Ling Yi had already floored the cloaked man without a sound, like a shadow cutting a candle. She scavenged scrap iron, hammered a crude but thick shell, and sealed him inside like a tin coffin. Metal soaked in Flash Energy snapped back to shape under his magnetic pull, like water finding its riverbed, cutting off any hope of escape.

She glanced over. Jiang Bailu was still tangled with the helmeted man. Ling Yi grabbed the cloaked man by the two boots jutting from the iron block and hefted the immobilized body like a club. She rose on a gust of steel and headed over, ready to dish out justice in a two-on-one—oh, make that three-on-one.

But Jiang Bailu shouted, voice like a bell struck in fog, “You go secure the robot!”

Ling Yi paused midair, let the wind cool her cheeks, then banked upward and flew off.

...Blind confidence.

Truth was simpler. She just didn’t want to lose to an eighteen-year-old girl. Adults had their own pride, like old trees refusing to bow in the wind.

The helmeted man closed fast, a bullet with a heartbeat. Jiang Bailu slid her right leg back, tucked her right fist to her waist, and took a classic punching stance, as plain as a dawn horizon.

He judged her in a blink. She’d awakened a fractured vampire bloodline and was drunk on her own damage output—so he thought, a grin like a knife under his helmet. Fine. Let fists decide. Half-baked monster power is nothing before trained muscle and honed technique, like a paper kite in a storm.

Jiang Bailu threw the punch.

To the helmeted man, it was the dullest, weakest right hook imaginable—playground stuff, a sparrow pecking at a tiger.

Then the fist warped.

It slid through something invisible in the air, like a fish disappearing under ice. It twisted outward at an impossible angle, as if the wind itself had a hinge.

Jiang Bailu was still punching straight forward. Yet her right fist didn’t move an inch that way. It bent inside a skewing force-field, looping again and again, coils stacking along her forearm like a ridiculous cartoon spring.

“Every skew my ability imposes,” a voice murmured against his ear, cool as rain on slate, “vanishes the instant I cancel it. That’s not returning to normal. That’s returning to position.”

“You,” the voice smiled without lips, “ever seen a mainspring?”

—!

He backpedaled on instinct. The deviation field collapsed like a tide pulling back.

In that lightning-flash sliver of time, the fist that had turned three full circles in twisted space snapped back to where it must be, in the universe of inevitability.

The helmeted man’s abdomen.

Bang!

His body followed the punch’s line like a comet to ground. His back slammed the metal floor and stamped out radial cracks, spiderwebs of shock. Blood geysered from his mouth and pasted the black visor of his motorcycle helmet from within, red on black like sunset on oil.

His limbs went limp, ropes tossed on a pier. He didn’t move again.

Jiang Bailu’s right arm couldn’t stomach that brutal phase warp. Skin and muscle split and blew, and slick red ulna and radius flashed in open air like bleached driftwood in a storm.

The Sorcery unraveled.

“Hah... that hurts,” she breathed, a laugh caught on thorns.

They say the mind’s reaction time is 0.2 seconds; anything inside that window slips by like a fish between fingers. But the feeling of dropping into a meat grinder punched through anyway, hammered straight into her skull. She shook and dropped to one knee, the floor cold as river stone.

By then, the flesh of her right arm was already knitting in plain sight, veins like ivy creeping back up a wall. A vampire’s vitality was the shield that let her dare this move.

Jiang Bailu sat down beside the helmeted man, breath shivering like a candle flame. She used her intact left hand to pop his chin strap and took the helmet off.

From inside emerged a girl’s—no, none of that soap-opera nonsense. What she saw was a rugged male face, stubbled and blunt as a chisel.

His lower face was a mask of his own blood. His eyes had rolled white. He was gone to the dark for now.

She confirmed his condition, then patched in Yekase.

“Doctor?”

“Mhm. I won,” she said, like raindrops ticking in a cup.

Yekase used the Helen Disk to ferry the two unconscious prisoners—and a still-protesting Jiang Bailu—to the City of Ivalice precinct. She’d just happened to run into two scholars she knew from the Sovell Conference in the principal’s office. They chatted about her current life-form, then gave her a brief but solemn appointment—straight from undergrad to university professor, like a swallow cutting straight to spring. She’d been granted her own independent block among the thousands in the City of Ivalice—permanent title. She hadn’t even tasted the joy, when news hit: Ling Yi and Jiang Bailu had rushed all the way down to the city’s bottom and gotten into a fight with two unknown spies.

???

And Jiang Bailu was the one who chased first.

????

Generation after generation of office workers, marching down the path of the brawler like scholars trading brushes for spears...

So Yekase cheerfully decided to refund every effort Jiang Bailu had made to keep “Dr. Yekase a nice logistics lady” right back to her, with interest.

“Doctor, I was wrong, I was so wrong,” Jiang Bailu sobbed from inside the Disk’s holding cube, words fogging glass that wasn’t there.

Yekase didn’t budge. “Wrong about what?”

“I shouldn’t jump into an incident the moment I see one...”

“I do that all the time. Not that.”

“I shouldn’t test a new skill on the battlefield...”

“I do that all the time. Not that.”

“I shouldn’t make a skill with massive side effects...”

“I do that all the time. Not that.”

Jiang Bailu blinked, lost in a maze.

“...Then what?”

“You were wrong to go solo when you had teammates beside you. That lone-hero act.”

“Don’t you do that all the time?”

“...”

Yekase rubbed her nose and looked away, the sky suddenly very interesting. Ling Yi and Liu RuoYuan cackled behind her like sparrows on a wire.

Soon, the cloaked man and the helmeted man were handed over without fuss to the City of Ivalice police. The chief who received them wore a mechanical body, polished steel under neon. After embracing Flash Energy and ascending, Yekase had already purged the side effects of Infinite Force Perception. She could see the crisscross of mechanical structures and circuits inside him, like a city grid at night—he looked more like a robot than Miaow ever did.

Only his abdomen held an empty pocket, likely housing his original brain like a pearl in a shell.

In the machinist City of Ivalice, that was common—plenty here dreamed of mechanical apotheosis, even in their sleep.

“...Alright,” Yekase said, voice like a quilt thrown over a draft, “you two who just brawled, come to the dorm and rest.”

“I’m not tired! I wanna look around,” Ling Yi protested, sparks still dancing in her eyes.

“No, you’re tired—body and mind. Whatever you want to see, you can roam to your heart’s content once you enroll.”

At Bangli University, every professor had a private dorm. A fully furnished, twenty-square-meter studio, which could slide along the city rails to any district like a gondola on wires—but the fuel was on you. Yekase shoved one thousand reluctant Ling Yis and Jiang Bailus into a dorm she herself hadn’t properly toured, then went shopping with her kid sister.

“Wanna bring some souvenirs home,” Liu RuoYuan said, voice soft as tea steam.

“Souvenirs... here that probably means flashy, useless little gizmos,” Yekase sighed. “All gears and glitter, priced like moonlight.”

She could design piles of flashy, useless little gizmos herself. The lure felt thin as mist. She would window-shop, steal a pinch of inspiration, and call it a day.

Yekase scratched her head, tapped on the hover platform’s control panel. “Let’s just look around then. I’ll grab Mom a set of gardening tools, and that air fryer she mentioned last time.”

The platform undocked from the deck and drifted to the next destination, a leaf on a magnetic stream.

The city was studded with lush greenery, pockets of forest in steel canyons, a balm for residents who could not see the sky when they looked up. Those were public projects, tended and pruned on schedule. The mechanics who ran shops here, whether it helped business or not, either got used to it or didn’t care. Their spaces—oil, gears, circuits—coexisted magically with plants, like ivy climbing an anvil.

On the way, Yekase spotted a number of Chinese signs, brush-strokes lit by neon. One was a hotpot joint literally named “We Don’t Speak Foreign Languages.”

If you don’t speak foreign languages, just use a translator, right... or was that a stamp of authenticity? Beats me. Yekase noted its sector and block number, planning to try it later.

There was even a pink-lit Chinese foot massage parlor. Its name was comically long, words crammed into every corner of a standard metal plaque: “Why Does the Clothesline Fall Down Instead of Flying Up to the Sky.”

Yekase quietly noted its—didn’t note it at all. A foot massage place could be whatever it wanted.

At last, the hover platform carried them to a storefront called “Poincaré Recurrence” and locked into a magnetic berth like a ship kissing a pier.

“Uh, I searched for gardening tools, right?” Yekase eyed the name and the familiar spherical bots on the rack by the door. Doubt pricked like a thorn. She checked the panel again. Yep, this was the place.

She braced herself and led Liu RuoYuan inside.

Only one person worked the counter, a blonde, fair-skinned girl who looked about thirteen, wearing a rainbow flower crown—very garden-core at least on the surface.

“Hi, do you sell gardening tools here?”

“Welcome, customer!” The synthetic voice bank mimicked a young girl’s accent perfectly, like a mockingbird under a lamppost. “Yes, yes. Any tool you can imagine. Shovels, watering cans, even auto-irrigators!”

Third confirmation it was a gardening shop.

Yekase couldn’t help it. “Can I ask, why the name? What’s gardening got to do with Poincaré recurrence?”

“All life returns to dust in the end, and from dust new life rises,” the girl chirped, like wind chimes in a theory lab. “Just like when time accelerates to its limit, the cycle restarts from the top.”

“An oscillating universe, got it. So?”

“So gardening is itself a recurrence!”

“Oh...”

Poincaré would cry, she thought, a chalkboard weeping in the rain.

Still, think about it. Particles returning to initial positions, life returning to dust—both are long journeys home. The analogy was romantic and flimsy, but she talked herself into it with a shrug.

Yekase picked up something that looked like a shovel, but grew odd little structures like barnacles.

“This is a multi-function transforming sapper’s shovel. The lamp on the handle toggles white and UV. Edges extend into sawteeth to deter sudden threats. It can, of course, dig.”

“...Digging is its day job, right?”

Bundling useless features to hike the price—classic black-market play.

“Show me the auto-irrigator.”

“Coming right up!”

Seeing Yekase seemed to know her stuff, the girl was straightforward. She pulled a long metal hose from the cabinet behind her.

“It’s got a timing array imported from Mysidia locked inside. Accuracy rivals a hydrogen atomic clock. Flow and rate are fully controllable. Foolproof operation. Very low energy draw.”

“Looks solid.”

Mostly because she said “timing array.”

Yekase traced the structure in her mind—modern Alchemy, using Sorcery flow as a metronome. Then she bought the metal hose as if paying the license fee for the array itself and had the owner bag it.

At checkout, Yekase couldn’t resist. “That flower crown on your head. You’ve got a preservation spell locked on it too?”

“It’s a magitek flower crown.”

“Right. A magitek flower crown.”

Add “magitek” to anything and it sounds fancy, like steam boilers and Sorcery streamlines crossing in a golden age. Magitek trains, magitek mechs... magitek toilets.

Magitek toilets are wonderful. Yekase had tried one once. In winter, the seat wasn’t cold at all, and the conjured water orb was way gentler than a mechanical spray.

She also bought an automatic tiller that looked like a four-wheel-drive RC car.

As they left, Yekase leaned closer to the owner’s ear, mischief like a firefly. “Quiet tip. Poincaré recurrence assumes a closed system. Our universe is an open one.”