Ink-dark clouds pressed the sky down, and late August split open with a downpour.

The busy street emptied like a drained riverbed. Only a convenience store’s electronic chime pecked through the rain-curtain and flew to a girl’s ear.

Her name was Qianchun. She’d been a trainee Magic Maiden for the Order Keeper, a lantern for the future.

Her birth had been her family’s sunrise.

Hope filled her chest like spring water. She wanted to join the Order Keeper, guard her kin, and guard what she believed deserved guarding.

Then disaster fell like a trapdoor.

On a trip, a car crashed.

Her mother’s legs broke like snapped branches; Qianchun and her father walked away.

The home lost a gear, and the clock still ticked, rough and loud.

Dread came first, then the noticing.

In two long years of her mother’s bedrest, her father began leaving at dawn and returning like a shadow.

He drank like a sinking man.

He called her mother useless, a mouth that burned money like paper charms.

Thunder filled the house, then lightning struck.

Her mother and father fought while Qianchun hid in a corner like a small bird in a cold bush.

She felt helpless, and help was a horizon she couldn’t reach.

Right and wrong blurred like ink in water.

Then he sold the house, and her mother didn’t know.

She confronted him, and the only answer was fists coming down like rain.

That night her mother cried by her ear, and truth dropped like stones.

Her father had another woman, picked up at a gambling table.

Morning broke.

Her mother packed a little and took Qianchun to a relative’s place, a raft in floodwater.

Bitter taste rose first, then the thought.

“Meet a woman in a casino? He’ll be bled dry,” Qianchun told herself.

And the river of fact indeed ran that way.

One day he found them, by means Qianchun couldn’t guess.

She stared, disbelieving, at the man at the door, ragged as a stray dog.

That was her father.

He’d lost his job, his money, his woman, and debt clung like leeches.

He came begging.

Her mother tried to refuse, but honeyed words snared her like a web.

They sat facing each other like two stones in rain.

Qianchun, trying to be grown, closed the door soft and went to wash the waiting vegetables, a small duty like a candle.

Voices rose, then snapped.

Her father wiped his hands on a mop rag, stomped to the entry, and stormed into the weather.

The whole storm lasted minutes.

Silence pooled like dark water.

Her mother didn’t come out.

Qianchun pushed the half-closed door, and warmth still breathed in the room.

Blood bloomed across the floor like spilled dye.

Her mother’s pupils had lost their focus, floating like dead stars.

A hard glass cup sat nearby, its chipped corner kissed with blood.

It was the weapon. No doubt. No mercy.

Little Qianchun cupped her mother’s cooling hand.

Her pale dress drank blood until it turned heavy and red.

Minutes later, medics in white lifted her mother onto a stretcher like pallbearers in snow.

Qianchun leaned beside her and cried without strength, a sparrow in rain.

Regret crushed first, then the truth.

There was no miracle.

Rain swallowed her again.

Qianchun stood in the downpour with linen bandages around her white back, each strip reddened like fading maple leaves.

Cold water soaked the cloth, needling her unhealed wounds.

It was punishment for failure.

She pulled on a black cloak, a thin roof against the sky.

At the convenience store’s door, the electronic chime rang like a small bell.

Cool air drifted out, snow to the skin.

Shelves held neat, tempting goods, all bright as lacquer.

By the register, steam climbed from a pot of oden and a kettle of hot tea.

She thought a moment, then walked to the breakfast stall next door and bought two steamed mantou buns.

To her, a convenience store was a mountain too steep to climb.

This street always pulled on memory like a magnet.

Every time, the days after her mother’s death returned.

And she always regretted that choice in the rain, the one reckless step that cut off her future.

Debt fell like hail.

Her father couldn’t repay a coin.

The burden slid to her relatives, and to small Qianchun.

Luckily, her kin didn’t push her into the mud.

They even lifted her, waiving her rent like sheltering her with an umbrella.

After her mother’s death, a hidden sum surfaced like a bottle on a tide.

It carried Qianchun through high school.

Her grades shone.

At night, after class, she worked in a nearby restaurant, coming home at midnight like a moonbeam fading.

That afternoon, the sky matched today.

Rain drummed like a warband.

In a narrow alley, Qianchun heard a whimper she knew in her bones.

Her father lay by a garbage heap like a dead dog.

His hand gripped a dark green glass bottle, chipped at the lip like a broken tooth.

Filthy hair curtained his eyes, but she knew him.

That was her father.

Her mother’s corpse rose in her mind like a ghost.

This man was the root of it all, the rot in the beam.

If not for his other woman, if not for his love of liquor and dice, if not for his killing hands—

She might have lived a better life, a childhood like spring.

Classmates wouldn’t whisper behind her back like gnats.

Debt wouldn’t have chained her ankles.

Anger flooded her first; the body moved after.

She raised her hand.

Mana pulled tight, then shaped into an arrow like frozen rain.

It punched through his skull.

Red and white mixed with the downpour and ran away like paint in gutters.

The Order Keeper arrived.

They found her fast, like wolves to blood.

She knew paper can’t cover fire; truth burns through eventually.

So she dropped out.

One night, she left the Twelfth District and the city that had held her for more than ten years.

She drifted outside its walls like a stray leaf.

She had killed her father.

The Order Keeper would never shelter her.

Her hate burned her path to ash.

All she had was the hot rush of revenge, and the cold valley of loss.

After, she joined a group.

They called it resistance under the Twelfth District, but really it was bread money in a dark market.

“Aklatia…”

She stuffed the rain-wet bun into her mouth.

The soggy crust slid easier, like clay with water.

The rain stung her back now and then, little knives along raw skin.

After a long breath, she turned toward Lingchen Yao’s place.

Since we all live under the floorboards, since this is all a gamble, why not bet big?

Win, and you step into the sky in one stride.

Lose, and you fall without bottom.

Anyway, she had nothing left the rain could take.

Lingchen Yao shut the window and lay on his back.

The storm cooled the heat inside and out, like a fan over coals.

It also scattered the plan he and Eye Orb had stacked last night.

Aklatia had been ripped up by the Order Keeper, roots and all.

But records remained, and half-made tools, like bones after a fire.

They sat now in a secret base Eye Orb had set up.

“Base” was a big word.

It was simply one of Eye Orb’s hideouts, a shell he wore in plain sight.

If luck held, the Order Keeper wouldn’t sniff it out.

Today’s plan had been a walk to that den, to fetch Aklatia’s research and a slice of its funds.

The rain tore that page.

They’d wait for clear skies.

Sleep crept in when the old wooden door knocked like a branch on a window.

Lingchen Yao got up and cracked the door.

A figure stood there in a threadbare black cloak.

Black hair hung wet, and droplets fell to the old boards like beads.

A cool gust slipped through, and Qianchun shivered like a willow leaf.

She shed the cloak.

Lingchen Yao remembered her face, even scraped by wind and rain.

He hesitated, then let her in.

He pushed a few new-bought clothes across the table and set a pot for hot tea.

Steam curled like white snakes.

Eye Orb murmured to him: no killing intent on the girl, no shadows at her back.

So he relaxed.

Even if the sky cracked, he could still run.

Qianchun didn’t change, but she accepted the tea.

She didn’t mind poison in the cup; she had come to defect.

To revive Aklatia, you had to gather hands.

Poison was a leash for wolves with bad hearts.

She’d lived under the earth long enough to know the rule.

To join, to survive, you show loyalty and worth.

“I want to join Aklatia.”

Lingchen Yao blinked, and reasons flickered like lanterns.

“I want to hear why.

If it’s only because poison can bind you, then, sorry—at best, you’re a tool, not a member.”

Eye Orb excelled at such talk.

A mechanical voice rose from under the bedboards, dry as gears.

“No.”

Qianchun shook her head, a wet crow feather.

“Our group is at its end, a road that narrows to a cliff.

I need a new path.

Aklatia is broken, but it still has bones.

If every road is dead, why not gamble once?”

“An end, huh… I get that feeling.”

Lingchen Yao’s voice was a low rain.

“But I can’t take you.

If you can betray yours, you can betray us.

Aklatia needs hands, but it needs loyalty more.

Show it, or there’s no door.”

Qianchun reached into her pocket.

A blue Magic Stone slid to the table’s heart like a small sea.

It was hers.

A Magic Maiden without her Magic Stone can’t transform—just a lamb on a chopping block.

“I see,” Eye Orb said.

“But before that, a trial.”

A white sheet of paper slid out, black ink biting an address.

“That’s a remnant Aklatia sub-branch.

There are classified files there.

Bring them back untouched.

Do that, and I’ll agree.”

Qianchun rose, rain already in her steps, but Lingchen Yao pressed her shoulder.

“Mm. Your Magic Stone.

Also, no rush… change first.

Even a Magic Maiden’s body cracks under weather.

Bath’s down the hall, last door on the left.”