From the two girls’ stammered accounts, Night Frost learned their names. The quiet one was Zhang Jialu, like a closed window catching no wind. The black-haired one with green streaks, shivering in the corner like a leaf in rain, was Xia Qingqing; the “streaks” weren’t dye at all, but a quirk left by her Mana awakening.

The girl lying on the ground, fainted and pale as moon milk, was Qiu Sheng. As for her surname, Zhang Jialu and Xia Qingqing had no clue; Qiu Sheng had never told them, like a locked drawer no one dared open.

Two of them were full members of the Order Keeper, while Xia Qingqing and Zhang Jialu were only reserves, saplings not yet a grove. Because of the Abyss’s massed invasion and the Twelfth District’s thin manpower, not only First Symphony teams but even the reserves beneath them were sent to reinforce, like every drop dragged into a flood.

Members below Cantata Two were split up and spread like seeds, four to a squad, so each could bloom where she best could.

Each of the four carried a different edge. Xia Qingqing was a plant-type Magic Maiden, strong at control, like vines that bind with a smile. Zhang Jialu was physical-type; her Mana pooled in her eyes, making her a watcher whose gaze cut like glass.

The one who died had healing down to a hymn. If she hadn’t gone first, Qiu Sheng’s wounds wouldn’t be this bleak, like frost on a flower.

As for Qiu Sheng, Night Frost learned from Xia Qingqing she was nature-type. Whatever she could do came in scraps, whispers about lightning, like thunder heard through walls.

“Mhm. Lightning… Then why does she look familiar, like a face you glimpse in a storm and can’t place?”

The Eye Orb glanced at Night Frost, a pebble plunk in a still pond.

“Don’t tell me you forgot the Magic Maiden who tried to mug you for your haul—till you flattened her? And the cash you lifted that day, didn’t you spend it in a blink?”

Blonde hair. Lightning. The pieces fell like leaves into a pattern. Night Frost remembered the Magic Maiden she’d dealt with—the pampered face wearing a crown of arrogance—rising in her mind, then slowly aligning with Qiu Sheng’s face on the floor.

“Uh… right, that does ring a bell. Still feels off. Maybe it’s the lost sense of superiority that’s throwing me?”

If Qiu Sheng was that Magic Maiden, Night Frost felt a pinch of regret, like drinking cold tea. Saving her meant saving a little tyrant. But she’d already spent the strength; once you pull someone from the river, you don’t toss them back.

Her injuries were ugly as winter rot. Night Frost wasn’t that petty; the old grudge had already burned out, and Qiu Sheng had tasted her own medicine.

Still, what a coincidence, like bumping into a familiar ghost in a crowd.

They had stanched the Blood for now, but Qiu Sheng was still far from safe. Even with alcohol to clean the wounds, infection lurked like mold. She’d lost too much Blood. Her breath was a torn thread.

Blonde hair clotted with black scabs of Blood. A face white as porcelain. Her chest rose weakly, like a broken bellows. The slightest breeze and she’d be gone.

Night Frost let out a murky breath, mist on glass. She glanced at the anxious Hao Wenqian and Chen Xiaoyin at her side. Fine, fine. Soft heart wins today. Since they’d rescued her, they’d see it through—one more shove against the gates of hell.

Better that than letting Chen Xiaoyin and Hao Wenqian grieve for days. Better that than Night Frost herself lugging a corpse to feed the Monsters. That thought sat crooked in the chest.

Night Frost studied Qiu Sheng, gaze drifting up and down like a lantern beam. Something was missing in her memory. Something that could pull Qiu Sheng back from the brink. The name of it hid like a fish under ice.

Her eyes snagged on the palm-sized rectangular case at Qiu Sheng’s waist. A spark lit. There it was. A rope across the chasm.

She remembered what the Eye Orb had said: a small storage space, not big but roomy enough to stash plenty. It needed a password. Back then she’d tried a bunch. The password was Qiu Sheng’s birthday… right?

“121…”

Night Frost tried nine more times, patient as rain.

She popped the case open with practiced fingers. She dug through, item by item, tossing the useless aside like shell from meat.

Hao Wenqian moved to scold her for prying. Chen Xiaoyin, more curious than righteous, wondered how Night Frost knew the password. The newly arrived Zhang Jialu and Xia Qingqing kept their mouths shut, mice under a hawk. Only Qianchun, who’d seen it all, stepped in to help.

“I remember meds in here. Where’d they… oh, this one, right, this one!”

Night Frost pulled out a stack of small vials: a few special-effect potions only full Order Keeper members could buy, plus a mana-rich clarifying elixir that gleamed like a caught tear.

“Tsk, tsk. Pricey little things. They look expensive.”

The Eye Orb hopped off Night Frost’s shoulder, a startled pebble to Zhang Jialu and Xia Qingqing’s pond; both drew weapons, nerves taut as strings. Qianchun’s quick words soothed them, and their shoulders sank an inch.

The Eye Orb poured the Mana elixir and the special potions into Qiu Sheng’s mouth. It picked a pill, crushed it to powder, and sprinkled it on the burned skin, like ash on ember.

“These potions don’t look like much…”

Night Frost watched, seeing no change, like staring at soil for sprouts. For that price, it couldn’t be all show, could it?

“Not many people use these,” the Eye Orb said, voice dry as parchment. “First, they’re pricey. Second, for Magic Maidens above Cantata Two, they don’t matter much. Those girls outheal these in their sleep.”

It paused, then motioned for Chen Xiaoyin to feed Qiu Sheng a solid pill. Qiu Sheng’s jaw clenched like a locked gate.

The Eye Orb dragged Night Frost to a corner, backs turned to the others. Pity our naïve Night Frost missed a rather steamy moment.

“As for Mana elixirs, unless you can’t restore Mana on your own, Magic Stones do the job. But for First Symphony, these are lifesavers. First Symphony can’t match Cantata Two in anything… except you.”

The Eye Orb cut Night Frost a look. This girl was a First Symphony body trading blows with Cantata Two—like a reed parrying a spear.

Mid-lecture, the Eye Orb reminded Night Frost to clear the Monsters outside. She didn’t dawdle. She cut down Monsters like weeds while listening on.

“It’s a shame,” the Eye Orb went on, “these potions that help First Symphony can’t be afforded by your average First Symphony, and Cantata Two rarely needs them. So no mass production. The Order Keeper only supplies them in a trickle.”

Behind them, Qianchun and the others gasped. Colorless Mana coaxed the Blood, stilled the wound from the inside out. Under the white powder, the burn on Qiu Sheng’s thigh began to scab, like ice forming over a pond.

Qiu Sheng’s breathing evened. Color returned like dawn to her cheeks. She’d wake soon, if fortune held.

Chen Xiaoyin settled Xia Qingqing and Zhang Jialu. Qianchun and Hao Wenqian stood guard at the orphanage door. The Monster tide had ebbed, yet a prickle of unease crawled over Night Frost’s skin like cold dew.

Above, the Moon Owl hung in the air, and on the scarred earth below stood a battered white knight, both facing a chitinous, cracked-shelled Monster lurking midair.

Both sides were spent, torches guttering in wind. Moon Owl and Yuan Dai marveled at the Monster’s strength and recovery, like a rock that drank rain. The bug, in turn, begrudged the gnats’ tenacity and ferocious life.

But the bug had met its aim: stall and kill the Twelfth District’s main force, the task the queen had hissed into its shell. Even if it shattered, it would finish it.

At this pace, fighting on meant it might lose to the two human foes at its level. So only one road remained—a way to drag them down with it.

The scattered swarm knotted together, clouds reforming from tatters. It flipped tactics: no more nips and feints. The hulking body and the swarm rushed as one. The assault was knife-cold. The speed was lightning-quick.

“It’s going all in.”

The Eye Orb watched the fight, a lantern in its pupil. Both sides were spent arrows. The bug would decide the winner with one strike, staking all its life.

Moon Owl and Yuan Dai unsealed again. Mana flared and veiled a corner of the sky’s wound. Fireflies dared to rival the bright moon.

The white knight clasped the sword in both hands. A pink halo drove the greatsword’s tip skyward. While the bug jammed itself in a ten-meter tear Moon Owl had ripped, the knight dropped like a falling star.

Night Frost thought that move deserved to be called Excalibur.

The bug severed its own body. Its tail detonated, chopping the knight’s descent and yanking its skull from the rift. It dragged half a body, bleeding colorless, translucent, viscous Blood that dripped like glue.

It packed all its Abyssal Aura into the Magic Stone inside it, then lunged for Moon Owl once more.

Moon Owl, practiced, tore open an Abyssal Rift. The bug dove into the tear like last time. But unlike last time, it flung the Magic Stone it had stuffed full of Abyssal Aura.

Without its Magic Stone, it thrashed twice in the rift and died, a candle pinched out.

But the Magic Stone, crammed with all the Chapter Three force the bug could muster, shot for Moon Owl like a thunderbolt with no warning.

Moon Owl ripped a slit with one hand. With the other, she shaped a Mana shield that looked thin as frost—she’d only just ascended to Chapter Three. After nearly three hours of dueling the Monster, her Mana scraped the bottom like a dry well.

Beneath the deep-purple tear, Yuan Dai crawled from the ruined, immobilized white knight. Pink petals flickered on her, there and not, like dawn through mist.

She unsealed again. Once against the chimera. Once earlier against this Chapter Three Monster. Now, a fourth time today.

She felt the edge of herself, a cliff in fog. Maybe it was overuse. Maybe it was simple exhaustion. In that instant of unsealing, her ears and mind filled with voices she’d never heard, like a sea rising in a shell.

She shook her head. The voices ebbed, but pain boomed like drums. She forced open those dimming rose eyes. Her scarred palm lifted toward Moon Owl in the air.

“Shield… sanctify, shelter my friend!”

A white veil flared before Moon Owl. The Magic Stone struck the Rift. Mana and Abyssal Aura collided, a sky-splitting blaze smashing both shields and swallowing Moon Owl whole.

Under the night, a flaming figure streaked, dragging a bright Crimson tail across the dark, and fell toward the Twelfth District border.

It carved the air almost over Night Frost’s head, a comet skimming rooftops.

A modest mushroom cloud budded near the orphanage. Dust rolled from it, a gray tide lapping their steps.

In the crater, Moon Owl hauled herself up, trembling as her Magic Armor reached its limit and broke into drifting particles. She yanked up her pitch-black cloak to cover her bared body, then casually speared a Monster’s skull as it lunged.

That strike should’ve killed her, nailed the coffin shut. But at the instant the Magic Stone would’ve hit the Rift she’d torn, it hesitated. Just a heartbeat.

Moon Owl tore a slit wide enough to swallow her and slipped inside. The blast from Mana and Abyssal Aura smashing together blew her opened space to pieces and hurled her out like chaff.

Who had helped her, a hand in the dark? Moon Owl didn’t know.

If she survived and learned the name, she would repay it well. First, she needed a safe corner, a hush where Mana could gather like dew.

The outskirts crawled with Monsters, many driven out by the Chapter Three battle over the city center. Some had bite. With her leftover Mana, she could maybe handle a few First Symphony strays.

“That’s… the orphanage?”

Moon Owl had been here before. When she’d investigated Lingchen Yao, she’d walked these halls. She could see an array wrapped around the building, its aura kin to Jiuqiong University’s wards. Inside the array, she felt Abyssal Aura coiled like smoke.

“Cantata Two? Is it her?”

Moon Owl felt her life run thin as thread. If the Fallen One from the Abyss she’d expelled before was still there, she had no chance in her current state.

A Magic Maiden holding a Chapter Three Magic Stone would be quite a lure for that one, sweet as blood in the water.

Moon Owl had to wheel around, yet behind him a flock of Monsters gathered like crows on cold branches.

At the tail of the pack stood an injured, tiger-shaped Monster, its stance like a wounded mountain cat.

Judging by its aura, it had once been a Cantata Two, a note now frayed like winter silk.

Corrosive shadows twined around its wounds like acid ivy, a mark from the first wave into the Twelfth District—one that slipped from Lujin Lushi’s hands.

Its aura sat not far from Moon Owl’s now; if they clashed, the tilt of fate could go either way.

A bitter smile tugged at Moon Owl’s mouth; the Monsters loomed ahead, the orphanage behind like a row of tired eyes.

His heart sank first; now he was trapped, no step to advance and no room to retreat, thorns on both paths.