Shanghai, 11:47 p.m.
Huangpu River embankment, near the abandoned Dongjiadu Wharf.
Lin Kexin stood on the broken concrete pier, wind cutting straight through the thin field jacket she still hadn't thrown away. The river stank of diesel and rust. She had come here because it was quiet enough to think, and because she had run out of places that didn't ask questions.
She was counting the last of her cash—three crumpled twenties and a handful of coins—when the truck lost control.
It happened too fast for sound.
A 40-ton container truck on the elevated road above, driver asleep or drunk, smashed through the guardrail. The trailer flipped, shearing steel cables. One of the containers—twenty feet of cold-rolled steel—dropped like a guillotine.
She never remembered diving. Muscle memory from too many evacuations under fire did it for her. She threw herself sideways, shoulder hitting the concrete, skull cracking against a mooring bollard.
Then the world went white.
Not light. Absence.
When color returned, she was on her back, staring at the underside of the fallen container. It had landed less than a meter away, one corner buried in the pier where her torso had been a second earlier. The impact had shattered the concrete into powder; rebar jutted out like broken bones.
She couldn't hear anything. Tinnitus rang at a frequency that made teeth ache.
Then the text appeared, floating in the center of her vision, cold white, no background box, no sound.
[NULL]
Initialization complete.
Host confirmed alive.
Rule set:
1. You may summon anything you can define with perfect precision.
2. Every manifestation requires equivalent energy.
3. Energy is harvested at random from what you currently possess—tangible or intangible.
4. I do not negotiate. I do not warn twice.
State your first definition.
She blinked hard. The text did not vanish.
Blood ran from her scalp into her left eye. She wiped it away with a shaking hand.
"Hallucination," she muttered. Concussion. Obvious.
The container shifted with a metallic groan. The pier was still collapsing in slow motion; chunks of concrete the size of washing machines calved off and splashed into the river.
She tried to stand. Left leg answered late—nerve shock, maybe fracture. She dragged herself backward until her spine hit the rusted ladder that led up to the wharf.
Another line of text.
Time until secondary collapse: 00:00:19
Define or perish.
She laughed once, a dry bark that hurt her cracked ribs.
"Fine. I want an industrial electromagnetic crane capable of lifting forty metric tons, positioned directly above the container, magnet engaged, power source stable, no human operator required, active right now."
The moment the sentence finished in her mind, the world hiccupped.
A ripple in the air, like heat haze, then the crane simply existed—towering yellow gantry, cables thick as her arm, magnet already clamped to the container's roof. It lifted the twenty-ton box as casually as a child picking up a toy.
The pier stopped crumbling.
Silence returned, broken only by the soft hum of the magnet.
Lin Kexin stared upward, mouth open.
New text.
Manifestation successful.
Energy cost settled.
Random extraction:
Permanent memory cluster [Yunnan, 2022-09-17, 03:11–03:27] erased.
You will never retrieve it.
The loss hit harder than the container would have.
Sixteen minutes of her life—gone. Not blurred, not repressed. A hole. She reached for the memory the way a tongue probes a missing tooth and found smooth nothing. Whatever had happened in those minutes had been important enough that the army buried it and discharged her with honors she never felt she earned.
Now even she didn't know why.
She sat there, back against the ladder, while the invisible crane held the container suspended like a lantern. Sirens began wailing in the distance.
The text returned, smaller this time.
Next definition?
She tasted iron and river water.
"You fucking parasite," she whispered.
No answer.
She closed her eyes, forced her breathing steady the way they taught medics when the morphine ran out.
First rule of combat medicine: stabilize what you can, accept what you can't.
She opened her eyes again.
"Summon a class-4 trauma kit, military issue, sealed, with two units of O-negative whole blood, refrigerated to four degrees Celsius, placed on the ground one meter to my left. Include a working headlamp."
The kit appeared exactly where requested, olive drab pelican case, red cross stenciled on the lid.
Second extraction:
Left little toe—complete amputation, painless, cauterized.
She felt nothing below her ankle for half a second, then a faint warmth as the boot suddenly fit better. When she unlaced it later, the smallest toe would simply be missing, the wound already scarred over.
The price was random, the system had said. It wasn't lying.
She dragged the trauma kit closer with her good hand, popped the latches, and started an IV on herself while the invisible crane kept the container floating above the ruined pier.
By the time the first police speedboat rounded the bend, lights flashing, she had the bleeding mostly stopped and a plan beginning to form—cold, precise, the way plans form when you have nothing left to lose twice.
She looked up at the white text still hovering in her vision.
"You and I," she said quietly, "are going to have rules of engagement."
The system did not reply. It didn't need to.
The game had already started.
End of Chapter 1