Yao knew, with the cold, calculating certainty of a spider assessing the strength of its web, that waving the banner of the Economic Ministry would send the black-market denizens scrambling for cover. None of those profit-hungry jackals would dare have her followed. After leaving the emporium, her form—a shadow among deeper shadows—weaved through a labyrinth of dripping alleys and steam-choked passages, visiting three more establishments, each more discreet than the last. Her purchases were swift, specific, paid for with silent, efficient transfers from her newly fattened account.
"A single Cryo-dependent Auxiliary Crystal. Yes, one. 200,000? The price has… inflated."
"One JF 'Gremlin' payload. Standard variant. 800,000? Might as well just mug me. Fine. One."
"And…"
Finally, she slipped into a cheap transient hotel that smelled of stale incense and mildew. Inside her rented room, the sole light source a flickering amber glow-globe, she laid her acquisitions on the thin, stained mattress. The most prominent item was the heavy, shielded case. It seemed to hum with a potential that made the air crackle. One thousand copper notes. A king's ransom, spent in a single, reckless hour.
She popped the latches. The interior glimmered with a soft, cerulean light. Row upon row of Tier-1 Agility Crystals, each the size of her thumb joint, perfectly faceted, pulsing with a cool, kinetic energy. But there were… too many. She counted swiftly, her breath catching. Not one hundred. Two hundred. The shopkeeper, terrified of an Imperial audit, had attempted to bribe the phantom inspector, doubling the order. Another million coppers worth of contraband, a staggering fortune meant to implicate her, to drag her down into the muck with him.
The names Zhou Linlang and the Ministry carry that much weight?A hysterical laugh bubbled in her throat, tempered by a sharp spike of anxiety. Is this illegal? I'm a law-abiding citizen!The internal protest was weak, drowned out by the greedy, thrilling pulse of the crystals in her hands. Wealth corrupts,she thought, even as her fingers closed around one of the cool, smooth stones. The old me was so frugal.
The Agility Crystal was a marvel. It felt alive, a captured fragment of wind and lightning, its surface so clear she could see the faint, swirling motes of energy trapped within. It was beautiful. It was obscenely expensive. And she was about to treat it like gravel.
With a focus that shut out the world, she began the tedious, maddening process. She produced the Arachnid Ascension Ring from its pouch. The ugly, green-spider artifact seemed to drink in the room's feeble light. One by one, she began fusing the Agility Crystals to it. It was a brutal, inelegant process of pure energy infusion, forcing the crystal's properties to bleed into the ring's matrix.
Click. Hiss.A soft chime of success. The ring's band glowed faintly. +5 Agility.
Click. Crunch.A dull, crystalline pop. Failure. 10,000 coppers evaporated into inert dust.
Click. Hiss.Success. +5.
Success. Failure. Failure. Success.
It was a symphony of waste, a performance that would make any seasoned Arcanist weep. Gems meant for legendary Green-tier gear were being pulverized to empower a single, niche Bronze-tier ring. Her wrist ached. Her Spirit felt frayed from the constant, minute concentrations of will. But she didn't stop. Two hundred crystals. A waterfall of copper notes, cascading into a single, ugly band of twisted metal.
When it was done, the Arachnid Ascension Ring lay in her palm. It was no longer merely ugly; it was wrong. It throbbed with a palpable, hungry energy, the green of its surface now a deep, venomous emerald shot through with threads of silver-blue lightning. Its modified property read: +450 Agility.
The infamous loophole. The ring's sublime "Gossamer Ascent" skill required a base 300 Agility to activate. But the requirement checked the wearer's totalAgility, not their innate stat. By grotesquely over-enchanting the ring itself first, then wearing it, she was gaming the system. It was the act of a profligate madman, or a desperately clever cheat.
"I was once so sensible," she whispered to the empty, shabby room, a ghost of her former, pragmatic self. Then she slid the ring onto her finger.
The effect was instantaneous and violently alien. It wasn't pain; it was a fundamental rewriting of her body's relationship with space and inertia. The world slowed down, or rather, her perception of it accelerated to a terrifying degree. The flicker of the glow-globe became a lazy, predictable pulse. The dust motes in the air hung like distinct, navigable islands. She felt impossibly light, as if her bones were hollow, her blood replaced with helium.
A tentative, experimental hop.
THWAP!
Her head slammed into the ceiling three meters above before her mind had fully registered the command to jump. She barely got her hands up in time to cushion the blow, the impact echoing in the small room. She dropped, but the descent was all wrong—too floaty, too slow. She stumbled, her limbs moving with a twitchy, over-responsive violence that felt clumsy. Yet, her eyes… they saw everything. The grain in the wooden floorboards, the microscopic cracks in the plaster, the individual threads in the dusty curtain. It was sensory overload.
No time to train. No time to adapt.She glanced at the cracked chrono on the wall. The game was in motion.
That same night, in the reeking depths of Alley 13, a man in a nondescript data-worker's coverall glanced nervously over his shoulder. The air was thick with the greasy smoke of street food and the low, constant thrum of illicit power generators. From a pool of absolute darkness deeper in the alley, a figure in a hooded cloak coalesced.
"Hold," the cloaked figure hissed, its voice a synthetic rasp. "The exchange. Use a Drift-Cantrip. My package for yours. Simultaneous. No closer."
The data-worker nodded, sweat beading on his upper lip despite the chill. "A clean trade. Nothing more." His eyes dropped to the figure's boots—common, scuffed, revealing nothing. With a muttered word and a flick of his wrist, he sent a small, padded case floating through the dank air. At the same moment, a cloth-wrapped parcel drifted toward him from the shadows, borne on a more powerful, practiced current of air—a Tier 4 Drift spell.
Hands snatched at the airborne objects. A swift, frantic inspection—a glance at data-chips, a heft of the parcel's weight. Satisfied, both figures melted backwards into their respective veils of gloom, the entire transaction lasting less than fifteen seconds.
The data-worker, once around the corner, activated a subcutaneous comms link. "Package secured. The seller—neutralize him. Cleanly."He then moved, not with fear, but with the brisk purpose of a man returning to sanctuary. His path took him to a private, mid-level transport shuttle docked in a discreet bay. As the hatch hissed open, he finally allowed himself a breath of relief, reaching to deactivate the privacy field generator on his belt.
The relief died instantly. The shuttle's ambient hum was wrong. The welcoming chime of the AI did not sound. The lighting remained at a dim, standby level.
His blood turned to ice. He looked up.
Zhou Linlang sat in the pilot's chair, one leg crossed over the other, her face illuminated by the soft, scrolling data of a handheld scanner. She hadn't bothered with an ambush at the alley. She had known a man like this—a mid-level Li Conglomerate fixer—would be too paranoid, too well-equipped with counter-surveillance tech. His guard would only drop when he believed himself safe, cradled within the metal womb of his own transport.
"You're early," Zhou Linlang remarked, her voice conversational. "I was just reviewing the shuttle's recent navigation logs. Curious destinations."
The fixer's mouth worked soundlessly. Instinct and training took over. His mind grasped for a combat incantation, his lips beginning to form the first syllables of a Lightning Jolt. He never finished.
From the shadows behind him, two Ministry guards moved. There was no dramatic burst of energy. One simply jammed a neural-disruptor rod into the small of his back. A sickening crackle-fizzof purple energy arced through his nervous system. Every muscle in his body locked, then turned to liquid. He collapsed to the deck plating, a marionette with its strings cut, a gurgle of pure terror escaping his lips.
Zhou Linlang didn't rise. She watched as a guard knelt, yanked the man's head back by his hair, revealing the ashen, terrified face of the Li Conglomerate's local Compliance Officer—the very man who had overseen the "accident" reports. She then leaned forward and picked up the cloth-wrapped parcel he had dropped. Unwrapping it, she found a small, old-fashioned crystalline data-slug. She slotted it into her scanner. Grainy, horrifying footage played out: safety protocols manually overridden, warning alarms silenced, containment doors sealing as miners screamed.
The definitive evidence. The one piece missing from Qin Mianfeng's otherwise comprehensive dossier.
Her comm chimed. "Magistrate Zhou, we lost him. The secondary target… he vanished. One moment he was in the alley mouth, the next… gone. Like a portal. The Li assets tailing him lost him as well."
A translocation scroll? For a Level 4 itinerant Arcanist? The pieces, once puzzling, now clicked together with cold, hard certainty. Qin Mianfeng wasn't just lucky or resourceful. He was being guided, equipped.
"He'll head for the orbital skiff docks," Zhou Linlang said, her voice cutting through the hum of the shuttle. "Seal them. He's making a run for it."
The private skiff docks of X5 were a chaotic symphony of roaring engines, shouting deckhands, and the ozone stink of cheap repulsor lifts. It was the aorta of the planet's underworld, a place where fortunes and lives were traded for passage off this rock. Qin Mianfeng moved through the chaos with a predator's tension, the weight of the data-chip transaction a physical heat in his inner pocket. He had burned his bridge with Zhou Linlang. The grand design of riding her coattails to power was ash. But he had secured his future—a small fortune from Li, enough to buy his way into a decent academy far from here. He'd used his most precious asset, the monthly "Short-Step Portal" granted by the spectral elder, to evade pursuit. All that remained was to board one of these rattling heaps of scrap and blast away from this wretched planet forever.
He was two turns from the main dock concourse, in a narrower service alley stacked with fuel canisters, when a primitive, animal part of his brain screamed a warning. Not a sound. A shadow. It flitted across the grimy wall opposite him, vast and misshapen—a grotesque, spindly silhouette that belonged to no flying vehicle.
Spider?His mind, trained for magical threats, recoiled at the primal image. The instinct to look up, to identify the threat, overrode tactical discipline. His neck craned.
He saw her. A figure, impossibly high up, suspended between two rusted communication spires by nothing at all, silhouetted against the bruised purple of the night sky. For a fleeting, surreal second, she looked like some mythical, giant arachnid poised in its web.
In that second, something small and dark detached from the silhouette and fell. Not fast, like a bullet, but with a silent, inevitable grace.
"MOVE!" the elder's voice shrieked in his mind, a raw blast of panic.
It was too late. The object—a JF "Gremlin," a compact, hyper-volatile fusion of wind and fire elements designed to detonate on impact—kissed the shoulder of his jacket.
The world dissolved into light and fury.
BOOM
The concussion was a physical wall that smashed Qin Mianfeng off his feet. The alley became a sun. A roiling blossom of violet and cerulean fire erupted, swallowing dumpsters, shredding metal siding, and hurling him like a rag doll into the opposite brick wall. The sound was less a noise and more the universe tearing in half.
Alarms across the dock region began to wail. "Explosive discharge! Dock Sector Gamma-7! All security, converge!"
In the heart of the conflagration, a figure stirred. Qin Mianfeng lay in a smoldering crater of melted pavement, his clothes charred, his face blackened. But he was alive. Across his chest, the Green-tier breastplate he wore—another gift from his otherworldly patron—glowed with a fierce, defiant jade light. Runic wards etched into the metal had flared, absorbing the cataclysmic heat and force, cocooning him in a bubble of protective energy. Smoke poured from his body, but beneath the soot, the green glow pulsed, stubbornly knitting singed flesh and stabilizing fractured bones. He coughed, a wet, ragged sound, and tried to push himself up, his eyes wide with shock, pain, and a dawning, volcanic rage.