…ripped it open.

Right before Yekase’s eyes, Aurora tore the freeze-framed rift in the air, a shatter-the-void effect split by her bare hands like silk.

Is this what a brawler-style alchemist looks like, muscle over mind, iron over ink?

Or is this simply what a dragon is, a storm wearing flesh?

The rift had become a tunnel, a dim curtain of dimensions. On the far side lay a rainforest like a hot, wet ocean of green, the exact opposite of Siberia’s ice-blade plain. Yekase marked it in her heart like a red line on a map: do not make this woman an enemy.

Aurora stepped first, a spear of will piercing the dark.

Yekase moved to follow, but Sandryon caught her wrist, cool as moonlight on stone.

“?”

“Let her clear the first wave,” Sandryon said, voice level, a tide with no ripples.

First wave? Yekase squinted into the verdant haze. No movement, no beasts. Clear the forest itself, a green sea to be parted?

“Dear Holy Dragon—” Aurora’s voice rang from the far side, a bell across fog.

“We will truly merge here. With our love, we will annihilate the enemy!”

Her words fell like seeds. Then cyan and gold bloomed, light braided like twin rivers, exploding inside the Cosmic Bubble.

It felt like mountains cracking and timber snapping, a landslide’s roar beating at the ribs—yet that was a mirage. Even sound drowned under the surge, like rain swallowed by the ocean. After several heartbeats—or an eternity—the glare thinned. The scene beyond the tunnel had changed, a painting scraped clean and repainted.

“We can go,” Sandryon said, calm as dusk.

Yekase followed her through the torn curtain. The passage looked solid, three-dimensional, a hallway with bone and walls. In motion it felt like diving, lungs pressed by cold water. Focused, she realized it was illusion, a familiar pressure, a hand she’d held before.

Familiar? Which Cosmic Bubble had she crossed lately, which curtain had she slipped like a stage hand through velvet?

…stage rigging…?

The thought struck like flint to steel. Her boots finally met the soil of the Tunguska Cosmic Bubble.

And she saw the spell’s truth with naked eyes, no veil, no metaphor.

In the rainforest’s heart lay a circular crater, ten meters across, a coin stamped into the earth.

It sloped inward, smooth as a clay bowl. Inside the rim, nothing remained but dirt like ash—no trees, no shrubs, no grass. Everything under that halo had vanished, erased like chalk from a blackboard.

“What an anti-green crusader,” Yekase muttered, dry as winter wind.

“Only dragons can use that chanted magic,” Sandryon said, her tone a scholar’s ink. “A species-right of mystic pedigree. They call it ‘Dragon Hymn.’ Aurora’s was the ‘Dragon Hymn of Ice and Light.’”

“Something that has nothing to do with me,” Yekase sighed, though her pulse flicked like a sparrow.

She pictured that hymn falling on her head like a glacier. Another line drawn: do not be her enemy. But is Aurora a pure-blooded dragon, a human melded to a dragon, or a human who became a dragon? If it’s the third, could Ling Yi learn a Dragon Hymn too, a storm taught to sing?

Propose “Dragon Hymn of Iron and Fire,” a furnace set to music.

…no good, that clashes with Luzhixing’s brand, sparks against sparks.

Then have Lu Yao beat her down, threaten her, make her drop that “Iron-and-Fire Swordmaster” title, start over like a blade quenched again.

Her mind wandered to them, her flock, faces like stars in cloud. Yekase took a beat to realize she was probably wanted across Huaxia, a ghost on every poster. She wouldn’t see them for a while, not until the frost broke.

Loneliness came late, like a chill after sunset.

No, no. Once the blockade loosens and those costly Sorcery trackers get pulled down like old lanterns, she’ll sneak onto Sky Island. Changing jump coordinates costs a mountain of Flash Energy, but not using them costs more—meaning.

Sandryon tugged a leather-bundle from her alchemy pack and tossed it, casual as tossing bread to a pond.

It hit the dirt and writhed like a soft-bodied creature, pulsing, growing. Under Yekase’s wide-eyed stare it swelled and warped, finally settling into something like a Zerg hive from a sci‑fi war game, a living bunker with a mouth.

“This is our survey base,” Sandryon said, pride soft as velvet.

“Ancient Alchemy does biopunk now?” Yekase asked, her voice a dry reed, curious despite the sand in her bones.

“Go inside and you’ll know.” Sandryon’s smile was a thin blade.

Yekase stepped through the mouth-like doorway, a throat into light.

Inside sat a clean, bright field command post—tables, chairs, blackboard—bare-bones like the resistance rooms in old war films, smoke-free and precise.

“The Cosmic Bubble suppresses foreign matter and energy,” Sandryon explained, chalk words without dust. “Some even run physics unlike reality—luckily, not this one. Magic and tech both falter in surveys. The plainer the tool, the steadier the hand.”

Your “plain” is a command post wearing a hive’s skin, a wolf in linen.

Yekase let it pass. Two days of chaos had eaten at her mind like moths; snark took effort, and effort was a tax.

“…Wait. That Ice-and-Light Dragon Hymn was under suppression?” she asked, brows drawn like bowstrings.

“Correct,” Sandryon sang, smug as a cat in sun.

……

Sandryon, why do triple-digit-year Longlifers feel so different in raw power, mountain versus hillside?

“Don’t look at me like that,” she said, catching the thought like a tossed coin. “I know where your mind goes. But the age of measuring force is over—”

“You can’t beat her?” Yekase cut in, a blade turned sideways.

“Incorrect.”

“So you can’t beat her,” Yekase repeated, a teasing echo.

“Incorrect,” Sandryon said again, her lips a thin line, a bow unstrung.

They left the command post. Aurora had turned dragon, a leviathan in bronze wind, and picked a direction at random. She plowed forward like a heavy excavator, leaving deep earth-brown trenches behind, tunnels etched by a titan’s claw.

Xiaoyuan stood and flexed ankles and wrists, joints popping like dew. She’d clearly chosen her route, a path she could smell.

What was her class again? Yekase’s memory flicked. At that tournament she’d fought like a battle mage—lock with spells, cut with a straight blade, a storm guided by wire.

But she hadn’t brought a blade this time—

Xiaoyuan drew a dagger from her thigh, a small moon from a shadow. She pressed it to her side and pulled, left to right, carving an ugly smile in her flesh, a wound wide enough to see what she had eaten for breakfast.

From that blood-slick wound slid a handle, a hilt glistening like wet stone.

It had been hidden since last night, sheathed in meat and silence.

Xiaoyuan gripped the straight blade and drew it from her body, flicking off blood and tissue like rain from steel. She dragged the tip through the dirt and walked toward her chosen path, her figure swallowed by green, a wolf fading into trees.

“That blade’s called ‘Chengying,’” Sandryon said, voice a museum plaque. “An early work by Luzhixing.”

“She’s just gonna chop straight through?” Yekase asked, a brow curved like a crescent.

“That’s her strongest style,” Sandryon replied, a smirk like lacquer.

Strongest style?

Just plain slashing?

So the fancy moves in the arena were because plain slashing bores her, and research is her theater?

“A way to fight when you don’t die,” Sandryon said, like granite under moss.

“You could do the same if you wanted.”

“I don’t,” Yekase said, sharp as glass. “I won’t dirty my inventions. And Flash Energy doesn’t mend that fast.”

She reached for her beloved Dawn of Eden, fingers catching air. Then she remembered—inside a Cosmic Bubble, outside the newly upgraded global coverage of the transfer box. No courier bird, no phone line.

She slipped through the curtain back to Siberia, cold like knives, grabbed her Gunblade and iron staff, then came back through, warmth like breath on iron.

Her hand brushed last night’s paper.

[Turns out it works this way]

[Fang Tang is missing. The others have no life danger. I saw them at the detention center]

[Six protests and riots under the Mechbreaker name appeared nationwide today. Shadow Curtain International temporarily amended the management law, demanding low-tier organizations to maintain public order. No one responded]

The neat handwriting was Liu RuoYuan’s, graceful as bamboo.

Yekase let out a breath, a warm cloud in cold. She crouched and scribbled beneath it: [I’m entering a Cosmic Bubble. Can’t use the transfer box. Please confirm twice a day.]

She slid the note back, then returned to the Bubble’s humid hush.

Right hand shouldered the Dawn of Eden, a moon of steel. Left hand hung the Polaris Staff low, casual as a fishing rod. It was her ready stance now, a wolf at ease.

Gunblade on the shoulder saves strength, and the thumb’s right there to flick the cylinder like a bead. The Polaris Staff drooping looks like a spell in the throat, a bluff; it can snap up and block, iron against fang.

Sandryon nodded. “Looks the part,” she said, approval like a stamp. “But those two are basically your ID, right? Hide them when you go back. I’ll prep you a new staff.”

Polaris Staff—an iron-rod mechanical staff—had indeed become a symbol of Magical Girl Icarus, a banner and a silhouette. Yekase wasn’t sure how deep Shadow Curtain International had dug. She’d masked the overlap between Mechbreaker and Magical Girl Icarus. Did they see through the veil? Better to be safe, a fox in fog.

Dawn of Eden was fine. Few had seen it. Of the enemies who had, only Gu Xiangshi and Luzhixing still lived—so it truly fulfilled its “guard” duty, a sentinel at night. In a pinch, she’d unshroud it.

“I’ll clear a path like they did?”

“Yeah. We carve sectors and tame terrain for the survey team,” Sandryon said, steady as a compass.

Yekase gauged Aurora’s and Xiaoyuan’s directions, then took the other flank, a triangle of intent.

She tucked Polaris Staff under her arm and unfolded the auxiliary casting rig, gears like petals. She aimed at the jungle, a green wall waiting for a door.

Then she set Dawn of Eden lightly on a branch, like mounting a cannon on a natural gunwale.

She couldn’t spend Flash Energy like a festival, so the punch would be lighter, a scalpel not a hammer. But clearing forest needed a blade, not thunder.

Click.

Safety off. Feed in Flash Energy—fuel like sunlight poured into glass—

—pull the trigger.

“Thus, Heavenly Divide!”

Flash Energy surged from the gunmouth along the gunblade’s spine, a river finding its bed. With its own array and the Polaris Staff’s twin reinforcement sigil, it refracted like a prismed beam, swelling into a flood, light forced into a blade.

A scarlet pillar split the jungle in two, a canyon cut by a god, spearing all the way to a horizon shy of eyes. It held for seconds, a heartbeat stretched, then faded like dusk.

Yekase holstered blade and staff, turned to Sandryon, eyes a question mark.

…Your move?

Her gaze said it, a silent drum.

“Hmph. What a rude stare,” Sandryon sniffed, amusement like frost. “Seems my long quiet made you misjudge me badly. Fine—”

She raised her right hand high and slashed it down, a conductor calling thunder.

“—‘Arururu Goddess,’ go!”

…

……

Nothing happened, silence like snow.

“Forgot my staff.”

Sandryon scowled and dove back through the dimensional curtain, irritation a black wing.