Yekase fought her way into the sixties, maybe the seventies—she stopped counting, like climbing a tower swallowed by cloud.

It was a one-sided crush, a storm flattening wheat before it even swayed.

Flash Energy, warmed for half a month, flooded her bones and tendons like quicksilver. With a flick, guns and armor twisted at a distance as if gripped by invisible hands. The fully geared fighters died fastest, like candles snuffed in a gale.

Flash Energy felt like her arm’s extension, a long reach through air. Across a corridor, a squad’s rifles crumpled into scrap like wet clay.

For months she’d sabotaged the Sinister Organization in the open and in the shadows, yet Flash Energy never granted her its qualification. It was like a cloud drive without premium—only basic body reinforcement and raw energy shots, sluggish and dull, with no way to open a heart-led burst.

She’d thought it was a six-year debt left unpaid. Today’s walk brought a new clarity, like a bell rung in frost.

So she’d been holding back a breath all along, never letting loose, and the great Infinite Power looked down on her?

Follow your heart, like with Mind Energy, right? Yekase mowed through bodies like grass, while her mind slipped into its habit of hypotheses and threads.

Flash Energy and Mind Energy seemed to share a hidden seam. After Flash cracked the door for her, the taste lingered; appetite grew; insight formed like dawn through mist.

Both are born of the observer—one turned outward, one inward, two moons tugged by the same tide.

Thinking of it, Ling Yi’s smooth control of two branches of Infinite Power might be their natural affinity humming like matched strings. Yekase’s poor fit with Mind Energy and Flash Energy’s refusal felt like reflections in the same lake.

If so—

Could Flash Energy and Mind Energy—and even Soul Power—

Be unified first under a single Grand Heart Equation?

She smiled faintly amid the fresh corpses, like a blossom opening in ash.

Save it for the lab in the City of Ivalice.

With Ling Yi, Jiang Bailu, and students gathered from every country.

Drop the old world behind, and go back to her true work as a researcher.

…

Yekase didn’t stop. She fought until the sun climbed like a golden drum. She carved a path from the first floor to the fiftieth, changed elevators, and kept carving.

In the office levels, she tossed fireballs like bright fruit hurled into a market. In the upper levels—R&D bays and military assembly lines—she grew serious, sweeping floor by floor with a winter broom. Time stretched longer with elevation; in the seventies—she checked the plaque herself—she paused for breath.

The Red Lotus frenzy had burned for a month and now faltered. Big organizations, unwilling to lose ground, kept demanding supplies and troops from the Huaxia Branch. The main base ended up with only fifty thousand defenders.

They couldn’t all pack into the tower like sardines waiting. Only after alarm spread did they rush in, while terrified clerks burst out in waves and shattered formations like deer through a camp.

When they finally gathered and ringed the base, ready to close the pot on the turtle, a scent rose from the tower—blood boiling to the sky. Seven or eight gate guards lay piled by the door, unattended, like offerings gone rotten.

The battalion captain stared at the familiar gate, and it turned monstrous—like a beast’s maw, like a threshold between yin and yang. One step forward meant plunging into hell.

“Smoke! The building’s on fire!”

A fighter shouted, voice thin as a reed.

The captain looked up. Thick smoke rolled from the fifth-floor windows, like ink poured into wind.

The Flame Burst Spells she had thrown on each floor had ripened. First came chaos—the office workers fled like startled sparrows. It tied down the reinforcements and, in truth, spared their lives. The magic fireballs settled across the floors with a fox’s patience; only when people were gone did they stroll to desks and chairs. Fighters stationed above got blocked inside, none slipping through.

The name was still Flame Burst Spell, but Yekase had rewritten the sigils—her own edition, hammered out during the Cosmic Bubble while hugging the Southern Sky Cross for warmth. Each core-fireball was a delayed cluster—outer flames burned without spreading, like lanterns in a ring. When they consumed themselves, the inner magma core showed, the true seed of ignition.

Want to send reinforcements upstairs? Put out the fire first, then talk.

By now Yekase had culled a stack of second-tier cadres. At last she ran into the senior ones Xiaoyuan’s intel had flagged, unaware the outside world had already turned the story into thunder.

Mechbreaker, gone a month, strode out again. She appeared in the old quarter of the capital, ate a bowl of wonton, then stormed the Huaxia Branch.

With one sword and one staff, she made a gilded base into hell on earth.

That’s Shadow Curtain International. HQ aside, the Huaxia Branch is the biggest beast in East Asia. Everything pays their “security tax,” coins falling like rain into their sleeves.

Beaten back into their lair?

The wired world shoved the explosive news into every city’s every corner. The official channels offered no denial, only a cold silence that felt like consent.

Some who escaped said Mechbreaker was wrapped in surging crimson Infinite Power, already at that realm, a new top-tier Huaxia force in youth’s bloom. Others swore she entered unmasked, ready to die, bringing fire to a dragon’s cave with no way back.

The tale spread hotter, spread sweeter, spread like drumbeats. A codename known only in Twin Towers City half a year ago rang across Huaxia, into tens of millions of hearts—as hope, or as nightmare.

And then, a couple of hours later, a fresh shard hit.

Mechbreaker fought the Huaxia Branch’s senior cadres. Two killed, several wounded. She was captured alive, heavy with injuries and spent like a broken bow.

…

Gu Xiangshi’s hair had begun to fall in fistfuls, like leaves shaken off in a bitter wind.

The country roiled; warlords sprouted like weeds after rain. The Huaxia Branch was watched by hungry eyes. Every step had to land like a crane on ice. Right at this storm-tossed moment, her father tossed the Branch to her—full authority. He called it training for the future head. He hid in a secret villa deep in the mountains.

Training?

Times aren’t what they were. Fired up by stories, civilians truly dared to charge fighters. If rage peaked and someone carved out land to rule, this blame would crush her—she was only the young mistress.

Beyond that, one thing nagged her more.

Her Official Hero.

That project began as a way to suppress and absorb the scattered heroes, to forge a layer spanning organization and hero, blurring black and white until they dissolved like ink in tea.

Shadow Curtain International’s control would settle deeper, and she’d gain a private army she’d raised with her own hand.

Those troops could swallow small groups in secret. In public, they’d polish her name like brass. The folk information web had holes. If she sealed them, the assets of the erased would vanish without a whisper.

But the truest purpose was to feed her hidden childhood hero dream.

Gu Xiangshi had seen countless blood-streaked cases with her father. She always felt he went too far. Isn’t taking what the people have left enough? Taking all, killing to silence—must it go that far?

Use extreme strength to carry out fair judgment, then collect a proper fee, and let it cycle. Like the strongest antivirus being a virus, if the Sinister Organization governs hard and tight, no one dares to commit crime—that was her final form of an ideal nation.

For that, she needed Official Heroes, to become the open, shining sword of judgment.

“Miss! Miss! Emergency!”

A subordinate didn’t even knock; he ran in, breath ragged like torn paper.

“What is it?”

“Mechbreaker broke in! She set fires on the lower floors. People can’t get out. The fighters inside were all cut down! She blocked the fire exits. Bodies everywhere. I barely made it up!”

…

This important, and you report it now?

Emergency? She’d been hearing the rumble from her office for half an hour.

Gu Xiangshi almost lost her breath. She pressed her brow, voice clipped as a blade. “And now?”

“She’s up against the senior cadres.”

“She isn’t strong enough to kill all of them alone, right?”

“N-not that strong! If she were, she’d have come straight a month ago!”

Gu Xiangshi waved him out, the gesture sharp as a fan snapped shut.

These lower-ranked fighters didn’t know the real ties between Fang Tang, Yekase, and the Lantern Festival hijacking. That was organizational deep secret. Still, Yekase shouldn’t be able to beat those few senior cadres—no need to panic.

Gu Xiangshi didn’t know what power exactly that person held, but Longyun’s affair had branded her memory like hot iron. Don’t mob her. Don’t bring metal.

Those two death orders went to all cadres. Without her absurd anti-metal special, Yekase’s raw power sat around cadre level. Factoring recent growth, she might drop two or three in a rotating fight, but that would be it.

Sure enough, after a while, the soldier returned beaming, like a lantern relit in rain. He brought the good news: Yekase captured alive.

Captured alive…

That old fox who couldn’t be judged by appearance or common sense—if she wanted to run, she’d make the base her own garden. Getting caught this easily was obviously on purpose.

Gu Xiangshi thought it, but her face was calm water. She nodded to show she’d heard.

She wasn’t a fool. Naturally she knew Yekase had surrendered to talk to her.

Except that “surrender” was paid for with nearly a thousand low-ranked fighters, more than a dozen second-tier cadres, and two senior cadres dead. The wounded were too many to count.

Why did Yekase think Gu Xiangshi would grant her an audience?

A guess?

…Either way, she guessed right.

Gu Xiangshi gave a wry smile, bitter as burnt tea. She felt dragged back to the night she hung from one end of an iron staff like a salted fish. In over twenty years, she’d never been this stifled.

She dismissed her injured guards, who still stood watch like limping hounds, and went alone to the Huaxia Branch base’s floor 89.5—the prison.

The tower had one hundred floors. The top ten were a special mechanism. The chief’s office regularly rose and fell among those ten, hiding like a shrine behind moving screens.

Floor 89.5 sat like an elevator shaft, a hollow set with the most secret prison in Huaxia. It had never been used.

Yekase became its first guest.

Gu Xiangshi pushed open the door, mind painting Yekase as she’d seen her in the rally—she wanted to see a hero under heavy wounds and exhaustion. Would it be a proud defiance, or a silent resistance?

Behind the bars, Yekase lay with her upper body on the bed. Her two neat legs—short on a 160 frame, prim as keys—stuck up, crossed, braced on the wall at the bed’s corner. Her whole body made an L, like a character drawn in chalk.

Her phone had been taken. She stared at the ceiling, daydreaming like a cloud watching itself.

Her blood-soaked clothes lay tossed in a corner, a red scent pooling like iron. She wore only clean underlayers.

Her body was smooth, pale, untouched by excess, a beauty that belonged to a girl’s spring.

…Severely wounded?

…Exhausted?

I know you’re acting. Can we at least pretend harder?

“Well now, if it isn’t Miss Gu. Good afternoon.” Yekase greeted her while head-down, feet-up, smile light as a fan.

…

And you—last time you were a seven- or eight-year-old kid. How did half a year turn you into a blooming youth?

“Miss Gu, I’ve got a question.”

“…What?”

Yekase lowered her legs and propped herself up on her side. Her hair spilled over her shoulders, giving a hint of the captive, fragile beauty—but her eyes cut through, like knives under silk, reading every thought Gu Xiangshi tried to hide.

“Is your father Gu Zijian, or Gu Rongsheng?”