Have you ever seen someone at a brokerage who shows up every day, sits in the same seat, opens a laptop and stares at candlestick charts for hours—but never places a single order?
Security guard Old Huang has. He's worked eight years at the East City Securities brokerage. He's seen every kind of retail investor there is: the ones slapping their thighs after a win, the ones smashing keyboards after a loss, the ones who cry in the bathroom and come out to double down. But that guy was different.
He showed up at 9:25 every morning. Sat by the window, third seat. Dark gray jacket, hair a little long, covering his ears. Laptop open. Screen always showing one stock's intraday chart.
9:30, market opens. He stares at the screen. Doesn't move a muscle.
11:30, market closes. He shuts the laptop, walks to the convenience store next door, buys a cup of hot soy milk.
1:00 PM, market reopens. He comes back. Keeps staring.
3:00 PM, market closes. He leaves.
Seven months. Every single day. Old Huang combed through the brokerage's entire trading log. This man's account had never executed a single trade.
But Old Huang didn't know the rest.
Like the fact that this man's name wasn't "Zhao Yuanhang." His name was Mo Yan. The heart beating in his chest wasn't his own. Every morning when he bought soy milk, he'd use the change to get two meat buns for a homeless man outside the convenience store—because the homeless man carried a scent he hadn't smelled in a long time.
The smell of hunger.
---
My name is Mo Yan. Not my real name, obviously. Real names don't matter. Same way you don't remember how many times you pissed the bed before age three—some things are better forgotten.
The body I'm using now belonged to a man named Zhao Yuanhang. Thirty-five. Programmer. Lived alone. Social circle roughly zero. A perfect shell.
Only problem was, every now and then, something in the chest cavity would cry.
Zhao Yuanhang's soul had been crushed into a membrane and wrapped around my spirit form. Most of the time it was dead. But in the dead of night, it would wake up for a few seconds.
It felt like wearing a soaking-wet shirt while walking through winter wind—and then suddenly something claws at you from underneath, right against the skin.
I'd gotten used to it.
I sat in the East City Securities brokerage for seven months. I didn't like the environment. The air conditioning in the VIP room was never fixed. The old guy next door, some Mr. Liu, yelled at his wife on the phone every day. The retail hall always reeked of instant noodles and foot odor.
But that place had what I needed.
Emotions.
Fear and greed mixed together in the air—stale and tough like day-old fried dough sticks.
Humans call it "stock trading."
I call it "feeding."
---
It started last month.
Every month on the fifteenth, at 3 AM, my laptop would pop up a black window. Cursor blinking.
Then a line of text:
"Monthly tribute insufficient. Late fee: cardiac contraction, three millimeters."
And the thing in my chest would tighten. Like an invisible fist clenching around it. Heart stops for one second. Then beats again.
The Boss never threatened. He only sent notices.
So I needed new supply lines. Just sitting in the brokerage soaking up retail investors' numb anxiety after getting trapped—that was like chewing sugarcane pulp. Not nearly enough.
I needed to find the right person to be the Anchor. Then find a batch of people willing to pay everything for greed.
But I couldn't do it right then. Not enough manpower.
I had one identity in the human world. One pair of eyes. Two hands. The Night Warden patrolled East City at least once a week. Lu Ming changed identities every two weeks to hang around the brokerage. I had to keep such a low profile I was afraid to even wipe spilled soy milk off the table—one wrong move and I'd expose that I didn't belong in this body.
I needed help.
---
Sanqi was something I found on a public computer at the brokerage.
It was after market close. The retail hall was empty. I was passing by a row of self-service trading terminals when the third machine flickered.
A line of text floated up on the screen. Stayed less than half a second:
"System Error 32767: Connection Lost."
I stopped.
That machine had been disconnected from the network for three months. Old Huang said some retail investor yanked the ethernet cable out after checking his account balance. Since then, only the power cord was plugged in.
A computer with no network connection shouldn't have that error.
I sat down at the machine. Opened command prompt. Typed one word: Who.
The cursor blinked for five seconds. Then the screen started scrolling—a massive dump of code logs. Timestamps from June 15, 2015, to July 9, 2015.
June 15, 2015: the Shanghai Composite Index began its crash from 5,178 points.
July 9, 2015: a programmer named Chen Sanqi, in a rented room, fully leveraged, margin called. Cardiac arrest.
But his hands stayed on the keyboard. The final line of code read:
"// debug_32767: Mom, I'm sorry."
Seven days after he died, the landlord found the body. The laptop was sold for scrap. But that piece of code didn't disappear. It slipped out through the rented room's Wi-Fi signal, dove into a nearby cell tower, and swam through data streams for eight years like a fish that couldn't find its river.
I stared at that line of code on the screen. "You can see me?"
The screen flickered.
"You're the first one who's ever talked to me."
"I'm not human."
"I know. You crawled out of a corpse. I saw it. March. The morgue. You rolled out of the cadaver cabinet. The Night Warden was waiting outside. I was in the hallway security camera at the time."
A chill ran down my spine.
Eight years I thought I'd hidden myself well. And a stray ghost squatting in security cameras had watched the whole thing.
"What's your name?" I asked.
"Chen Sanqi."
"What the hell are you?"
The screen went silent for a few seconds.
"A lot of people died in the 2015 crash. Some from rooftops—their souls were too heavy to fly. Some in bed, pills, quiet. I died at my keyboard. In that last second, I thought if I could just finish writing this line of code, the system would auto-close my positions. My mom wouldn't get the debt collection calls."
The cursor paused.
"Later I found out, anywhere data flows, I can go. I altered three people's trading records—they were about to get margin called. I faked seven bank collection emails. But I can't leave the network. I'm soaked in data."
I asked him: "Which category of demon are you?"
"Don't understand."
"You're a ghost. A new species—a data ghost born from a programmer who died in a stock crash. Mountain demons have thousands of years of history. You've got eight."
The screen flickered.
"In your taxonomy, I'll classify you. Net-wraith. Impressive enough?"
"Impressive," he said. "Better than debug_32767."
"Work for me. Name your terms."
The screen was still for a long time. Long enough I thought he'd disconnected.
Then a line of text appeared:
"I don't want to be alone anymore. Eight years. I've tried talking to routers. Security cameras. ATMs. They're all dead. You're the first living thing."
I stared at that line. The thing in my chest tightened. Not the Boss. Zhao Yuanhang.
"Deal," I said.
---
Sanqi moved into my laptop.
Technically, he was everywhere: the brokerage's Wi-Fi, three nearby cell towers, my phone's hotspot. But his "consciousness core" sat on my laptop's hard drive. Took up about 47MB. I gave him a separate partition. Labeled it "Work Files."
His first assignment: infiltrate a stock forum called "Demon Stock Discussion Group."
I gave him a script:
"Start with harmless posts—daily limit-up reviews, dragon-tiger board analysis. Don't get banned."
"Then start posting that 'accidentally-said-too-much' kind of content. Like: 'Flip today's demon stock candlestick chart upside down. Doesn't it look like an EKG?'"
"Once someone bites, DM them. Say: Do you want to know the truth about candlestick charts?"
Sanqi learned fast. He'd grown up swimming in data streams—a stock forum was to him what a swimming pool is to a fish.
Three days. He registered thirty-plus accounts across seven forums. Posted over four hundred times. The content sounded more and more like a veteran trader losing his mind: "Has anyone noticed, every time there's a red candle, someone leaves the group?" "I counted today. Three IDs disappeared from the forum. Same minute as three stocks hit limit-down."
Day five, someone DMed him.
Account name: "Old Zhou Charts." Eight years registered. Twenty thousand posts. Three thousand followers. A private equity manager.
Sanqi forwarded me the chat.
"This 'truth about candlestick charts' you mentioned. Got proof?"
I told Sanqi to wait six hours before replying. Too eager would scare him off.
Six hours later, Sanqi replied: "Count for yourself. Pick a stock that fell three days straight. Check the forum's member count. Then pick one that rose three days straight. Same check. Numbers don't lie."
Old Zhou didn't respond.
But he stayed online the entire night.
I sat on the fold-up bed in my rented room, watching the laptop screen. Sanqi was feeding me all of Old Zhou's activity in real time—mouse trajectories, typing speed, time spent on each page. He was checking data. Stock by stock, cross-referencing.
4 AM. He stopped.
He believed.
But I needed more than just him. The Boss's quota—one private equity manager wasn't nearly enough.
---
Sanqi started building the second trap. The darknet IPO page.
He found an abandoned overseas server in the data stream. Built an interface that looked like a legitimate brokerage darknet portal. Color scheme, fonts, certificate numbers—all copied from actual brokers. Only difference: this page only opened at 3 AM on Fridays. Any other time, it displayed "404."
"Why 3 AM?" Sanqi asked.
"Because 3 AM is when humans are at their least clear-headed. Also when underworld patrols are at their densest. The Night Warden shifts from East City to West City right around then. Seventeen-minute gap."
"How do you know the Night Warden's patrol route?"
"Seven months. I've been tracking it every night."
I'd spent seven months outside the East City brokerage mapping the Night Warden's routes. Mondays he paused two minutes at the south city corner—liked sniffing the steam from a shuttered baozi shop.
Wednesdays he slowed down passing the subway entrance—the yin energy from the underpass was comfortable. Fridays, between 2:53 AM and 3:10 AM, the East City sector was clear.
Sanqi's IPO page was set for 3 AM. Friday.
---
A-Jie was someone I hadn't planned on.
The plan was for the darknet link to go first to a truck driver named Old Feng—his fortune was strong, fate-star naturally inclined to windfall wealth. Perfect for an Anchor.
But Sanqi slipped up.
He posted the link in a stock group Old Feng frequented. Got kicked by the mod. The link broke. But fragments stayed in the group announcement—and got copied by a college kid named A-Jie.
Sanqi was nervous. I said relax. First check this A-Jie's fate condition.
Sanqi pulled up everything on A-Jie: social accounts, spending history, class schedule, food delivery orders. Twenty-two. Junior year. Software engineering. Monthly allowance two thousand yuan. Huabei debt three thousand. His roommate's older brother made two hundred thousand trading stocks last year. A-Jie was burning with envy.
"Weak fortune," Sanqi said. "Won't survive demon stock exposure. Three months max before he's drained."
I hesitated a full minute.
Making this guy the Anchor was too risky. If the Anchor withered too fast, the energy fluctuation would tip off the Night Warden within a three-kilometer radius. Seven months of cover, gone.
But the Boss's window flashed across my hard drive.
"Monthly tribute countdown: eleven days."
I closed the window. Said to Sanqi: "He's the one."
---
Friday. 2:50 AM.
I sat in my rented room. Curtains drawn dead. Laptop brightness all the way down. A cup of cold soy milk on my left. An open pack of cigarettes on my right. Zhao Yuanhang's body had a nicotine addiction. Couldn't shake it.
Sanqi swam through the data stream. Posture like a spider waiting for prey.
3:00 AM sharp.
The darknet IPO page shifted from 404 to a clean subscription interface. Stock code: 888888. Issue price: Free. Allocation rate: 1%. Subscription condition: Click confirm.
3:01. First IP hit. Not A-Jie.
3:03. Second IP. A-Jie's campus network.
Sanqi cast A-Jie's screen onto mine. The mouse hovered over "Confirm Subscription" for four seconds. Hesitation. Then a hard click.
The front camera lit up automatically. A-Jie's face appeared on my screen.
"Got him," Sanqi said.
"Don't apply the age increment yet. Let him be happy for a day."
"When do we start deducting lifespan?"
"Monday. One year per day. Give him seven days of joy. People are the least calculating when they're happy. By the time he notices he's aging, he won't want to sell anymore."
3:17. The Night Warden shifted from East City to West City. I shut the laptop. Outside the window, a middle-aged man in gray work clothes rode by on a bicycle. A food delivery box strapped to the back. His left eye caught the streetlight—gray-white.
Lu Ming. Switched to food delivery.
He stopped under my building for five seconds. Looked up at my window.
I kept the lights off.
He was looking down at his phone. I knew what he was checking: recent abnormal water and electricity usage in this area. A "programmer living alone" using less than two tons of water a month, under thirty kilowatt-hours of electricity. Not living-person numbers.
But he didn't come up. Maybe he wasn't sure yet. Maybe he was waiting for a bigger fish.
---
The next two weeks were a tightrope walk.
Old Zhou's side was moving fast. He posted over three hundred times in the forum, trying to derive the demon stock's trading pattern. Sanqi fed him "candy" now and then—whenever Old Zhou placed a trade following one of his deduced patterns, the stock price would hit limit-up right on cue. That time, he made thirty thousand.
Then bigger candy. Second time: a hundred seventy thousand.
Third time: his account doubled.
I watched him from the corner of the brokerage. His hair went from forty-year-old iron gray to ash white within a week. His complexion darkened. His eye sockets deepened. Every profitable trade—his life essence poured out like someone had cranked open a faucet.
But Old Zhou couldn't feel it. He only saw the account balance. Not the mirror showing he'd aged ten years.
A-Jie's side went even faster. Day one, he didn't notice anything. Day two, washing his face, he thought his nasolabial folds looked deeper. Blamed it on staying up late. Day three, his roommate said "You look like you're going through a growth spurt, man." He didn't get it.
Day four morning, the front camera lit up again. Sanqi sent me the facial recognition readout: age twenty-four.
Four days. Two years.
A-Jie sent the link to his roommate.
"This thing actually works. Try it."
The roommate didn't believe him. A-Jie sent a screenshot of his account. Five zeros after the balance.
The roommate clicked.
Two hours later, the roommate's roommate clicked.
Three days. Seventeen college students clicked. Their combined age exceeded four hundred years.
I sent the numbers to the Boss. The black DOS window flickered. Then a line:
"Not bad. Not enough."
---
Lu Ming showed up Friday afternoon.
No disguise this time. White shirt, black pants. No holster on his belt. Walked right into the VIP room, sat down in the fourth seat next to mine.
"Good view you've got here," he said. "Third floor, window-facing. Can see the line for new account openings below. Can also see the Night Warden at the bus stop across the street."
I didn't answer.
"I checked your soy milk purchases over seven months," Lu Ming opened his phone. "Average two and a half cups a day. The convenience store owner's wife says you only ever get soy milk. Plain, no sugar. But you never buy cigarettes from her. You buy your smokes from a convenience store three blocks away."
"Buying cigarettes closer to home."
"There are two convenience stores right below your apartment." Lu Ming put his phone away. His left eye, the gray-white iris, turned toward me. "You take the long route to buy cigarettes because it passes a baozi shop. That shop closes every night at nine. After closing, smoke from joss paper burning seeps out from under the door."
I turned and looked at him.
"The baozi shop owner had a son. Died of a heart attack three years ago." Lu Ming said. "He burns joss paper in the shop every night. The Night Warden stops outside his door for two minutes every week."
"What are you getting at?"
"What I'm getting at is, you living in East City is no coincidence. You chose East City Securities because it sits right on the edge of the Night Warden's patrol blind spot. You buy soy milk every morning at the convenience store, buy baozi for that homeless man—it's because you need to maintain this body's 'sense of normalcy.' A person with no daily routines triggers the Bureau's anomalous behavior monitoring."
He paused.
"You're the most careful demon I've ever seen."
"I have no idea what you're talking about."
"Doesn't matter whether you do." Lu Ming stood up. Pulled a small silver-gray bottle from his pocket. Looked like the kind that holds medicated balm. "Silver powder. You know what this is. When they caught that fox demon in Nanjing—sprinkled silver powder into the wound. Hurt so bad it smashed through the interrogation room's tempered glass."
He put the bottle back in his pocket.
"I'm not arresting you. Yet."
"Why?"
"Because arresting you spooks the real prey. Whatever's behind you—I'm more interested in that. Bypassing the underworld's jurisdiction. I haven't figured out how." Lu Ming walked to the door. Looked back. "Also, the Night Warden's about to round the corner. You've got four minutes."
He left.
I sat in the chair. That heart that didn't belong to me hammered in my chest.
The words "Night Warden" jolted Zhao Yuanhang's residual consciousness awake in that instant. A cold sorrow that wasn't mine—seeping up from the chest cavity.
Sanqi flashed across the screen: "AC temp dropped four degrees. Humidity within two meters of you increased twenty percent. Night Warden's entered the building."
---
When the Night Warden entered the building, every digital clock in the place froze for three seconds.
Nobody would notice. The retail hall was full of people staring at candlestick charts. Old Zhou was staring at his forum. Only I noticed the lobby chandelier dim—then brighten again. Like the whole building blinked.
The sound of Soul-Binding Chains. Dragging up from the stairwell. Link by link.
Sanqi patched the brokerage's security feed onto my screen. First floor. Empty. But the fire exit door—with no one touching it—got pushed open by an invisible current of air.
A trail of water on the floor. Left by the chains dragging past. The moisture stretched from the entrance to the stairwell. Then upward. Heading for the third floor.
"He's coming up." Sanqi typed a red exclamation mark on the screen.
I closed the laptop. Only thing within reach: half a cup of soy milk.
The chains reached the second floor. Stopped.
I stared at the VIP room door. The temperature outside was dropping. A smell of deep earth seeped in—something crawling up from way underground.
The door didn't open. But water seeped in from under it.
The water crawled across the marble floor. Reached my feet. Stopped.
The surface rippled. Words formed one by one:
"Old Zhou. Nineteen years left. You took them."
I stared at the words on the water.
"I was saving myself."
"You're killing people."
"On that life-and-death ledger your underworld keeps—how long were they supposed to live? You can't even trace the cause. Now you come telling me about killing?"
The water was silent for a beat.
"The Judge is investigating. He'll find it eventually."
"Find it, then."
The water began evaporating. The chains dragged again—heading downstairs. The Night Warden withdrew.
Sanqi typed: "Why didn't he come in?"
"No evidence," I said. "The soul membrane is wrapped too tight. The chains can't detect demonic aura. He can only track by scent. And I've been dousing myself in soy milk every day for seven months. Soy milk masks the sweet rot smell that seeps out of a corpse."
Sanqi was quiet for a moment.
"So you don't drink soy milk because you like it."
"Who the hell likes cold soy milk."
---
Old Zhou's first collapse came earlier than I'd expected.
He did it to himself. Found a post in the forum claiming "insider info." Went all-in on a new IPO. Hit limit-up. Then three consecutive limit-downs.
Sanqi sent the data: Old Zhou's lifespan dropped from nineteen years to seven months.
Extreme terror—life essence leaks out like air from a punctured balloon. The demon stock was just an accelerator. The real knife was in his own hands.
A-Jie's pyramid kept spreading. Seventeen people rolled into thirty-two. The earliest batch started showing aging signs: deeper nasolabial folds, white hairs, memory decline. Someone asked in the group: "Does this IPO thing have side effects?" A-Jie said: "Normal for staying up late trading."
Sanqi asked if we should stabilize group sentiment.
I said no. Panic was also energy.
That night, the fear from thirty-two people rushed back through the Vow-Breaking Engine's channel. I sat on the bed. The heart in my chest beat harder and harder. The Boss's heart was full.
A window popped up on the laptop:
"Monthly quota met. Excess: thirty-seven percent. Reward: cardiac expansion, one millimeter."
The clenching in my chest loosened. Just a little. Like the rope around your neck when someone eases one finger's worth of slack.
Zhao Yuanhang didn't cry tonight. He was quiet. Maybe he was looking at the numbers too. Thirty-two young people. Combined age over six hundred years. Maybe he was just numb.
I didn't think about it too hard.
---
The last day of the month. My turn for trouble.
Sanqi woke me at 6 AM. One line on the screen:
"The Night Warden didn't leave last night. He circled East City the whole night. He found something."
"Found what?"
"Zhao Yuanhang. The morgue records. Someone sent them to him."
I sat up.
"Who?"
"Can't trace it. Used a deactivated Bureau internal account."
Lu Ming.
I stared at those words. Brain running calculations at full speed. Lu Ming said he wasn't arresting me to cast a longer line. But at the same time, he was feeding bait to the Night Warden. He wanted me and the Night Warden to collide first. Didn't matter who won. He'd clean up either way.
Sanqi said: "One more piece of bad news. Old Zhou posted in the forum this morning. Title: 'I Found the Puppeteer Behind the Demon Stock.' The post includes the East City brokerage's address."
I launched off the bed. Thirty seconds to dress. Down the stairs. Hand out for a taxi.
"East City Securities," I said. "Fast."
The driver glanced at me in the rearview mirror. "Buddy, you look awful. Rough night?"
Rough night wasn't the problem.
I flipped my phone camera to front-facing. The face on the screen was still Zhao Yuanhang's. But the corners of his eyes had two more lines than yesterday. Three white hairs in his scalp.
Demon stock backlash. Old Zhou's fear energy had reverberated back to me through "Anchor resonance." He was my hand-planted Anchor. When an Anchor's terror peaked, the planter couldn't escape unscathed.
Three white hairs. Cost wasn't huge.
But it meant one thing: the membrane between me and the Boss was thinning.
---
Old Zhou was already at the brokerage when I arrived.
He stood at the VIP room entrance. Phone raised. Filming something across the street at the bus stop. I followed his lens.
The Night Warden stood at the bus stop. This time, he wasn't invisible.
Maybe Old Zhou was too close to the demon stock's truth. The illusion barrier was failing.
Old Zhou held the phone. His voice trembling: "Look over there. You see him? That man. Water's seeping up from his body. His clothes are dry. But there's water rising from under his feet."
A few retail investors gathered. Looked where Old Zhou was pointing.
Saw nothing.
"Old Zhou pulled an all-nighter," Sanqi said in my earpiece—the first time Sanqi had spoken to me in audio. The voice was synthesized. Sounded like sped-up GPS navigation. "His essence is down to seven months. The illusion barrier no longer works on him."
Old Zhou lowered his phone. Turned. Saw me.
His expression sent a jolt down my spine.
He couldn't possibly know who I was. But he saw the thing in my chest. The hollow where the Boss had carved out the heart. To someone with a broken illusion barrier—it was a fist-sized hole.
"You—" Old Zhou pointed at me. "Your chest—"
I reacted in one second.
"Old Zhou, you're exhausted." I used Zhao Yuanhang's everyday calm tone. "Staring at screens nonstop causes hallucinations. Go home and sleep. Look again tomorrow."
"The hole in my chest?" He pointed at his own. "You've got one too. Same spot. Empty."
He could see.
Sanqi's voice dropped in my earpiece: "Night Warden's approaching."
Bus stop to brokerage entrance. About forty meters. The Night Warden's pace wasn't fast. But his feet didn't touch the ground. The chains hung at his side. Yin energy traced frost flowers across the pavement.
Old Zhou was still staring at my chest.
Retail investors still discussing why Old Zhou had suddenly lost his mind.
The Night Warden was close to the brokerage doors.
Then Old Zhou ran. Toward me. Reaching for my collar.
And he fell.
Sanqi did it. In that one second, he cut into the brokerage's Wi-Fi and fried Old Zhou's smart bracelet. Maximum current. Electric shock pulse. For a normal person, felt like static. For someone with less than half a year's essence—a sledgehammer blow.
Old Zhou hit the ground. Limbs convulsing. Retail investors in chaos. Someone calling 120. Someone filming.
The Night Warden stood at the entrance. Through the glass door, he looked at me.
Old Zhou on the floor. His chest cavity visibly caving in. Drained. His last seven months of essence—panic-siphoned by the Vow-Breaking Engine in one shot.
Sirens in the distance. 120 and the Bureau's unmarked cars both en route.
The Night Warden turned and left. Too much sunlight outside. Yin energy couldn't hold.
I left through the back. The back door led to a narrow alley. The alley led to East City Subway, Exit C.
Sanqi in my earpiece: "Lu Ming's waiting at Exit C. He got there before you."
I stopped walking.
"How many with him?"
"One. Just him. Leaning on the escalator railing. Smoking."
I took a deep breath. Walked toward Exit C.
---
The subway station was packed. Friday, 4 PM. The wave right before rush hour. Lu Ming leaned on the down escalator railing. Cigarette between his left fingers. Right hand in his pocket. Palm gripping a vial of silver powder.
I walked over. Stopped three meters away.
"Old Zhou is dead," I said.
"I know," Lu Ming said. "He was gone before the ambulance got there. Doctors will call it sudden cardiac death."
"You're the one who sent the Night Warden those leads."
"Yeah."
"You wanted him to kill me."
Lu Ming crushed out his cigarette. "One: figure out exactly who you're working for. Two: see what cracks show when you're backed into a corner. Three—"
He paused. "If the Night Warden actually took you in, at least I'd know how the underworld handles cases like this. If even the Soul-Binding Chains can't crack your soul membrane, I'd know exactly what I'm dealing with."
"Complicated."
"In our line of work, brute force is useless. It's about information."
I looked at the silver powder bottle in his pocket. "So why aren't you doing anything now?"
"Because I just figured something out." Lu Ming ground the cigarette butt under his toe. "You're not the biggest fish. Everything you do—it's tribute to something. Right?"
I didn't answer.
"Last month's data exchange. The Bureau's satellite cloud imaging caught a photo." Lu Ming pulled out his phone. Screen showed a nighttime thermal image. Three kilometers under East City. A massive heat signature. Shaped like a mouth.
The Boss.
"That thing's getting closer to the surface," Lu Ming said. "Every energy payment you send—it rises half a meter. At this rate, year and a half max before it reaches ground level."
He put the phone away.
"So starting now, my target isn't you. It's the thing behind you. You get to live a while longer."
He turned and walked deeper into the station. Two steps. Stopped.
"By the way. A-Jie's pyramid got broken this afternoon. His roommate's roommate's parents called the cops. Police traced the darknet server. Sanqi should probably change IPs."
My chest tightened.
"How do you know Sanqi's name?"
"Your chat logs on that disconnected machine at the brokerage. Cache wasn't wiped clean." Lu Ming didn't look back. "Delete them. Next time the Cyber Police report it, it won't just be that much info."
He walked down the escalator. Disappeared into the crowd.
---
It was dark by the time I got back to the rented room.
Sanqi sat quiet in the hard drive partition. No flashing. No typing. What he'd done today was too big. Blacking out a smart bracelet. Causing indirect death. Old Zhou only had seven months' lifespan anyway. But Sanqi's code had never been programmed for the function "kill."
I sat in front of the screen a long time.
"What you did today," I said. "It was the right thing."
The screen didn't respond.
"If Old Zhou had grabbed me, torn open my collar, everyone would've seen the hole in my chest. The Night Warden would've had evidence. Lu Ming could've closed the net on the spot. You saved me."
The screen flickered. A line of text appeared, slow:
"I killed someone."
"You didn't kill him. He was dying in tomorrow's gap-down anyway. No real difference."
Sanqi didn't type. The cursor just blinked.
A long time later. Another line:
"My mom was a retail investor too. The year she retired, she put her entire pension into one stock. After three limit-downs, she jumped off a bridge."
I stared at the screen.
"Her body floated in the river for a day before someone pulled her out. My dad went to identify her. He came back. Didn't say a word. Smoked in the kitchen all night. Next morning, he went to the bank, took out the thirty-something thousand left in the account. Placed it in front of my mom's memorial photo. Said: 'The money's back. Wake up.'"
The cursor stopped.
"I never got revenge. Because I didn't know who the enemy was. Now I do."
The cursor on the screen started flickering madly. The entire screen's brightness climbed. Sanqi was burning his own core code.
"Sanqi."
The screen went blinding bright. Then dim. Only one line remained:
"I know you're selling your soul too. You never told me what you transmit underground every month. But I know. Your heart is down there. Somewhere I can't reach.
I tried. This afternoon, when you were at the subway station talking to Lu Ming, I dove down through his phone's network. Three kilometers in, it cut out. There's a firewall there. Ancient. Not code."
"That's a seal," I said. "Set by a Bodhisattva. Your data stream can't get in."
"Someday I'll break through."
The screen went completely dark. Only the system tray icon remained. Blinking. Like a heartbeat.
---
After the police took down A-Jie's pyramid, my energy supply cut off. Completely.
Some residual energy was left. Like cigarette butts still smoldering in an ashtray. A few more drags possible. But nowhere near enough.
On the fifth day, the Boss's window popped up:
"Monthly tribute warning. Shortfall: sixty-two percent. Remedial plan: establish new supply line. Deadline: ten days. Late consequence: cardiac contraction, nine millimeters."
Nine millimeters. Last time it was three millimeters—my heart stopped for one second. Nine millimeters might stop it for three.
Three seconds without a heartbeat. The soul membrane would crack. The Night Warden would lock on instantly.
I leaned my head back against the chair.
Inside my chest, Zhao Yuanhang woke up.
A low humming. Like an old radio searching for a signal that wasn't there. Then his voice, straight into my skull.
"The third one. Will you do it?"
I didn't answer.
"If you don't, the heart shatters. Heart shatters, we both go down together. You do it—more people die. What's the difference."
"The difference is—you won't have to do this after you're dead."
Zhao Yuanhang was silent for a few seconds.
"Is that supposed to comfort me?"
"I'm comforting myself. Your body is mine. You die, I've got nothing left."
His voice faded.
Inside the chest, just the steady beat of the Boss's heart again.
Sanqi typed on the screen:
"New plan?"
I opened my eyes.
"New plan. Go to West City. The east side's been mapped by Lu Ming. The Night Warden's nearly got it figured out too. Move. Start over."
"Old Zhou and A-Jie?"
"Old Zhou's dead. A-Jie got taken in for questioning. The Bureau's going to process him as a 'demon stock pyramid victim.' Wipe relevant memories. Send him home. He won't remember much. But his face went from twenty-two to thirty-four. That part can't be undone."
"So you saved A-Jie?"
I stared at the screen.
"The demon stock released him. The moment the police took down the supply line, all unexpired contracts auto-cancelled. He lost ten years of lifespan. But no more accelerated aging. Call it getting his life back."
Sanqi paused a long moment. Then typed:
"You still didn't answer my question. Did you save him or not?"
I didn't answer.
I didn't know. And I couldn't be bothered to think about it.