In the narrow, damp alleyway, a voice was currently inducing cardiac arrest in anyone who heard it.
Calling it singing was generous. The tune twisted through nine curves and eighteen bends, every note at war with the one before it. A rare talent, really.
Lights flickered on in the tube-shaped tenements lining the alley. Windows were shoved open in fury: "Who's wailing like someone died in the middle of the night?!" "Whose cat stepped on a live wire?!"
Amid the cursing, a plastic bottle or two came sailing down with precision.
But the figure shivering under the streetlamp didn't care. She pulled the wrinkled men's suit jacket tighter over her head, as if performing some ritual of shame, and continued singing that little ditty that, in the sunless depths of the Turbid Abyss, symbolized "total surrender":
"Listen to me… dui bu qi…"
"I'm sorry… Désolé~Gomen nasai~ Joesong-hamnida ??…"
She sang while looking up desperately at an apartment on the second floor.
That window had been open for a while. A middle-aged couple stood leaning against the frame in their coats, hands full of sunflower seeds, watching with absolute relish.
The girl downstairs took a deep breath, fighting the urge to level the entire street. Her voice trembled as she continued:
"You were… right right right… I was wrong wrong wrong.??"
Her voice grew smaller and smaller, until it was barely a mosquito's hum.
The man upstairs dug at his ear and called down with a shit-eating grin: "Can't hear you! And where's the performance? Who was it that talked big by Pit Number Five?—'If I ever come crawling back to you two, I'll sing White Flag doing a handstand!'"
The woman beside him smiled and twisted the knife: "Yeah, why are you still standing? Back problems?"
The woman in white—finally snapped.
"Smack!"
She ripped the suit jacket off her head and hurled it to the ground, pointing at the second floor and letting loose:
"This isn't fun anymore! Give me a break! Can't you see I'm falling apart?!"
"Get your asses down here and open the door! This is humiliating!"
…
Before long, footsteps echoed down the stairwell. "Thump thump thump."
The rusty iron door creaked open.
The man and woman stood in the doorway like two guardian deities, showing no intention of letting Ling in.
The woman of the house wore a faded T-shirt printed with "Old Soldier BBQ," arms crossed, looking Ling up and down—covered in blood and grime, clothes in tatters. Not a trace of her Abyss overlord swagger left.
"Well, well, let me guess who's inside this sorry shell." The woman clicked her tongue in wonder. "Could it be our high-and-mighty Boss Ling? What, the food in the mortal world too tough? Chipped a tooth?"
Ling ground her teeth, clinging to her last shred of strength: "Cut the crap… I held up my end of the bet. Hurry… let me in… I'm about to crash."
With that, her body went limp and she pitched forward through the doorway.
The man's reflexes kicked in. He caught her, muttering: "She actually collapsed? What is this, insurance fraud?"
The couple exchanged looks. Sharp-tongued as they were, they still hoisted Ling up between them and dragged her inside like a dead dog.
"Print & Copy"—that was the shop's name. Offensively basic.
Past the front room piled with cheap paper, Ling was dumped onto an old sofa in the back.
She didn't stand on ceremony. She sprawled like a puddle of mud and stuck out one pale hand: "Quick—food, drink, spirit essence, batteries—anything. As long as it charges."
"What are we going to do with you."
The woman turned and went back to her room. A moment later, she returned with a coin-sized metal disc.
The thing looked like it had been pried off a junked graphics card, but its surface was etched with an incredibly precise miniature hexagram array, flickering with a dangerous blue glow in the dim light.
"Use it sparingly. This is our whole month's budget."
She slapped the "coin" firmly onto Ling's spirit platform—the point between her brows.
"Hummm—!"
Instantly, a torrent of wild but pure energy flooded into Ling's desiccated meridians like a dam breaking.
[System alert: External power connected.]
[Energy recovery: 8% -> 15% -> 30%…]
"Hahhh…"
Ling let out a long breath as she came back to life, her eyes finally refocusing. She touched the little thing on her forehead and let out a soft laugh:
"Who would've thought—you two half-dead 'rejects,' hiding out in this godforsaken place, could actually cook up something like this… forbidden Western arts?"
The couple—wife Moye and husband Gann—sat side by side on little stools across from her, still holding their half-eaten sunflower seeds.
"Spit it out," Moye said, brushing the dust off her hands. "You never show up unless you're in deep shit. If it weren't for serious trouble, you'd never swallow your pride enough to come find us."
Ling rolled her eyes and pried the energy coin off, clutching it in her hand like she was afraid they'd take it back.
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"What kind of talk is that. My number one priority coming to the mortal world was to find you two and apologize."
She was already spouting bullshit, face straight, heart steady:
"Really. After I kicked you into Pit Number Five, I couldn't sleep at night from the regret. The more I thought about it, the more I realized you were right—with great power comes great responsibility! I've decided to turn over a new leaf…"
"Stop." Moye cut her off coldly. "Talk like a normal demon."
Ling choked. Looking into those eyes that had long seen through the world's bullshit, she sighed and dropped the slick act.
"…Fine."
Ling lowered her gaze, fingers unconsciously rubbing the high-tech energy coin.
"I played myself. Capsized in the gutter."
"I thought that with what I could do, I’d own every room I walked into. Turns out I wasn't up here three days before I got strung up and beaten like a dog. This body's full of holes, and until I settle the score, I'm not letting this go… Okay, you can laugh now."
When she said "like a dog," her knuckles went white. Clearly that was a thorn buried deep in her heart.
The couple watched her quietly, without any mocking schadenfreude.
After a long silence, Moye finally spoke, voice distant: "Actually… we're pretty grateful for that kick."
Ling's head snapped up: "Huh? Are you sick in the head?"
"Really." Moye shrugged. "If we'd stayed in the Abyss obsessing over you, clinging to the past, we'd probably either be dust by now, or turned into those mud-monsters in your tavern who just sit around bullshitting."
"That kick severed our last attachments. Gave us a chance to start over. Sure, these identities are bought, and we live in hiding, but at least… we can still make things with our hands."
She pointed at the coin with the hexagram that Ling was holding.
Ling toyed with the coin, eyes growing sharp: "Hexagram… if I'm not mistaken, this incorporates Western alchemical circuits?"
"You're playing with fire. Stuff the Court explicitly banned—and you two, , still dare touch it?"
"Hands got itchy. Just messing around." Gann turned his head away, tone stiff.
Ling suddenly laughed. Laughed like a demon.
"Forgot to mention—I'm currently on the Court's temporary payroll. Reporting someone for using forbidden heretical arts might just get me converted to full-time."
The temperature in the room dropped to freezing.
Gann's hand had already crept toward the paper knife under the table. Moye's eyes turned dangerous.
Just as violence seemed imminent, Ling suddenly snorted and broke character.
"Hahaha! Look at you two! Your faces went green!"
She doubled over laughing. The couple's expressions shifted from murderous to resigned, shaking their heads with bitter smiles, as if that killing intent had just been a joke.
"Alright, I'll stop messing with you."
Ling sobered up, tone serious, and brazenly lifted her dress to reveal the faint runic mark at the center of her navel.
Moye quickly raised her hand to cover her husband's eyes.
"I'm not lying. This body really is Celestial property, and it's weird as hell. It's connected to your old employers at the 'Myriad Immortals Union' and that upstart 'Vessel Forging Sect.'"
She looked at these two former technical geniuses and dangled the most tempting bait:
"This is the Court's most cutting-edge, most classified vessel. I have admin access to this body."
"Dear masters—interested in seeing… the actual source code?"
…
The two swallowed hard, clearly tempted, but looked dejected:
"Ling, it's not that we don't want to help. You know we've been sentenced to severance by the Court. All their intellectual property was confiscated from us. One look at your body and you can tell it's no ordinary thing. The way we are now…"
Ling smiled: "I'm not afraid of starting over—why should you be? What if I told you this body also contains VFS's Manual?"
The woman's eyes lit up: "Really? How is that possible…"
"Including that thing you asked me for before—I can agree to that too. But first, help me get my body sorted out, and my little subordinate here. After that, whatever you want to do, whatever you want to build—go nuts."
Hearing this, the husband who'd been silent suddenly shot to his feet.
"You! You mean it?! You can't take it back!"
"If we're going to cooperate, show some sincerity first."
Ling sat on that shabby sofa like a queen, tapping her fingers in the air a few times, restarting the system that had once disguised itself as the Infinity Shell Array—【Divine Maiden's Prayer.exe】
"I'm opening a 'Devotee Port' for you now. Send your spirits in and see for yourselves."
The couple immediately crowded in, eyes gleaming with that distinctive tech-nerd hunger.
But Ling suddenly flashed a wicked grin and blocked the interface:
"Not so fast. This port has high security clearance. Requires dual biometric verification."
"First, invitation passphrase: 'Honored Celestial Maiden, You are the supreme radiance, and I am but humble dust beneath Your feet.'"
Moye's mouth twitched: "…That's disgusting."
"Second, motion verification: full prostration, face pressed to the ground. The scan only passes when your face touches the floor."
Ling raised an eyebrow, eyes full of challenge:
"So? This is top secret. You want to see the source code, you follow the rules. Or… do you two think your dignity is more important than technology?"
Gann's face went iron. Moye ground her teeth.
They exchanged glances, conducting a fierce internal debate through eye contact alone—for technology! For those unseen runes! For their former glory!
"…Fuck it."
They turned their backs to Ling, muttering curses under their breath. When they turned around, they wore expressions of martyrs facing execution.
"Thud."
The legendary engineers of the Union now knelt obediently on the filthy floor, arms stretched forward, foreheads pressed to the ground.
"Honored Celestial Maiden…" Gann's voice trembled.
"You are… urgh… the supreme radiance…" Moye rolled her eyes.
Ling watched these two big shots who'd just been upstairs cracking sunflower seeds and mocking her, now prostrated at her feet. Half the pent-up frustration in her chest evaporated instantly.
"Good. Petition granted."
"Hummm—"
A golden light flashed, "pulling" both their spirits into Ling's Spiritual Platform.
…
If the outside looked like a sacred temple, then the system interior was basically a junkyard.
All kinds of messy drivers, conflicting instruction sets, and piles of undeleted error logs were stacked together like illegal construction.
Gann's brow furrowed deeply: "My god… this is a celestial body? This is a bomb waiting to go off! Why are power management and spiritual circuits tangled together?"
Moye was even more horrified: "Look at this wiring! Look at this logic! They sacrificed all heat dissipation for aesthetics—this is literally stuffing a 4090 into a beeper!"
Ling's spirit appeared behind them, spreading her hands: "Now you see how rough I've had it? This body is like a trap specifically designed to lure cultivators in to die."
"Tell me something useful. Can you fix it?"
The two exchanged glances. Professional instincts kicked in, and they immediately entered work mode.
"The base architecture is Great Principle Golden Immortal level. With our current mortal bodies, we definitely can't fix it." Moye's expression was grave. "But we can add a 'virtual layer' to sort and display all this chaotic data."
She pointed at the jumbled energy bar floating in the air:
"Take this—this body runs multiple parallel processes. It feeds on biological energy converted from food, also absorbs heaven-and-earth spiritual energy, and even consumes spiritual faith. The system mixes them all together and displays them as one total 'energy.' So you have no idea whether walking uses one type while casting skills uses another."
"No wonder…" Ling had an epiphany. "Sometimes I've just eaten and after two steps it warns me I'm low on energy."
"I'll rewrite the interface for you." Moye gestured in the air:
- 【Yellow Bar (Stamina) 5/10】: Biological energy/physical strength. Given your current meridian condition, if you can use yellow, don't waste blue.
- 【Blue Bar (Mana) 5/10】: Spiritual energy/magic power.
- 【Red Bar (Corruption) 0/10】: This is the "rejection reaction" you mentioned. If you eat random stuff and this maxes out, you explode.
"With this baseline, you can manage your energy precisely in fights instead of mindlessly burning yourself out."
…
"Not bad. Hurry up with the next thing."
But Moye stopped, expression serious: "I only have my memories of forbidden arts now. All paths lead to the same destination, sure—the underlying rules are always similar. But for a project this big, without the Celestial system's runic architecture, it's hard to start… How about this—let me study that VFS's Manual first."
Ling laughed: "Don't try to play me. I know you too well. I've learned plenty of lessons these past few days. You haven't proven your value yet, and you want to fob me off with an interface makeover? Not a chance. Worst case, I go back and tinker with it myself somewhere. Just takes more effort."
Ling pointed at the only precise, beautiful part of this wrecked body.
"I approached you two because I figured you've had it rough. Thought maybe we could work together. Don't push your luck. If you're really sincere—that. That has to be dealt with."
All three gazes turned toward the utterly still black crystal deep within the system—the Kernel.