Night Frost lay half reclined on the bed, a pale crescent against rumpled sheets, while Kaneko and Zhao Qingsnow sat opposite like two steady lamps in a dim room. Zhao’s tone carried a chill front—she disagreed with the past few days’ plan. Night Frost went to back up the Old Woman, and Zhao stayed to gather intel, which left her talent sheathed like a blade left in its scabbard.
Night Frost felt the same cold tug. In mere days Zhao had scooped up almost everything on District Twenty One’s Magic Maidens, like a net hauled through a crowded river. Keeping her here to collect scraps was wasted fire—worse, a waste of Zhao’s strength.
Zhao could take on other work, or go with Night Frost to aid the Old Woman. The Old Woman’s target was a backup left near the tech park by Night Frost’s father, a clean-front research site for the Order Keeper in District Twenty One. A place with bright lights always hid sentries; Magic Maidens were bound to be stationed there.
Night Frost placed a call to the Old Woman. The line was a dead pond—no ripples, no voice. She waited out the silence, then lowered the device, a thin sigh like mist leaving her chest. All she could do was hope the Old Woman walked safe under the moon.
Just as Night Frost worried over how to set people like chess pieces for the best speed, a knock tapped the door, three dry knuckles against wood. The male host should still be out; the landlady, nursing a baby, started to rush over, milk-warm breath quick, but Night Frost was a shadow that moved first.
“Auntie, keep doing your thing. I’ll get it. If they’re here for you, I’ll call.”
After these two days, the landlady trusted Night Frost. Aside from a streak of youth like unburned incense, Night Frost handled things steady, a poise not normal for her age—even if she could be a bit flirty, a sparrow flicking its tail on a branch.
Night Frost felt Mana and Abyssal Aura pooling beyond the threshold, like damp cold creeping under a door. One aura out there mirrored her own earlier state—Mana braided with an Abyssal chill. If they lingered, the wall of the world might tear open—an Abyssal Rift yawning like a black mouth.
They had to be moved, quick as frost in sun.
Night Frost opened the door and was struck like glass under hail. Jiujiu stood there, rock-shell over her body, one arm gone. Beside her was Xun Xun, a Mechanical Arm bolted on, his face pale as paper ash. They had only just met him earlier today, yet the scene felt like returning to a familiar alley after a fire—same stones, different smell.
Seeing Night Frost, Xun Xun’s face loosened by a finger’s width and tensed by another. Relief like a warm cup for cold hands; worry like a thin blade—would Night Frost help?
Xun Xun’s state was wrong. His Mechanical Arm wobbled, twisted as if someone had torqued it twice in a vise; its connector had slack like a loose hinge. It looked bone-deep painful, but his face was a still pond—no ripple of pain.
Night Frost didn’t refuse. In that condition, they were reeds one storm away from snapping. She wouldn’t watch a classmate leave this world early, a candle cut before dawn.
But walking them through the front was a lantern that would draw the landlady’s eyes. This was someone else’s house, and Night Frost was only a guest—no right to invite trouble. She told them to circle to the building’s first window; she’d catch them like a fisherman’s hand lifting a net.
Hope lit Xun Xun’s eyes, a faint flame in wind. He nodded.
Door closed, Night Frost held a quiet curiosity that fluttered like a moth. Was this truly Xun Xun? His behavior fit, his movements fit, yet he wore a breath beyond life and death—a depth the morning’s Xun Xun did not have.
“Who is it?” the landlady called, the question light as a spoon tapping porcelain.
Night Frost spun a lie as neat as folded paper. Wrong address. Bad navigation. The landlady accepted, trust settling back like a quilt.
Night Frost returned and told Zhao Qingsnow what had happened, words clipped like trimmed reeds. Zhao agreed to bring Xun Xun and Jiujiu in, though curiosity trailed her like a silver fish—what had carved them into this shape?
They hauled Xun Xun and Jiujiu upstairs, steps soft as cats. Xun Xun was badly injured, but next to Jiujiu he was the lesser storm.
Jiujiu was a map of wounds—dozens of cuts and a severed arm. If not for her raw life-force, iron under molten rock, she’d have fallen long ago. It made Night Frost and Zhao stare and wonder what Jiujiu truly was—a mountain beast wearing human skin.
Her body held impure Mana mingled with Abyssal Aura, like oil swirling in water. The Mana ebbed with time, but the Abyssal Aura climbed, a cold vine around a pillar.
Night Frost’s potions were brewed for Magic Maidens. Whether they would touch Jiujiu’s kind was a fog she couldn’t see through. Night Frost opened a silver cube, spilling medicines and gauze like a healer’s winter table, picked two tablets, and handed them to Xun Xun and Jiujiu.
Just as Night Frost guessed, Jiujiu’s tablet did nothing—chalk on stone.
“Forget everything else—tell me what happened. How’d you end up like this?”
Xun Xun’s voice came thin, a line of ink across paper. His mother wanted a brain chip, a slave’s chain inside the skull. He smashed the culture tank like an axe through ice and pulled Jiujiu free. Jiujiu maneuvered with quick hands and saved him in turn, a fox slipping hunters.
Night Frost found it unbelievable. The self-styled largest Modification Center only sent two people to chase runaways? Luck had wrapped them like a charm.
Hemostat and Mana draughts worked on Xun Xun, mending everything outside the Mechanical Arm, a stitch on torn cloth. But Jiujiu’s side was a knotted thread.
Her severed arm’s wound held a layer of Mana, a thin film with teeth. Even Night Frost felt a thorn-prick of difficulty. Jiujiu said she had a magma heart; Night Frost knew that name. Monsters with a Magma Heart could regrow their bodies, lava making new flesh.
Yet this cut’s Mana blocked both healing and rebirth, a cold seal pressed onto living fire. The Blood had stopped, but the Mana still caged the Magma Heart. Other wounds looked glossy-healed, but weren’t—the enemy had set fuses. Next encounter, she could detonate that Mana, and old cuts would open like mouths.
Clearing that Mana was thorny. Walking and daily motions were fine. But pity clung—Jiujiu would stay one-armed for a while, until the Mana was burned out like stubborn soot.
Night Frost had already noticed Xun Xun’s arm. She lifted it gently, fingers cool as night water. She had seen this series twice—the arm etched with Array Patterns, like a Magic Tool but not quite. She examined the build—several patterns inlaid deep into the metal, strokes short as knife marks. She read the five lines clearly: defense, offense, speed, amplification, reinforcement—five paths carved into iron.
Some lines wandered from what her cut-rate mentor taught. Night Frost tried carving and found certain arrays not weaker than her mentor’s, and some needed fewer strokes, the activation quick as flint to spark.
Curiosity pricked her. Wasn’t it said that besides the Seeker, only two people truly mastered these arrays? Her father and her cut-rate mentor—names she held like two stones in a pocket.
Then who forged this Mechanical Arm with Array Patterns? She pictured the Seeker of District Twenty One and his eerie blue markings across the face, a drawn talisman under skin. An answer gathered like stormcloud. Night Frost turned to Zhao Qingsnow and spoke her guess, low as night wind.
“Right now, either some organization got to the Old Woman first with my father’s ‘help,’ or the Seeker is behind this product. Which means the Seeker may be linked to that Modification Center.”
Zhao nodded, a snowflake settling. Maybe District Twenty One’s Seeker was tied to the Mechanical Arm, and tied deep.
Just then, Night Frost’s device rang like a bell struck in a courtyard. It was the Old Woman. “I got the goods, but only part. I walked into an ambush. The guy had Array Patterns carved on his face.”
It confirmed Night Frost’s guess—District Twenty One’s Seeker had taken array knowledge and spun a new Formation, marrying arrays to machinery, birthing this new Mechanical Arm.
The arms were shipped to a processing line and handed to those in need, even for free—a test seed offered with a smile.
If Night Frost wasn’t wrong, the arm hid eyes. Surveillance nested in steel. They were likely exposed, a lantern carried into the dark watched by the dark.
Her guess held. Xun Xun remembered watching a video of the installer fighting a gray-white-haired Magic Maiden. Now the face in smoke was clear—that was Night Frost.
“This Mechanical Arm has explosives and a camera inside,” Night Frost said, voice steady as a straight path. “You’ve got two choices. Keep wearing it. Or I cut it off, throw it far, then you go find a new arm.”
Xun Xun didn’t want his privacy poured out like tea for strangers, nor to be someone’s lab rat. He should have traced the video’s stream—of course it came from a camera. And the easiest place to hide a camera was inside his Mechanical Arm, a glass eye behind iron.
Night Frost and Zhao Qingsnow took him into the night, to a secluded corner where the wind peeled paint and no one lingered. Even if the arm blew, Night Frost could fling it far like a comet from a sling.
“Don’t be scared,” she said, voice cool as water. “No fire this time.”
“But I’m afraid of pain. And didn’t you say you’d cut it? Why a Spear?”
Night Frost folded the Spear away, slid a kitchen knife from the silver cube, and fed Mana into steel—a thin white glow along the blade. Her arm moved in one clean arc. Hand rose, blade fell.
Zhao Qingsnow moved like winter lightning. Cold surged, formed ice, sealed the arm—a frost cuff blooming in a breath. Her speed left afterimages, a snow phantom on brick. Before Xun Xun could react, the arm was airborne, a dark bird thrown into the night.
As Night Frost warned, the arm was a coiled snake. The instant it parted from flesh, the blast’s heat punched through Zhao’s ice like a hammer through glass. It detonated—a blooming fire flower—snapping nearby power lines with a hiss and spark. Stronger than the last two blasts, Night Frost judged by the ringing in her bones.
She knelt and shoved hemostatic pills between Xun Xun’s clenched teeth, firm as a doctor’s hand in a storm.
Xun Xun struggled to accept it—he’d been walking around with a satchel of death. And the Mechanical Arm had been about to slip; if it fell…
Night Frost’s quick eye saved him. A few steps more and he’d have become a firework, innocents caught like moths in flame. He would have carried regret like a stone for life—if life had lasted long enough to regret.
They left under dark eaves, footsteps quiet as falling ash. Far away, on a screen lit like a cold moon, a new video appeared.
Title: Test Subject 017.
Experiment ended. Uploading footage.
