Yaaawn—

Weariness pooled behind his eyes like dusk mist; in the classroom, Lingchen Yao couldn’t help but yawn. Last night ran him ragged like a midnight tide. He rushed back at dawn, snatched two or three shallow hours of sleep, then got dragged to class by his roommate.

The ruckus last night was a hornet swarm; from the border to the black market, shadows tailed Lingchen Yao and Qianchun in a steady stream. Shaking them took grit, like scraping leeches off in cold river water.

Still, the haul glittered like cold stars in a velvet pouch: three Cantata Two Magic Stones, two First Symphony. With them, he could buy cheaper Magic Tools, or hand the money to Qianchun. They could raise a headquarters like laying bricks at sunrise, or invest like planting seeds and wait for them to swell.

On the platform, the male teacher droned like a slow river. Below, Lingchen propped his head with one hand, his mind wandering like smoke. After last night’s probing, one truth felt solid as iron: Illusory Glass wasn’t lying. A disaster was coming. The Twelfth District would be erased. Everyone would die. Him included.

Resolve tightened in his chest like a drawn bowstring; his preparations had raised his overall strength. Yet to survive Chapter Three, that string would snap.

Only one day of sand remained in the glass.

He’d booked the shooting club for this afternoon, hoping to hone his aim like whetting a blade on wet stone. He didn’t expect to split an arrow by nightfall, but at least, within five meters, he shouldn’t shoot wildly. Otherwise, that pistol belonged in Qianchun’s steadier hands.

In the gaps of the day, he spent a First Symphony Magic Stone. In campus corners where shadows pooled like ink, he laid wards, then told Ren Changxiao and the others their positions. If something broke bad and retreat was cut off, those wards would be a cloak to save a life.

Qianchun followed his assignments, working as a hand at Yunyang Orphanage. When the disaster notice dropped, Qianchun and Hao Wenqian would hustle the director granny and the orphans to the nearest shelter like shepherds guiding lambs through rain.

Eye Orb wasn’t idle either; Lingchen had him compile Twelfth District Monster types. It wasn’t for Lingchen, but for Qianchun, Hao Wenqian, and Chen Xiaoyin. With that lamp in their hands, they wouldn’t swing blind at shadows.

Everything that needed arranging was set, yet a thorn pressed under his ribs. Where was that white-haired girl now? Since their midnight meeting, Illusory Glass had vanished like frost at noon.

At that very hour, Illusory Glass was ripping out the border’s small factions like weeds, trying to braid them into a single rope.

In past loops, she’d learned the Twelfth District’s annihilation had a hand behind the curtain. After that hand pushed, leaders of major organizations vanished or died, and the underworld reshuffled like cards on a stormy table. With the Twelfth District destroyed, even the Magic Maiden–ruled Twenty-Second District had its lines redrawn.

The one behind it could hobble the movements of Order Keeper leadership, and they had pieces embedded in the underworld like black stones on a go board.

By rights, today’s science couldn’t predict how an Abyssal Rift tore open; the underworld couldn’t foresee the Abyss’s advance. Yet rumors of invasion spread underground like mold in damp walls, and most bosses believed them.

That left two roads in the fog. Either the big underground groups had moles inside the Order Keepers and drew the news from their mouths. Or the mastermind wanted those rumors out, baiting a trap for the underworld.

The aftershocks of that reshuffle hit border lines district by district like uneven waves. The borders called in more men, leaving branch forces hollowed out like emptied gourds. That, too, smelled like part of the plan.

Right now, Illusory Glass couldn’t reach the Order Keepers’ upper floor, nor get near it. So she aimed for the underworld. Long view: forge a newborn force as a wedge to pry out the mastermind, and as a stabilizer for those below ground. Short view: unify the border and raise their odds against the coming Monster tide.

Time slid forward like silent snow. A man burst at her with a blade; blood fanned out, bright as spilled wine under sparse stars. Illusory Glass’s silver hair danced in the wind, and a Blade of condensed time Mana kept harvesting the defiant like a winter sickle.

Warm Blood cooled into dark varnish; the will to resist wore down under absolute strength like stone ground to sand. Under brief tyranny, Illusory Glass won short-lived obedience.

She knew brute force could stitch rival groups together in a heartbeat, but if she stumbled, they’d bite her throat without a blink. She didn’t care. Their loyalty wasn’t on her to collect. Her goal was to steer this crisis to calmer waters, to drag Moon Owl back from the brink at any cost.

For the short term, this much was enough.

“You,” she said, voice cold as a night wind, “pack your gear and lay a line on the border. My patience is very thin…”

Her words hadn’t finished falling when the wide sky split; a deep-violet seam opened in the firmament. That violet crack swallowed the shine of stars and moon like a black river. Centered on Jiuqiong University, it drank light from the heavens.

An overpowering Abyssal Aura saturated the air like oil smoke. On the border’s wild plain, fine rifts tore open like dry bark cracking. Soon, Monsters would gather here without number, tens of thousands rolling together into a dreadful tide.

Illusory Glass’s face went hard as ice. The Monster tide had arrived four whole hours early.

She’d seen early waves in other loops, but never this far ahead. It jarred, but she’d expected fraying edges; most of her pieces were already in place.

Beyond the border, unbloomed Abyssal Rifts dotted the land like closed eyes. The heavy Abyssal Aura pressed on nerves like a thumb on a bruise. Anyone with half a brain saw this was a massive Abyss incursion, and they finally grasped why she’d ordered a defensive line.

Who would sit here and wait to die?

Most weighed flight like a coin in the palm; a few acted, lunging at Illusory Glass to gamble for a slit of life.

She paused the runners’ time mid-stride, then tossed them back behind the line like sacks. She had killed enough already; if she kept culling, the border would run short of hands.

“I know you’re scum, criminals, cornered rats,” she said, eyes like winter glass. “I don’t expect much from you. Until my order comes, you don’t take a single step back…”

She paused, sweeping her gaze like a blade.

“If you resist, the corpses behind me are your lesson. When the incursion ends, if you’re still breathing, in the name of the Order Keepers, I promise you what you dream of—treasure, seven figures or more. I’ll wipe certain charges, let you live above ground, not as vermin in gutters.”

The promises were smoke; in her eyes, most wouldn’t live through this. Their deaths would be a fitting penance, like Blood washing old stains from stone.

Most days, profit weighs heavier than a life; few can resist that sugar, and fewer want to keep crawling through the underworld’s mildew.

So Illusory Glass thought.

Under her threat and bait, some border rats moved briskly, fear buried in their eyes like live coals. They dreaded the white-haired girl in a Monster’s skin lifting a finger to pluck their thread.

A smaller group stood different. Their looks at her held disgust, but their spines were iron. They raised their weapons of their own accord, as if this duty was etched into bone.

Their eyes told Illusory Glass as much.

“We don’t need promises from the Order Keepers,” one said, voice steady as stone. “Protecting this city is our duty.”

Illusory Glass understood. These were remnants of the old world’s old era. They didn’t trust the government built by Magic Maidens; they trusted their own hands. In every loop, she saw them bright on the front.

“If everyone were like you…” Her voice softened like evening light. “Then they’re yours to command. Hold this line. If you meet the army, help them as best you can.”

She looked at the man in front. Scars crossed his chest like tangled rivers. Below his left wrist hung an old oil-driven mechanical hand, its metal dull as weathered iron. He looked like a veteran forged for Monster brawls, brave and stubborn as granite.

“Of course,” he answered, rifle ready, breath like steam. “What we can do, we can do better than you Order Keepers. What you can’t hold, we’ll hold! For our home! I’ll prove to you—yes, you—and the Order Keepers that what you’ve done is wrong!”

“For our home!”

He had weight among them; his words cracked like thunder, and many voices echoed. The crowd’s tide shifted, and their idea drew nods like wheat bending in wind.

The rest—those once forced into shape by her blade—began to knit together, a faint cohesion like frost forming on glass.

The man slid into position with his squad, rifles braced, bodies low inside a flat-roofed concrete bunker, solid as a tooth set in the earth.

Illusory Glass had thought she’d need to stay as a whip over stubborn backs. Now, with this man at the point, she could range wider.

As for the truly disobedient, they were already corpses under her blade, chicken and monkey warned in one stroke.

The border’s fortifying moved like a well-drilled drumbeat.

Illusory Glass didn’t idle. With a satellite phone lifted from the underworld, she spoke with Blade. She moved part of the army to keep Order inside the Twelfth District, and sent another part to plug the border gaps left by her earlier purge.

You ask how she convinced Blade? She borrowed headquarters’ seal like moonlight on stolen armor. Blade had likely already noticed the Twelfth District was cut off from HQ.

She knew the Order Keepers’ secret orders; with external comms severed, Blade, as branch commander and secretary, wouldn’t see the snare for a while.

Illusory Glass lifted her face to the deep-violet Rift at the horizon, a wound holding endless unknowns and ruin. She had watched this sky too many times to count.

“Next,” she breathed, voice thin as a thread, “I should go find my sister…”