Night Frost placed the supervisor as a shield before the camera, so she could slip into the elevator’s blind spot like shadow under an eave.

The thing was a mana camera.

Know its bones, and you could draw the two long black-and-white Magic Stones like thorns.

Snap one, and its sight went dark like a drowned lamp.

But this one wasn’t a street cam; yank those stones, and the alarm would shriek like a startled gull.

So Night Frost chose to bleed the camera’s Magic Stones, sip by careful sip, like drawing ink from a reed.

The supervisor fell silent; shock pricked her throat like a fishbone.

Night Frost had pretended to leave with that man surnamed Wang only to net her in the act.

As Night Frost had vowed, a hawk’s shadow would stay on her back.

Fear hit first, cold as river water.

Night Frost halted the elevator.

The supervisor stared at the vial in Night Frost’s hand, then clutched her head and sobbed, a trapped hare in a snare.

She feared Night Frost would kill her without a second thought.

She’d been a supervisor for years, weathered crowds like tides, yet Night Frost was unreadable fog.

The white coat seemed not to hold Zhou Jiaxin at all, as if another soul wore that skin.

Something had surely happened to Zhou Jiaxin; she hadn’t truly returned.

What came back was likely a powerful Magic Maiden, a blade wrapped in silk, slipping into this place with a storm tucked under her sleeve.

If so, everything lined up like stones across a stream.

Today’s Zhou Jiaxin felt foreign, a mask where a face should be; the swap had happened long ago.

She swallowed her sobs, and her voice crept out like wind through reeds:

“I won’t die that easy! You’re not Zhou Jiaxin. You replaced her to burrow into the Modification Center like a mole under snow!”

No sooner had she spoken than flame licked up in Night Frost’s palm with a soft whoosh, a fox-tail of fire.

Night Frost pinched her brow and looked at the shouting supervisor, exasperation hanging like light rain:

“You could’ve walked out breathing. Now it looks like you’re dead meat. Once an infiltration’s blown, I’ve got two roads: slip away like mist, or cut down whoever noticed. Tell me that logic doesn’t balance like scales.”

Night Frost knocked on the elevator wall; the metal thudded, a muffled drum in a well, and the sound rolled around the cramped box.

She nodded, satisfied, and sent the car back to the lab’s floor like a stone sinking to its depth.

“Sure, if you’d screamed this in a crowded market, you might’ve lived by hiding in a tide of faces. Bad luck. Here, people are few and the walls drink sound like cotton.”

The supervisor’s confidence collapsed like wet paper.

She’d thought she could threaten Night Frost; now she felt like the sacrifice laid on the slab.

“Life or death. I’ll give you one toss of the coin on the blade’s edge.”

She didn’t want to kill; death clings like soot and salt.

If she meant to act, she’d have done it already, no wind-up.

One missing supervisor would stir the Modification Center like a hornet’s nest.

If the woman refused, Night Frost would strike and walk away without looking back, like a door slamming in a storm.

If she agreed, doors would open; there’d be room to maneuver like a boat on wider water.

In the end, the supervisor was only human; the will to live flooded her like warm tide.

She begged without pride, soft-kneed like wet clay, just to buy a path to daylight.

Night Frost would let her go; in truth, if the plan flowed smooth as water, the woman needn’t die at all.

Night Frost fished another vial from her Spatial Box, like drawing a moon from a sleeve, and said to the supervisor:

“This is poison. Drink it, and every three days you’ll need a dose to ease it.

Skip it, and pain will bite from head to heel, until you die in agony like frost cracking a branch.

Do you accept?”

A faint déjà vu stirred first, a scent like old incense.

Night Frost had said these words before, long ago; to whom, she couldn’t fish the name from the dark hallway of memory.

Far away at her desk, Qianchun snapped out a sneeze like a firecracker.

She glanced at the window, as if a stray draft had threaded in like a reed flute.

Maybe she’d caught a chill.

The supervisor weighed it, beads on an abacus clicking.

Refuse, and it was death; accept, and her life sat in Night Frost’s palm like a caged sparrow.

No supervisor would stomach that, yet choice had narrowed to a cliff: live in pain, or fall.

At the edge of death, her pride fell off like cracked lacquer.

She bowed her head and choked down Night Frost’s “medicine.”

It crawled like maggots clinging to bone, alive the moment it touched her tongue, sliding down her gut and seeping into her cells.

Pinpricks flared under her skin, nettles waking in a field.

The sting was Night Frost’s warning bell: her life now perched in Night Frost’s hand.

Night Frost, behind her calm, worried the woman might notice it was only water, clear as rain.

Judging by the flinch and pallor, the supervisor believed in the poison as if it were a coiled snake.

We’re all human; as long as the heart still wants dawn, it chooses life.

Not everyone will torch the house with themselves inside when death knocks, least of all those long seated high, like the supervisor before her.

Her choice didn’t surprise Night Frost; life begets bargains.

Looked like tonight she could cast the net and pull up a good haul of secrets.

On the other end of the line, Zhou Jiaxin’s mouth twitched, a crooked blade.

Threatening people, feeding them fear, making them choose between obedience and death—by any mirror, Night Frost didn’t look like a good person.

And Night Frost was wearing her name to boot.

Even if the disguise had been blown, the seams were laughably crooked.

No—because Night Frost had slipped into Zhou Jiaxin’s skin, Zhou Jiaxin couldn’t help spinning stories.

A seesaw rose and fell in her chest as she weighed whether partnering Night Frost was right or ruin.

She hadn’t known Night Frost long, but patterns show like grain in wood.

Night Frost treated her own well; to outsiders and strangers, she kept a blade behind the smile.

She moved like thunder, thought like lightning.

In temperament, both she and Night Frost shared a hard edge, the kind that cuts inward first.

Zhou Jiaxin had signed Night Frost’s contract, so she wasn’t an outsider, yet not a companion either.

A deep ravine ran between them, a paper bridge at best.

She wouldn’t pry into Night Frost’s secrets or aims; with only a sheet of contract between them, knowing more would be poison, not tea.

Still, she knew the Modification Center wasn’t a clean temple.

It had official seals like thin ice, yet underneath it tinkered with bio-mods and human trials in the dark.

She hadn’t dipped her hands in, but the pond was muddy all the same.

From her perch, Zhou Jiaxin would watch the board and wait.

When Night Frost and the Modification Center decided victory and defeat, and the contract unknotted, she’d land on the winning branch.

Only by following the strong do you eat your fill; Zhou Jiaxin had known that since she was small, like a stray pup trailing the butcher’s cart.

Lately, without shifts to work, boredom pooled like stale water.

The room held nothing else; she could only pace its walls like a goldfish in a bowl.

If she’d known, she would’ve brought something to kill time.

No staff meals either; only Night Frost’s instant noodles and a few self-heating packs.

The steam curled like lazy ghosts, and the taste was decent—especially the pork chop.

Mid-bite, a spark leapt in her mind, as if some old tangle of love and hate had sprouted new leaves.

Night Frost’s purpose here felt even more layered, like lacquer on wood.

She chewed on the thought and the meal alike, and finished with relish.

Night Frost walked shoulder to shoulder with the supervisor, their steps echoing like paired metronomes.

The woman sketched the Modification Center’s layout, a map of veins under ice.

The Center held six zones, built beneath the park’s lake like a hive under water.

Each zone had a Cantata Two as warden.

They were in the pharmaceutics zone, the only one open to the outside, so a doorway rose on land like the mouth of a dry well.

Besides it, there were the mechanical modification zone, the bio-breeding zone, the conference and magic research zone, and the parts assembly research zone.

Every zone also held a biological experiment sector; those sectors linked together like canals, occupying the Center’s heart as a hub.

But the mechanical modification zone had been wrecked by two unknowns.

They’d let loose the Mud King from their biological research sector, like breaking a dam to free a swamp-born king.

Night Frost remembered the patch of lake ringed by several Cantata Two like nets on water.

That should’ve been the mechanical zone, torn apart by the Mud King Xun Xun’s group loosed while fleeing.

It must’ve throbbed like a drumbeat of trouble for them.

Worry pricked, a thorn under the nail.

How was Xun Xun now?

In the middle of talks with his father’s men, Xun Xun sneezed, a spark off steel.

Beside him, Jiujiu, wrapped tight like a dumpling, asked if he was alright.

He waved it off; he was sturdy as an ox.

He flexed his solid Mechanical Arm; it wasn’t as strong as the last, but it was enough.

In his chest, an anchor set—he finally had the strength to guard his freedom.

“In the end, it all comes down to me anyway!” he said, grinning like a lone pillar holding up a roof.

Jiujiu pinched his waist like a crab claw.

Xun Xun swallowed the yelp, keeping the surface calm like a pond during a sermon.

She hurried an apology; she still couldn’t pour her strength like tea without cracking the cup.

This time, Xun Xun had his father at his back like a windbreak, hard evidence in hand, and Jiujiu as witness.

They could topple his mother’s faction.

It was meant to go to court, but both sides saved face and chose to settle behind a curtain.

That favored Xun Xun; a courtroom drags in tides.

They couldn’t brawl with the Modification Center and the beast behind it.

In District Twenty One, a single chain of interests threads most powers like vines around pillars.

It still bruised, frost on the heart, that the mother who bore and raised him stood across the field.

Hard to swallow.

But he wasn’t the same as before; the steel had taken a temper.

“These are your chips. They got soaked, but the code inside can still be restored.”

He paused, the honorific snagging like a burr.

“Mother—no. You. Tell me plainly what you were trying to do.”

Across from him stood a woman.

Time had carved rings into her face; black hair streaked with a finger of white, eyes red and wet.

She dabbed at the rising tears with a handkerchief, like blotting rain from a letter.

Xun Xun’s father held his head and rubbed his temples, a man ground down like a millstone.

He had never thought the storm would break inside his own house.

He didn’t go home; he went straight to his company, clothes stained with blood, one arm severed, a girl he’d never met at his side.

He told his father part of the story, words like smoke after a fire.

Who would’ve thought the wife he’d loved a lifetime would raise a knife from the pillow at Xun Xun?

The estate passed by order of blood; her motive needed no lantern held to it.

He knew wolves would circle—every aunt and cousin had their eye on the estate—so he’d grounded Xun Xun.

Who imagined the first strike would come from the hound inside the gate?

He didn’t want her excuses, but he wanted the truth laid bare.

So he sat here today, under the family’s lamps, with every kin watching, ready to lay the words on the chopping block.

Xun Xun’s poise surprised him, a fresh spring bubbling where he’d expected dust.

Xun Xun…

He looked more and more like the man his father had been, a mirror laid across years.

They’d thought he’d drift on, unremarkable.

This time, an ember had caught; ambition flared like a new torch.