The metal armrests were cold.
I looked down at the straps on my wrists. Not handcuffs — medical restraints, padded. An IV needle in the back of my hand, the tube connected to a machine bigger than a freezer.
Someone coughed behind my head.
"Awake?"
I turned. Lu Ming sat on a folding chair in the corner of the room, legs stretched out, heels resting on another chair. The gray-white film over his left eye didn't reflect the fluorescent light. It swallowed it.
"You slept eleven hours," he said. "Plus the six in the morgue. A man dead for seventeen hours. First thing he does when he opens his eyes? Doesn't scream. Doesn't cry. Doesn't call for a doctor. He turns to a mirror and practices how to smile with a human mouth."
He got up and walked over. Pulled a penlight from his pocket. Shone it in my left eye. Right eye. Checked my pupil response.
"Interesting." He put the light away. "Come on. Let's get you on the machines."
I followed Lu Ming out of the morgue. The fluorescent tubes in the hallway flickered, off and on. Off and on. The ER was still noisy at this hour — a kid crying somewhere, an old man vomiting. The rumble of gurney wheels rolled up through the floorboards from the level below.
Two vehicles sat outside the entrance. One was a white ambulance, back doors open, stretcher empty. The other was an unmarked black Iveco. The rear compartment was sealed tight, no windows.
Lu Ming pointed at the black one.
"Get in."
I stared at the white ambulance.
"This one." He pointed at the Iveco again. "A police van's too conspicuous. We told the hospital we're from the Health Bureau. If you get in that ambulance, they'll run you through emergency protocols. You know how many security feeds I'd have to scrub if you spent one night in the cardiology ward? Three floors' worth."
I climbed into the Iveco.
The air inside was stale. It smelled like a dentist's office mixed with a hardware store. Three machines crammed the space: one for drawing blood, one for scanning irises, and a metal cabinet I couldn't name — seven copper rings embedded in its surface.
Later, I heard the technician say its full name: "Spirit Resonance Detector."
Specifically designed to catch possessing spirits.
The machines ran for three hours. Lu Ming sat at the back of the van, flipping through test results, tossing each page aside when he was done. The paper hitting the metal table made a sharp, brittle sound.
"CBC normal."
"DNA matches Zhao Yuanhang's file completely."
"Iris pattern match confirmed."
He turned over the last page. Stared at it for five seconds.
"Spirit resonance reading — zero."
He held the report up to my face.
"See for yourself. This machine was built to detect spiritual possession. Even the lowest-level wraith clinging to a cockroach would give a resonance reading of at least point-five. Guess what yours was?"
I didn't answer.
"Zero." He answered himself. "Something possessing a corpse, and the machine can't read it. Unless—" He paused. "Unless it's fused with the body at a molecular level."
His gray eye swept over my face.
"But that's supposed to be the domain of thousand-year demons. You're just a numbered nightmare fiend. Three-hundred-something." He shook his head.
"I'm not possessing anyone," I said.
Lu Ming waited.
"I'm Zhao Yuanhang. The programmer who got scared to death. Your autopsy report says it clearly: dopamine and adrenaline levels both off the charts. Cardiac death at the intersection of extreme excitement and extreme terror. Medically speaking, not unheard of."
Lu Ming didn't respond. He picked up another form.
"Your left-hand grip is forty percent weaker than your right. Zhao Yuanhang's medical records say he was left-handed."
My heartbeat skipped half a beat. The soul shroud was wrapped too tight. I hadn't even inherited all the muscle memory.
"The morgue was cold," I said.
"Morgue temperature is four degrees Celsius. Not cold enough to freeze a dead man's muscle memory into the wrong hand."
He set the form down. Leaned back in his seat. Stayed quiet for a moment.
"Fine. Finish the tests first."
For the next three days, I was held in the testing wing of the Paranormal Bureau's West City branch.
Day one: bodily fluids. Spinal fluid, synovial fluid, aqueous humor. A twenty-centimeter needle went in through the gap between my third and fourth lumbar vertebrae. The fluid that came out shimmered pale gold in the test tube. Not a human color.
I stared at the tube, already building excuses in my head. The technician glanced at it and said: "Normal. Spinal fluid contains trace bilirubin. Yellowish means slow metabolism. Didn't sleep well, that's all."
Day two: brainwaves. Sixty-four electrodes glued to my scalp. Close your eyes. Open your eyes. Do math. Recall your childhood. The EEG printout stretched over a meter long. The technician studied it for ten minutes. Wrote five words: Normal Adult Brain Activity.
"Your prefrontal cortex is a little overactive," he said. "You think too much."
Day three: sleep study. They injected me with a sedative. To a nightmare fiend, that was sugar water. But I closed my eyes and faked eight hours of sleep. The readings showed twenty-three percent deep sleep, forty-six percent light sleep, and two hours seven minutes of REM.
A perfect match for the sleep architecture of a thirty-five-year-old anxious programmer.
The fourth morning, Lu Ming stacked all the reports together. Stapled them twice.
"Three whole days. Twelve tests. Cost me a hundred seventy thousand in funding." He tossed the stack onto the table. "Conclusion: you are a dead-once, left-handed-turned-right-handed, slightly-jaundiced-spinal-fluid, overactive-prefrontal-cortex ordinary human being."
"Can I leave?"
"There's something in you I can't identify." He didn't turn around. "Between the T wave and P wave on your ECG, there's an electrical signal with abnormal morphology. It doesn't match any known waveform within the cardiac electrical axis. My equipment can't read it. But it can't rule it out either. For now, I'm filing it as 'incidental premature contraction.'"
He pulled the door open.
"I'll be watching you."
The door didn't close. One fluorescent light in the hallway was dead. The other was dying.
I walked out of the Paranormal Bureau building at 3:40 PM. The sunlight stung my eyes, made me squint. Zhao Yuanhang's pupils adjusted to light far slower than a nightmare fiend's. The body had been out of the morgue for four days. Still hadn't fully recovered.
I went back to Zhao Yuanhang's apartment.
Nineties-era tower block in the old district. Thirteenth floor. One-bedroom. The police seal on the door had been torn off. A scrap of tape still clung to the doorframe, edge curling. Case closed. Coroner's verdict: sudden cardiac death. A programmer in his thirties, working overtime every day, staying up to watch the stock market. Heart gave out. No one would ask questions.
I pushed the door open. The air inside was dense, stuffy as a basement. The computer still sat in front of the gaming chair. Screen black. A thin layer of dust on the keyboard. Zhao Yuanhang died in that chair that night. I'd watched it happen from the ceiling. Now I was inside his body, walking back to the spot where he died.
I sat in the chair for a while. Zhao Yuanhang's face stared back at me from the dark screen. The expression didn't look like mine.
That night, I spent four hours sweeping the room.
Above the doorframe, a metal flake the size of a rice grain. RF reader. Monitoring heart rate abnormalities.
Outside the living room window, wrapped around the burglar bars, a strand of fiber optic thinner than a hair. Night-vision remote camera, infrared-assisted. Had to be installed from the exterior wall. Thirteenth floor. Lu Ming requisitioned special equipment.
Inside the toilet tank, a button-sized acoustic sensor. Underwater listening. Optimized for conductive sound waves.
In the ceiling light fixture of the bedroom, power draw point-three watts higher than the rated value. A thermocouple chip.
And one more thing I couldn't find.
Lu Ming wouldn't just plant surveillance in obvious spots. The real ace was somewhere invisible. Sole of a shoe. Lining of a jacket. Somewhere harder to check. He let me find those four on purpose. Let me think I'd swept the place clean.
I smiled at the doorframe. That smile wasn't for myself. It was for Lu Ming.
The next day, I went to work.
Zhao Yuanhang's company was called Yuanhang Zhilian — literally his own name. He'd worked there seven years. Frontend to backend. Office near the Third Ring Road to a shared rental outside the Fifth Ring. Finally bought this one-bedroom in the old tower block. The company hadn't folded. He'd been dead three days. HR's first call was to ask why he'd been a no-show.
I had to go back to work for him.
His desk was on the seventh floor, corner spot, by the window. Ops guy on the left. QA on the right. Product manager diagonally across, the type who stands up at 4:30 PM sharp every day to push deadlines.
I wore Zhao Yuanhang's badge. Swiped his card through the gate. Sat in his chair. Looked at his code. At lunch, Old Zhang from ops asked if I was coming on the weekend team outing. I said no. Old Zhang clapped me on the shoulder. "You look way better than last week."
I said I'd been sleeping earlier.
The first week, I did nothing extra at the office. Just typed code. Attended meetings. Ate lunch. Clocked out. Zhao Yuanhang's residual muscle memory made my typing speed almost match his. Except I hit the backspace key more than he used to.
The second week, I started on something more meticulous. Memorizing Lu Ming's surveillance patterns.
The RF reader refreshed every fifteen seconds. The fiber optic outside the window auto-rebooted between 2:40 and 3:10 AM. The infrared light dimmed for point-three seconds during that window.
The acoustic sensor in the toilet tank switched to passive mode if no data transmitted for four to six hours. Reactivation required water vibration. Which meant flushing.
The thermocouple in the bedroom light fixture was the dumbest one — it only read room temperature changes. I flicked a lighter directly under it twice. Ten seconds each time. The next day's surveillance log had two entries: "Target suspected of smoking."
Nothing more. The thermocouple couldn't tell what the lighter was actually being used for.
I memorized these gaps like multiplication tables.
The sixth night, I took a risk.
2:55 AM. The fiber optic rebooted. In that point-three-second blind window, I reached out to the feral cats sleeping on the AC unit outside.
I touched the lead cat's nose — an old black tomcat. Point-three seconds was enough to latch onto its consciousness. The old cat's dreams were fragmented. Rats bursting from sewer drains. Pounce and miss. Burst again. Miss again. Six loops of it. I skimmed a fingernail-sized fragment of emotional residue from its frustration.
Thinner than sugarcane pulp.
But it proved one thing: I could feed during the fiber optic's blind spots. As long as the distance was short, the window brief, the emotion shallow.
By the third night back in the apartment, I was starving.
The soul shroud wrapped around my spirit body, demonic energy consumption ten times lower than before. But that didn't mean I didn't need to eat. The mysterious boss was gripping my heart. The heart anchored the soul shroud's stability. Part of the energy needed to maintain the shroud — I had to get that myself. Like a boss approving your land for building a house. He supplies the bricks and cement. You do the labor yourself.
Back in the sales department, I'd sip anxiety off a few retail investors every day. A steady trickle. Not anymore. That rice-grain-sized chip above the doorframe read my heart rate twenty-four hours a day. If the data ever showed "conscious but heart rate below forty," anyone with half a brain would know the person lying there wasn't normal.
I had to stay hungry.
By the third evening, the edges of the soul shroud began to feel rough. A raw, scraping sensation starting at my ribs, contracting toward the spine. It wouldn't kill me right away. But it would make Zhao Yuanhang's body start showing livor mortis. Real livor mortis.
I needed a way to feed without being detected.
Day four. I ordered twice-cooked pork at the little diner downstairs. Three real estate agents at the next table were eating noodles. One of them took a call. After hanging up, he lowered his voice to the guy beside him: "Old Zhao's got a buddy at a brokerage. Says bad news drops day after tomorrow. I'm pulling out at market open."
I bit into a piece of pork.
That night, I did something. Didn't enter his dream — dream entry required contact, contact would get caught by the fiber optic outside the window. I used a different method. Text message.
"The property you're watching, Shengyuan Real Estate, may be affected by bearish news tomorrow. However, some analysts believe there's a restructuring play in three months. Whether to reduce holdings is your decision. Legitimate investment advice. Reply T to unsubscribe."
Sent at 2:15 AM. He didn't unsubscribe, of course.
Market opened the next day. He didn't sell. By close, he'd added to his position. Thirty thousand yuan.
I sat in Zhao Yuanhang's apartment with my eyes closed. A sweet-bitter taste rose through the floorboards. Anxiety mixed with wishful thinking. Half-cooked emotional energy. Not as dense as a nightmare, but better than starving.
The fourth morning, I noticed the fiber optic outside the window had been replaced.
Thinner gauge. So thin I had to press my face against the glass and stare for three seconds to confirm it was a wire and not a strand of spider silk.
Lu Ming knew I'd made a move.
He might not know what text I'd sent the agent. But he could see the agent — ready to cut losses yesterday, adding to his position today. A suspected non-human entity under Paranormal Bureau's "close observation" sends a text at two in the morning, and the very next day a nearby agent makes an irrational buy decision? Lu Ming didn't believe in coincidences.
Day five. 3:00 AM. The laptop screen turned on by itself.
A black window popped up. White text cursor. No title bar, no close button, no minimize button. I tried to close it. Couldn't even find the process.
The cursor blinked six times.
"Monthly Payment Countdown: 28 days. Quota: 3 karma crystals. Note: First month trial. Late payment triggers penalty protocol."
Three crystals.
One karma crystal can drain the emotional energy of a fully engaged participant. Three crystals meant I had to set up a complete operation within twenty-eight days — find a mark, plant the seed, and harvest the first batch of victims to their karmic peak. At least a dozen deep participants.
With Lu Ming monitoring my every move, this was like digging through an iron door with my bare hands.
The cursor blinked twice more. A new line appeared.
"Penalty Protocol: Heart contraction, starting at six millimeters. One additional millimeter per day of delay. No upper limit."
I didn't know what six millimeters would feel like.
The heart wasn't mine. It mimicked a heartbeat under the soul shroud's guidance, seventy-two beats per minute, steady as a metronome. But the heart's core — the one the boss had taken — connected to the soul shroud's foundation. He didn't need to touch this fake heart. He just needed to pull that invisible thread.
Three millimeters. Six millimeters. What would happen?
The soul shroud was stretched across every blood vessel wall. The contraction force would transmit directly into the brainstem. Zhao Yuanhang's body would convulse. Spasm. Eyes rolling back. And then? Maybe I'd get up. Maybe the shroud would tear.
If it tore, demonic energy would leak out. The Night Patroller's soul-binding chains could sense it from three hundred meters.
The window vanished.
I sat in the dark for a long time. The laptop fan hummed. The fiber optic outside the window aimed at my profile. The button-sized acoustic sensor still rested at the bottom of the toilet tank, submerged in still water.
Lu Ming on one side of the screen. The boss on the other.
Three people's gazes crowded inside this single laptop.
It took me five days to type out Yuanhang Zhilian's second demon stock on that notebook. Yongsheng Holdings.
I chose the greed archetype. Hooked to the "Thou Shalt Not Steal" precept from the Eight Prohibitions. On the surface, a high-dividend utility stock. Annual dividend per share looked slightly better than bank interest. But what it actually paid out wasn't money. It was lifespan.
The first few months, shareholders would notice they looked healthier. More energetic. Then dividend day would come. A text message on their phone: "Dear shareholder, this period's dividend has been distributed. After tax, the actual amount credited to your account: three years."
It wasn't a financial product. It was a contract dressed in respectability. Sign it, and you paid interest with your life.
I had to seed this without leaving the apartment.
So I used a residual programmer's memory from Zhao Yuanhang's fingertips and wrote a crawler. Scraped over twenty local stock trading groups. Filtered keywords: "retirement," "dividends," "safe investment," "set and forget."
A name hit the filter: Sun Guoping.
Sixty-two years old. Retired middle school teacher. Four hundred twenty thousand yuan in savings. He'd posted in a group: "Anyone know a stable stock? Doesn't need to go up fast. Just something where annual dividends beat bank interest?"
I registered a burner account. Profile picture: a smiling middle-aged man.
"Yongsheng Holdings. Utilities sector. Under the Municipal Water Group. Seven consecutive years of dividend payouts, never below five percent. A genuine retirement stock. Buy it, forget it, collect money every year."
Sun Guoping bought in the next day. A hundred thousand. Testing the waters.
A week later, he increased to two hundred fifty thousand. Two weeks later, four hundred twenty thousand. Everything.
I sat in Zhao Yuanhang's apartment, eating a bowl of cold tossed noodles. The boss's window blinked on the laptop beside me: "Monthly Payment Progress: 0.4/3."
Four days after Sun Guoping went all in, footsteps sounded in the hallway.
Not the landlord shuffling in slippers. The heavy, rhythmic thud of tactical boots on old concrete stairs.
Three knocks on the door.
I pulled it open.
Lu Ming stood outside. Not in uniform. Wearing a food delivery jacket. Holding a takeout bag.
"Your delivery." He shoved the bag into my hands. His eyes swept over my shoulder, scanning the room. "Fifteen-yuan malatang. I ordered it for you."
"Since when do you moonlight as a delivery driver?"
"Last week. Delivery guys can't get into your building without an access card. I asked the property management for one." He pulled the card from his pocket and flashed it. "Also installed three pinhole cameras. Two in your neighbor's unit. One downstairs. I know what time you leave, what time you come back, and how many bowls of malatang you've eaten."
I set the bag on the shoe cabinet.
"You came all the way here just to tell me that?"
"I came about Sun Guoping." He dropped the official tone. "Sixty-two years old. Retired teacher. Last month, he didn't even know how to open a stock trading account. Two weeks ago, he joined an online stock group. Someone in that group told him to buy Yongsheng Holdings. Newly registered ID. IP address one street over from yours."
"There are hundreds of people in this building. One street over covers thousands."
"But only one of them sent stock advice during that time window. You."
I leaned against the doorframe.
"Your surveillance catch me typing?"
"No."
"Audio pick up me talking?"
"No."
"Then why are you here."
Lu Ming was silent for a moment. Then he slipped back into that slow, lazy drawl of his. "Came to tell you something. The Night Patroller's patrol schedule changed this cycle. Wednesday night, 10:40 to 11:30 PM. East City sales department vicinity. You might want to be somewhere else."
I stared at his left eye. The gray-white iris showed no expression in the dim light of the hallway's sound-activated lamp.
"Are you helping me?"
"I'm helping myself. If you fall into the Night Patroller's hands, I can't study you anymore. If you get caught now, my hundred-seventy-thousand-yuan testing budget goes down the drain."
He turned and left. The rhythm of tactical boots on stairs — steady, monotonous, no hurry.
I shut the door. Leaned back against it. Stood there a long time.
Lu Ming hadn't come to threaten me. He was demonstrating a more sophisticated form of control. I don't need evidence, he was saying. I don't need audio. I don't need footage of your fingers on a keyboard. All I need is one indirect inference to know what you're going to do. Right now, I'm not moving against you because I haven't figured out what's behind you yet. The moment he did figure it out — or the moment he felt me slipping out of control — the man who'd watched me through that window for three days and nights would dump his files in front of the Night Patroller without hesitation.
I didn't sleep that night.
Zhao Yuanhang's body needed sleep. The soul shroud could fake an EEG, but it couldn't fake facial puffiness and dark circles. The next morning, I splashed cold water on my eyelids before heading out.
After that day, I stopped all activity. No new targets. No messages to Sun Guoping. I even turned off stock app push notifications on my phone. Yongsheng Holdings' candlestick chart wobbled on its own for two days. Up three percent. Drifted back down. Sun Guoping didn't move either. Still waiting for his dividend.
Day five. The boss's window popped up again.
"Monthly Payment Progress: 0.4/3. Time Remaining: 12 days. Warning: Progress significantly behind schedule."
The window couldn't be closed. Only minimized. Three hours later, it popped back on its own.
"Monthly Payment Progress: 0.4/3. Time Remaining: 11 days. Warning: No extension for this cycle. Penalty accumulation in effect."
I shut the laptop. One minute later, it turned itself back on. A DOS window jumped up past the boot screen.
"Do not shut down."
I didn't try again.
The next ten days were the slowest days of my life.
Can't move. Can't feed. Can't get caught.
The only thing I did every day: go to work. Clock out on time. Buy a bento at the convenience store downstairs. Come back to the apartment. Lie down.
I wasn't resting. I was waiting. Waiting for the infrared light on that fiber optic outside the window to flicker. Waiting for the sensor on the doorframe's metal chip to blink. Waiting for the signal light on the acoustic sensor in the toilet tank to glow once in the deep night.
Lu Ming was waiting for me to slip up too.
He'd shown me all the obvious surveillance. Doorframe. Window. Toilet tank. He was telling me: you're already in the net. The mesh is tightening. Running or staying — your choice. But move, and you'll get tangled.
Day twenty-eight. 3:00 AM.
The laptop turned on by itself.
DOS window. A cursor. Six lines.
"Monthly Settlement Initiated."
"Monthly Mission Quota: 3 karma crystals."
"Actual Completion: 0.7 crystals."
"Shortfall: 2.3 crystals."
"Overdue. Penalty Protocol activated."
"Penalty Execution: Heart contraction, six millimeters."
I didn't even have time to stand up.
The feeling in my chest wasn't pain. Pain requires nerve conduction. This heart wasn't mine. It was a rhythm squeezed out by the soul shroud imitating a heartbeat. But the heart's core — the one the boss had taken — could directly access the shroud's foundation.
Six millimeters.
The shroud tightened inward from the heart's position. Like a hand reaching through the bones of my chest, gripping the core of that fake heartbeat, and squeezing.
I collapsed. The apartment floor was old composite wood from the nineties. Splinters curled up at the seams. My left cheek pressed against the boards. My whole body stopped obeying.
Zhao Yuanhang's limbs seized. His leg knocked over the instant noodle bowl. Cold broth spread across the floor. My fingers curled and uncurled, curled and uncurled. I don't know how many times.
I could hear blood cycling through my skull. The shroud's contraction compressed the blood vessels. Cerebral hypoxia. My vision started going black at the edges, slowly closing toward the center.
On the edge of losing consciousness, a half-formed thought flickered through my brain.
The real estate agent from twenty-three days ago. I'd sent him a text. A line and a half. His increased position counted as greed I'd provoked, but it wasn't deep enough. The retired teacher with four hundred twenty thousand was just sitting on one stock. He hadn't gone through the full extraction cycle — hope to despair.
A complete karma crystal from a deep participant required an entire journey. From hope to despair.
And I couldn't even walk into his dreams to speak to him.
The punishment lasted about forty minutes.
When it ended, I was lying in a puddle of cold noodle broth. The bowl was crushed. A plastic fork wedged between the table leg and the floor. I rolled over. Pressed my back against the cold floorboards and gasped.
There was an irregular shadow on the ceiling. The shape of the thermocouple chip inside the light fixture.
Lu Ming was watching.
He must have seen the whole forty minutes. Me jolting up from the bed. Collapsing. Full-body convulsions. Both eyeballs rolled back. Lips turning purple. Every biometric indicator slamming into the abnormal range simultaneously. Then, after forty minutes, everything snapping back to normal all at once.
Tomorrow's Paranormal Bureau file would have a new entry: "Observation Target: Zhao Yuanhang / MY-37. At 0300 hours on Day X, presented with unexplained full-body tonic spasms. Duration approximately forty minutes. Cause unknown. No organic damage detected. Recommendation: Escalate surveillance level."
I spoke to the shadow on the ceiling. My voice was so hoarse it didn't sound human.
"Seen enough?"
A thermocouple can't answer.
I lay on the floor for another fifteen minutes before I could get up. Right knee swollen. The nail on my left pinky had split during the convulsions, a small piece torn off by the floorboards. Half the nail still clung to the nail bed, seeping blood. I wrapped it in toilet paper. Then unwrapped it.
I was afraid the fiber optic would catch me treating an injury. A normal programmer, after forty minutes of unexplained convulsions at 3:00 AM, should call an ambulance. No phone call, just sitting there bandaging a finger — suspicious.
I pushed myself up against the wall. Walked to the window. Drew the curtains.
First time I'd deliberately covered the window since moving in.
The next morning, I sat on the edge of the bed. Curtains still drawn. Sunlight squeezed through the gaps in the fabric, casting strips of grayish light across the floorboards.
A residual ache lingered in my chest. Not heart pain. It was the imprint left by the soul shroud after being forcibly contracted. Zhao Yuanhang's body was repairing itself. The shroud wouldn't. Shroud damage was irreversible.
Punished again. Once. Twice. Three times. The shroud would tear. Once it tore, demonic energy would leak. The Night Patroller's soul-binding chains could detect it from three hundred meters away.
I touched my chest. Still empty. A heart that didn't exist, tethered to a contract I couldn't see.
I reached for the old radio on the nightstand. Twisted the dial. Tuned to the local traffic station. A female host was reading the traffic report. Faint static crackled in the background.
Wind noise from a car window that wouldn't fully close. The metallic screech of brake pads worn down to bare steel. Horns at the intersection. These sounds mixed with the real street noise from downstairs — drifting in through the radio speaker, slipping out through the window crack, and getting picked up by the acoustic sensor on the fiber optic. When Lu Ming's audio analysis software processed this section, it would be nearly impossible to separate which layer was reality and which was the radio.
I set the volume just loud enough to cover the echo of blood moving through my body.
From that day on, the radio stayed on. Twenty-four hours a day.
I reassessed my situation inside that continuous white noise. Three sides watching one. The boss wanted three karma crystals out of me every month. Miss the quota, get punished. Lu Ming wanted me to act like a normal, ordinary, dead-once programmer at all times. The Night Patroller wanted me to not even breathe demonic energy.
Three forces locked in mutual restraint. Break one's rhythm, and the other two would fall into chaos.
The boss was the most stable. He was deep underground. Shackled in chains. A bodhisattva sitting on his head. All he could do was collect energy and squeeze hearts. He wouldn't change suddenly — he needed me alive. Short term, he wouldn't touch me. Long term, what he wanted would eventually kill me.
The Night Patroller had a vulnerability. Wednesday nights, 10:40 to 11:30 PM. He passed through the East City sales department. From the moment he entered a building to the moment he left, his yin energy coverage radius was about two hundred meters. As long as I stayed outside that range during that window, he couldn't touch me. Lu Ming hadn't told me that out of kindness. He'd traded that "intelligence" for the Night Patroller spirit-soldier data I'd provided in the parking garage.
But the real wild card was Lu Ming.
He had no evidence to arrest me. What he had was instinct. Logic. And a machine that couldn't read an abnormal waveform. His current strategy was attrition. Wear down my patience with surveillance. Wear down my nerve with surprise visits. Wear down my sense of luck with that "incidental premature contraction" entry in my file. He was waiting for me to blow myself up.
To break this stalemate, I had to force one of the three to move first.
The boss was hundreds of meters underground, squeezing my life. Lu Ming was hundreds of meters away behind a surveillance screen, tracking my movements. The Night Patroller was on his patrol route, gripping his soul-binding chains. Three ropes around my neck. Each pulling in a different direction.
Step one: loosen one of them.
The Paranormal Bureau — couldn't touch it. Lu Ming lived by evidence. It wasn't that he didn't believe I was a monster. He just needed scientifically irrefutable proof. As long as I kept denying him that proof, he was my shield.
The Night Patroller — could be borrowed. His suspicion of me had never faded. He just lacked evidence. If I could feed him a clue at the right time — make him think someone else was pulling the demon stock's strings — his focus would shift away from me.
The boss.
I sat in silence for a moment. Then got up and made a cup of instant coffee.
Zhao Yuanhang's body got palpitations from coffee. But today, I was damn well drinking it.
The window popped up again.
"Monthly Payment Countdown: 31 days. Quota: 3 karma crystals. Note: Previous cycle underperformance. Late penalty surcharge applied. Additional 1 crystal. Total: 4 crystals."
Four.
I finished the coffee. Undissolved granules clung to the bottom of the cup. I set it down beside the laptop.
In the bottom right corner of the screen, Lu Ming's camera watched my window. In the next street over, the Night Patroller's spirit soldiers were on patrol.
I crouched on the apartment floor. Cracked the living room window open a slit. The breeze carried the smell of scallion oil from the diner downstairs and the lavender scent of laundry detergent drifting from the neighboring unit.
Someone on the street was laughing. Someone full from lunch. Basking in the sun.
I closed my eyes. Touched his dream.
Didn't enter. Just touched it. Like brushing the surface of water with a fingertip. Ripples spread out. His dream shallowed for a fraction of a second.
The soul shroud still worked. Punished six millimeters. But not broken.
I shut the window. The radio was still playing traffic updates. The female host's voice had switched over to the evening music program. A man's voice now, low and unhurried, reading out song dedications. The faint static from the radio itself rose and merged with the real street noise from downstairs. Fed the fiber optic's acoustic sensor a mouthful of useless data.
Beneath this blanket of noise, I made my first real plan since arriving here.
Next month's quota was four crystals. Impossible to hit by normal means. Under Lu Ming's surveillance, even one was a struggle. So what I needed wasn't just an operation. I needed a method Lu Ming had never seen before — a way to make emotional energy flow into my bowl on its own.
Zhao Yuanhang's residual coding memory told me one thing: every system has a vulnerability. The surveillance system was a system. The laptop pop-up was a system. The boss's punishment was a system. As long as it was a system, there was an entry point.
I needed an ally. Someone who didn't fear surveillance. Didn't fear soul-binding chains. Someone who could move through data streams and carry emotional energy back to me.
I stared at the laptop. The unclosable window still blinked on the screen. Black background. White text. Four.
I opened a new text file. Typed two lines of code.
The first was a crawler. Designed to scrape dead data strings from the dark web's edges — deleted forum posts, residual data from canceled accounts, digital garbage that had spilled out of servers during stock market crashes.
The second was a tracker. Embedded at the deepest layer of the first crawler. It searched every scraped piece of data for one keyword: "I'm sorry."
Zhao Yuanhang's mind had no memory of "I'm sorry." That was someone else's keyword. Someone I didn't know. Their obsession.
The crawler ran for seven minutes. The laptop fan spun into high gear. The plastic casing over the heat vent grew hot to the touch.
A plain-text result appeared on the screen. Timestamp: eight years ago. A string that had been deleted again and again but always lingered in the server's depths.
Seven characters.
"Mom, I'm sorry. Chen Sanqi."
I stared at those words for a long time.
Outside the window, the fiber optic's infrared light blinked once. 11:30 PM. Lu Ming's log had probably just updated with a new entry: "Target opened Notepad. Suspected writing code."
I typed one more character in Notepad. Saved. Closed it. Shut the laptop.
The man's voice on the radio finished the last song dedication. The female host took over again, starting the night traffic report. The orange glow from the radio's display panel tinted the entire room.
I lay back on the bed. Folded my hands over my chest. Zhao Yuanhang's fingers naturally crossed with his left thumb on top — one of the few instincts this body still had. I didn't bother changing it.
Left thumb. Left-handed.
That detail was probably already noted at the bottom of my page in Lu Ming's file.
I closed my eyes, facing the ceiling.
The three-on-one standoff wouldn't break yet. But the crawler was out there. Crawling slowly through the ruins at the dark web's edge. Like a metal spider burrowing into the shell of a dead server. Sifting through a million forgotten fragments of data. Searching for the one called Chen Sanqi.
If I found him — or he found me — I'd have a piece on the board no one else could see. Doesn't eat. Doesn't sleep. No camera can capture. No soul-binding chain can sweep. Alive only in the data.
Thirty-one days left.