perception, her personal interface flaring to life.
[Level: 1]
[Primary Attributes]
[Spirit: 18 (Base: 1)]
[Strength: 19 (Base: 1)]
[Constitution: 35 (Base: 3)]
[Agility: 26 (Base: 2)]
Yao's spirit, the core of her being, recoiled. So weak.The S1's multiplier effect was there, but it was amplifying trash. Oaks's genetic foundation was a barren desert. An 18 in Spirit was… pitiful. Barely enough to light a candle, let alone wield meaningful arcana.
But then she remembered. The Devouring Scroll was a paradox. A gamble on two lives.
She focused, accessing a deeper layer of the interface, a function unique to her fractured existence.
[Note: Displayed attributes reflect the amalgamated gene-lock of host vessel 'Oaks.' Core host attributes are masked. Toggle core display?]
She willed it. Yes.
The numbers shimmered, dissolved, and reformed. And as they did, the physical sensation was immediate and electrifying. The feeble, borrowed body seemed to thin, to become a sheath. Her true form, slick with sweat and grime, muscles trembling with newfound power, knees on the cool tile, surged to the forefront of existence. She gasped, the air tasting different, cleaner. She looked up, not at the bathroom mirror, but at the projected screen of her soul.
[Level: 1]
[Primary Attributes]
[Spirit: 188 (Base: 1 + 99)]
[Strength: 48 (Base: 1 + 18)]
[Constitution: 69 (Base: 3 + 15)]
[Agility: 99 (Base: 2 + 25)]
A laugh, ragged and triumphant, caught in her throat. The slave girl… obliterates the wastrel.The staggering Spirit value—188—wasn't from Oaks. It was hers. The resource merchant, the strategist, the will that had clawed from nothing. That base bonus of +99… it was an S-rank potential, a once-in-a-generation talent, lying dormant in a branded slave. The Devouring Scroll hadn't just given her a new face; it had unleashed a monster.
"Either die, or rise to the top," she whispered, the old gamer's adage for the scroll now her lived reality. She spat into the sink—coppery blood and residual bitterness. The face in the mirror was her own, for a fleeting second, eyes holding a depth and calculation that Oaks's features could never mimic.
But the victory was laced with ice. This power was a secret she must keep buried, a last resort. The game board was still deadly.
She focused, pulling the mask of Oaks back over her true self. The sensation was like slipping into a damp, ill-fitting suit. The world dulled slightly.
Her mind, now honed by the genetic awakening, replayed the day with crystal clarity. The leader's lie about the transport. His too-perfect deference. The way his men watched her, not with the contempt of superiors for a weakling, but with the flat, patient gaze of hunters waiting for a trap to spring.
He had given her water. Tested her constitution. Was obedient to every whim.
Why?
The answer, when it came, was simple and horrifying. You indulge a prisoner. You make them comfortable. You make them feel safe.
Right up until the moment you lead them to the slaughter.
Yao—the soul within Oaks's shell—stood up, wiping her face. The fear was gone, burned away in the genetic forge. What remained was a cold, sharp clarity. The road ahead was a knife's edge. The leader was a ghost hiding in daylight.
And she had just become something far more dangerous.