A shell-clad figure in pure white streaked like a meteor over the Twelfth District, and Qianchun dangled like a chick in its grip as the whoosh split the clouds.
Wind slapped her cheeks like wet flags; she squeezed her eyes shut until the speed bled away, and they touched down by a ruin like a broken tooth.
She cracked her eyes; a wash of white flooded in like snowlight; up the white armor rose a gaunt face with withered gray hair, and pupils shattered, black and white tangled like ink and frost.
“Sorry... seems I went a little too fast,” she said, voice thin as wind through reeds, and it tugged a thread of familiarity in Qianchun like a half-remembered song.
“Do you have food... water would do,” she asked, lips dry as cracked earth, and hunger hollowed her like a lantern burned to its wick.
Qianchun didn’t refuse—savior’s due weighed like a stone—so she pulled water and rations from her Spatial Box, its metal gleam like a firefly in dusk.
The woman devoured compressed biscuits and half a bottle of water like a parched field drinking rain; color crept back like dawn, and Qianchun finally dared ask, gentle as a hand on a sleeve, “What’s your name? A codename works too.”
Her white-shelled hand hung midair like a bird paused on the wing; she froze, eyes vacant as winter ponds, and murmured with a well’s hollow echo, “What’s my name?”
The woman in pure-white armor couldn’t recall her name or origin, fog erasing her path; hunger alone had driven her to snatch Qianchun, sensing food; one thing was clear—she was a Magic Maiden, likely above Cantata Two, a blade wrapped in mist.
While she sank into thought, Qianchun scanned the ruins like a hawk, opened GPS glowing like a green star, snapped a photo of the white maiden for Blade, and traced the map’s lines like river veins; grateful for the rescue, she still felt the knot— the blood scion wasn’t dead, and her task wasn’t done.
Blade’s voice rang from the phone like struck steel; no need to return—follow the Magic Maiden; the blood scion could be stalled, with the Magic Cannon and the branch Formation damming the threat long enough for liquid nitrogen to arrive like midnight frost.
The veil lifted like morning fog; Blade knew her identity and spoke without flourish, truth heavy as iron: her codename was Yuan Dai, warder of the Twelfth District, Moon Owl’s predecessor—a senior; a Chapter Three powerhouse who once soloed a fierce chimera in catastrophe, and with Moon Owl slew an insectoid Chapter Three, two stars burning in one sky.
Back then, from the orphanage, Qianchun had seen it too—against the insectoid Chapter Three, not only the pitch-black Moon Owl but a dazzling white flare; that was Yuan Dai, the lighthouse that kept the Twelfth District calm for seven years through storm nights.
Qianchun looked at Yuan Dai; so this unassuming Magic Maiden carried a mountain for a name? Shock rippled like a thrown pebble, then stilled; she’d met many giants, and habit grows like moss.
Yuan Dai wrung her mind like a cloth for a drop of self, and whispers from deeper down brushed her ears like cold reeds.
“I... don’t want to go there!” The formless voice flowed like honeyed poison, a riptide tugging her into endless dark, but Yuan Dai refused, thrashing like a swimmer in winter water.
“Go where?” Qianchun tilted her head like a sparrow, baffled that identity-search turned to flight-talk in a city of ruins.
The whisper thickened; her blood stalled like a freezing river, gray-green veins knotting like ropes; black and white bled outward from her eyes with each struggle like ink in water, and the white shell failed, breaking into unstable motes like ash in a gust.
Pale skin met air; wounds bloomed from nowhere like red flowers; blood seeped and dyed her whole body crimson until she stood a figure of blood, head to heel.
She dropped to her knees on rubble and keened like a wounded wolf; tears squeezed from ruined eyes and rinsed her face, while stones below turned red with the rain of her blood like clay under storm.
Qianchun rushed to steady her, but stray Mana exploded off Yuan Dai and flung her back like a gale; invisible Mana nicked her throat like a Blade; Yuan Dai snapped back to herself and tamped the riot down like a lid on a boiling pot, or Qianchun would’ve stood a headless war-god.
“Go... now,” she rasped, breath frosty with pain, but how could Qianchun leave her alone in wild weeds and ruins?
She stepped in again; Yuan Dai shoved her away with a palm like thunder; white armor skinned over her anew, then turned into a streak of light and shot toward the border, a falling star seeking the horizon.
Qianchun stared as ink-black clouds split like torn silk; drip-drop, cold rain beaded from the heavens, washing blood from stone, rinsing her stained hands, and dissolving a crystal wrapped in red—a pure-white Magic Stone gleaming like snow.
At the rain-soaked border, blinding fire bloomed like a lotus; a thunderous boom rolled the earth, and broken pure-white armor rose from the ground, standing like a battered statue to show its final majesty.
It was a god descending through storm, a shock that branded Qianchun’s life like a hot seal on paper.
She stood soaked in blood and rain, yet pride burned through like a lantern in fog; in those shattered, vacant eyes, resolve ran iron-straight to the horizon.
Opposite Yuan Dai gaped a narrow spatial rift like a torn scroll; the Blood Clan Prince had driven Moon Owl from her familiar domain; blood-lit threads tugged the blood across his back and wove a colossal net that draped the whole city, cocooning Yuan Dai and Moon Owl alike.
“You’re... Senior Yuan Dai,” Moon Owl breathed, stunned like ash in wind; Yuan Dai had been missing for months—what had carved her porcelain-thin and ready to break at a touch?
“Not the time for that. Honestly, I didn’t think I’d stand with you again,” Yuan Dai said, a tired smile like dusk light on iron.
In that instant, the pure-white giant and the Blood Clan Prince were evenly matched, two mountains grinding; Moon Owl harried the field, ripping space now and then like paper, and the tears made him stagger.
In the Prince’s hands, blood knew no shape; it gathered into needle-spears, arrows, and spears and lances, a red armory blooming like thorns.
Those blood-weapons sank almost to the hilt in the white giant, but linked mind-to-body, Yuan Dai felt no pain, ignoring blades and staves skewering her like brambles; her white fist smashed through the blood and slammed the Blood Clan Prince like a hammer on a bell.
He burst into blood mist, and space around them blew open like cracked ice, then sealed; the void stole a portion of that mist; when he tried to tear space and reclaim it, Moon Owl flung that share deeper, like casting stones into the abyss.
They moved with eerie harmony, twin blades in one scabbard; yet the advantage stayed with the Prince; the pure-white giant thinned to transparency, and at its core Yuan Dai showed clear like a candle behind paper.
Moon Owl saw it—Yuan Dai had no Magic Stone; without one, Mana was hard to draw or replenish, a mill with no water, and taking the Prince’s strikes head-on had likely pushed her to the edge.
Worse, her state and look were wrong; eyes stayed shut like barred doors, hair hung gray and lifeless, and no breath of life clung to her like wintered grass.
“Don’t mind that. My choices, all of them. But Moon Owl, if you can... don’t unseal,” she said, words soft as falling ash.
The Prince watched them talk, ignored like a scarecrow in rain; a Blood Clan Prince, scorned by one broken and one wounded human—unforgivable as a stain on silk.
The blood-weapons inside the white giant liquefied and gushed from armor seams like burst springs; he beckoned, and the flying blood rivers ran together like all streams to sea in his palm, enough to drown Moon Owl and Yuan Dai.
Moon Owl nested the space holding Caris into another space like boxes within boxes; with a spatial dagger in each hand, she tore two rifts—one before Yuan Dai, one before herself, shields like mirrored lakes.
Endless space could hold the blood sea, but the sea was vast as night; waves boomed around the Twelfth District, and even the white giant standing in it looked tiny, a boat in storm.
Blood-red swells slapped his cloak, blood-red hair streamed, and blood-red moonlight washed his face, sharpening him like a carved demon mask.
“I’ll make this world sing my name!” he roared, and laughter rolled across the blood sea like iron drums, shaking souls like a demon’s hymn.
His blood-red hair snapped in the gale, and red light burned in his eyes, a gaze that pressed kneeling thoughts into hearts like a mountain weight.
The closed rifts were forced open by the blood sea; the space holding Caris, hidden deep, was swept up above the waves like a leaf; Moon Owl swore—if he freed Caris, the fallout would be a dam break.
She sprinted over the blood sea toward the ejected compressed space, feet skimming like swallows, but the Prince above would allow nothing; a storm coiled from the bloody tide, set to seize and shred her like a cyclone of knives.
“Damn it!” Her pupils flashed cold light; the white giant braced the surging waves like a cliff, and silver blade-light tore the night, cleaving the blood rushing at her in two like silk.
The blood knitted in a blink like flesh closing, but it was enough; Moon Owl broke free of the storm and, with no time to thank Yuan Dai, pocketed the compressed space like a stone in the sleeve.
Yuan Dai’s silhouette grew more transparent; the white giant teetered on drowning; only killing the Prince would still the sea, wind dying at dusk.
The voice in her skull needled her nerves; clarity guttered like a candle; skin split along her fingers inch by inch, and black and white overflowed her eyes like spilled ink.
If she collapsed now, Moon Owl would face this terror alone, odds thin as paper; then her existence was to forge that chance, a whetstone for a blade.
Yuan Dai spent her last strength and lunged for the Prince like a hawk stooping; the pure-white armor unlatched from her shoulders and fell into the blood sea like a sinking moon, and she herself shot toward the Prince hanging in the sky like a thrown spear.
