After the stream went dark, Yekase, who’d already kicked her legs like a dying moth and “rode the crane west,” came back to life and hopped down.

The two accompanying cadres stared as she calmly slid her neck out of the rope loop, their faces pale as moonlight. Before they could form a full sentence, Gu Xiangshi erased them with a black cube, like ink sealing a scream.

Mechbreaker was dead, so handcuffs weren’t needed anymore. But Yekase still lived.

That was the result of their talk that day.

Yekase heard Gu Xiangshi’s dream of an ideal country. She couldn’t agree, but it beat the status quo, so she counted Gu as a teammate on a stormy bridge. Gu, feeling the weight of a life-debt like a stone in her chest, set the premise for a pact.

The pact said this: Earth’s uprising leader, “Mechbreaker,” would die publicly. The uprisings everywhere would have their crimes washed thin, written off as “disturbing the peace.” Big waves cut small.

Later, Gu might recruit Official Heroes from among them. That wouldn’t be Yekase’s problem.

The public didn’t know the name “Yekase,” but to dodge needless trouble, Yekase wouldn’t set foot on Huaxia soil for five years. Gu would help hide her trail like wind covering footprints.

Yekase agreed briskly. She had the Ambition Divine Ship. If she couldn’t touch Huaxia’s “soil,” she’d fly in the sky. Her family and friends lived on Sky Island; the ground felt as distant as a seabed.

She rested a bit. She was about to open the Recall Array and go home to say she was safe.

Ivaris suddenly bombed the Huaxia Branch base.

Of course, the execution room and Fang Tang’s setup weren’t the same, not even in the base proper. That was basic smoke and mirrors.

Gu Xiangshi watched her hometown get blown like a clay roof in a storm. She yanked Yekase’s phone from her pocket and tossed it back, shouting, “Call her off!”

“She’s in a strange state. She doesn’t have a phone!”

“Huh?!”

“It’s hard to explain in two lines. She’s like a ghost—appears now and then, then slips into a void a few minutes later. No phone works there.”

“A ghost…?”

Gu blinked, as if noon had chilled and a spirit crossed the sun.

“You’ve got superpowers, right? Throw a quarantine around your base. Hold for a few minutes, and her energy burns out like a candle.” For now, they were partners, so Yekase offered calmly.

“Tch… Microcosm Phenomenon!”

The black cube stretched long and thin, a night blade sheathing the base tower. From the outside, it vanished like fog swallowed by rock.

It covered that much? Yekase was stunned. She thought of Coffee Moon and sighed—superpowers were bespoke circuits, neither copied nor inherited, wild as lightning and unreasonable as fate.

Ivaris had seen this trick once in Changyun. Back then, she forced a magical hole through it to rescue Jiang Bailu. She didn’t flinch now; she hammered the cube’s skin with raw magic, like a typhoon beating a cliff.

The Huaxia Branch wasn’t soft clay anymore. The single-soldier humiliation two days ago was burned into their banner. They tripled their armaments, and the iron sang.

Missiles, autocannons, rifles, laser lances—mixed with attack magic—rushed at Ivaris from every direction, nearly no delay, like a pack of wolves leaping at a lone snow cat.

They fought over the sky above Shangjing City, thunder ringing like temple bells.

“Ivaris…”

Yekase whispered her name. From a shadowed window, she watched that fierce, agile silhouette dance through fire like a swallow.

She was exactly as in memory—effortless, like water finding its path.

Yekase longed to talk to her, but she couldn’t show her face. She could only watch from this hidden slit, while Ivaris didn’t even know Yekase was safe.

Gu Xiangshi sighed. “Magical Girl Ivaris is a hero of the One-Year War, a savior of humankind. If I can help it, I don’t want to hurt her.”

“Fun fact: so am I.”

“I didn’t do anything to you, did I?”

“Thanks.”

“…”

“Shy? Your resolve is soft.”

Gu’s eyes flashed cold, like frost under lanterns. “You, a resolute hero, thanking a Sinister Organization?”

“That’s a separate ledger.”

She wouldn’t meet Ivaris today anyway. Yekase accepted that and kept talking with Gu.

“I’m this calm with you because your cause is fated to fail. So I’m not worried.”

Gu jerked up her left hand, three fingers half curled, power gathering like a storm bud.

Yekase didn’t flinch. “You don’t see your own place, much less the road ahead. Your ideal and your actions are split like river and shore, and you’re too hesitant to give up either side. You don’t understand the people you think should be under your reign, and you think you love them.”

“Don’t think I won’t—”

“Do you want to be a hero who brings people happiness, or an evil emperor who rules all? Do you know what happiness they want? Are you sure your rule won’t err?”

“—”

“Of course you don’t know. You’re not sure. So you’re worse than those blindly confident ones—at least they try, like a gambler who actually puts chips down.”

Yekase didn’t bother to look at her. Hands behind her head, she drifted back inside the room like a leaf returning to shade.

Gu stayed where she was, staring at air like it held a mirror.

Yekase hadn’t used a single dirty word, yet Gu felt like she’d been beaten by rain from all sides.

“If you truly want to change Huaxia with Official Heroes, spend a night thinking hard about what I said. At least five years—we won’t meet.”

She checked for magical detectors around the shabby little place. Light from the Recall Array bloomed like dawn on water. Yekase’s silhouette vanished, leaving Gu Xiangshi alone, dumbstruck, in a room that felt too wide.

…

…

She got home and her mom crushed her in a hug, arms like iron bands.

“Cough—cough—can’t breathe—”

Her mom’s grip hadn’t softened over the years. Yekase saw stars and flailed.

Liu RuoYuan didn’t buy it. “You can breathe hanging on a rope, but not in a hug?”

“Uh…”

Busted. She’d just learned this body started with suffocation immunity, and she still hadn’t found the ceiling. All kinds of insane antics were possible later… Oh, she wasn’t Jiang Bailu. There was hope to stay sane—

Then Jiang Bailu stepped out of the house like a breeze from a cool hall.

“…”

“Seems you really enjoy near-death thrills?”

She even used polite “sir” in her tone.

Yekase shook her head like a rattling drum. “No! Not a fan! I hope I never get a second time!”

“Good.”

The four of them went back in. After a while, Ling Yi and Lu Yao returned too.

“Ivaris wiped the Huaxia Branch’s forces.”

Lu Yao said only that. She nodded to XiaoLei and headed to rest. She’d been piloting Peace Walker, keeping distance tight so she wouldn’t get lit up. She’d skipped the vampire buff before departure. Her strength was a spent match.

Ling Yi explained to Yekase, detail like rain. “Too bad she can’t stay long in reality. She blew open a corner of that… that black box someone made, then turned to light and vanished.”

“Gu Xiangshi.”

“Oh, right—Gu Xiangshi.”

Everyone turned to Yekase, waiting for a different angle, like owls watching a lantern.

So Yekase laid out her dirty backroom deal with Gu, clear as chalk lines.

Jiang Bailu slammed the table right away, sound like a shot. Yekase thought she was angry, but Jiang raised her right fist high like a standard, a victor’s pose.

Jiang Bailu delivered her acceptance speech. “I finally caught up with the Doctor’s loneliness!”

“Caught up with what?!”

“So you can’t come back to Huaxia for five years?” Liu RuoYuan cared about that most.

“Yeah, but Sky Island’s outside her leash. I could float over Huaxia for five years, and she still couldn’t touch me. I plan to teach in Europe anyway, so I’ll take that slope and slide. I even put on a very pained face.”

Ling Yi asked, “What does Gu Xiangshi want to do in those five years?”

“Probably build a transitional Official out of tool-people for our future world.”

Yekase smiled, a cat by a warm window. “I believe she’ll unify and manage the current loose Sinister Organizations, aiming at her dystopian worldview. That opens chances for us. Luzhixing and her followers are on the Moon, eyes like stars, watching her day after day.”

Then her historical task would be to topple that transitional Official and hand the world to the cute successors holding Flash Energy, light in their palms like meteors.

And the new world’s shape would be answered by all Huaxia, free of the Sinister Organization, and would finally change human civilization. That might take centuries, like a forest growing rings.

By then, Yekase could tell Xiaoyuan and Aurora, heart clear as glass, that she’d also spent a lifetime’s worth of years and burned without reserve for a better dawn.

Sandryon was a petit-bourgeois mage. Yekase wouldn’t say it to her.

Then, basking in everyone’s stunned relief, Yekase got cocky. A bet only has two kinds: either you can afford to lose, or you can’t lose at all. This time I had both. I played Miss Gu Xiangshi on my palm like a little chess piece.

So she could say with full confidence, “wo ke yi pao.” The hardest part wasn’t fooling eyes, but recalling the Morse code table she’d half-memorized in college. That burned brain cells like dry leaves.

After boasting about strolling through the Huaxia Branch and its secret prison like it was level ground, XiaoLei and Liu RuoYuan, as angry now as they’d been worried then, pinned her on the sofa and tag-teamed her for a full ten minutes.

…

After that, things were simple. Sky Island solved the long road and awkward identity. If Yekase wanted, she could even fly home for dinner every day while teaching in Europe. But changing jump coordinates that often wasted energy. Infinite Power wasn’t truly infinite; it flowed like a river with banks.

She wanted to walk Europe, too, build a local web. So they set it: she’d return to Sky Island once a month, with video calls in between.

It felt more convenient than some college students.

At least more convenient than Ling Yi, who was really applying to Ivalice State University in the second half of the year.

Liu RuoYuan, tired from the beating, melted into the sofa like warm wax. “Whatever the case, this is a new beginning.”

“For me, for Huaxia, for Earth,” Yekase said, voice solemn as a bell at dawn.

“Come on, don’t force a grand moral.”

“I’m charging zero patent fees for my Flash Energy mechanics. What else do you want? That’s visible profit! It could outgrow the World Tree’s spell tax!”

XiaoLei hadn’t run out of steam. Her anger cooled into tenderness, and she started to worry about Yekase’s poor backside under the sweatpants. She pulled the long-absent daughter into her arms and smoothed her glossy black hair like sewing silk.

“Right, right—our big girl is the smartest, the bravest.”

“Mom, your face-turn is still that fast…”

“Hmm?”

“Nothing. I love you.”

“I love you too!”

And mother and daughter held each other, deep as night water, warm as a lamp.