[HOST INTEGRITY: 10%]
[CAPITAL: 0 COINS]
[TIME: 4:15 PM]
The school bell rang, releasing a thousand teenagers into the afternoon sun.
For most of them, the day was over. They were thinking about homework, video games, or dating.
For Ren Wu, the workday was just starting.
Ren sat on the curb outside the school gate, checking his pulse. It was thready, skipping every fifth beat. The adrenaline from the Tier 1 Memory unlock in the Bell Tower had burned off, leaving him hollowed out.
Energy Reserves: Critical.
Estimated operating time before collapse: 4 hours.
"You look like a corpse that forgot to fall down," Jian said, handing Ren a stale granola bar. "Eat. If you pass out on the bus, I'm not carrying you. It's bad for my lower back."
Ren took the bar. He watched Ye Lingshan's black sedan pull away from the curb. She sat in the back seat, staring straight ahead, her sword case resting next to her like a silent passenger.
The window was tinted, but Ren could feel her gaze. It was heavy, sharp, and suspicious.
"She knows," Ren muttered, chewing slowly to keep his blood sugar from crashing. "She sensed the Authority spike in the tower. She just doesn't know it was me."
Jian was scrolling on his phone, checking the local Reaper dispatch logs he had hacked. "She filed a report, by the way. 'Anomalous Energy Spike in Sector 9.' My dad is going to love that. Ren, we are creating a paper trail."
"Paper trails are fine as long as they lead to a shell company," Ren said, forcing himself to stand up.
The world tilted on its axis. He swayed, grabbing a lamppost for support. The metal was cold against his palm, grounding him.
"We need to move," Ren wheezed. "The factory is running, but the machinery is empty."
"Empty? I thought you sent the scary ghost lady to grind up the vermin?"
"Vermin spirits are Filler," Ren explained, forcing his legs to move toward the bus stop. "They provide bulk, but no potency. If we make incense out of just rats and bugs, it's trash. To make a product that sells, I need a binding agent."
He pulled out his phone and dropped a pin on a massive complex downtown.
[ST. JUDE'S HOSPITAL]
"I need Binder," Ren said. "Something to make the ghosts crave it."
The Commute Through Hell
The bus to downtown was crowded, hot, and smelled of unwashed humanity.
To the normal passengers, it was just a miserable commute.
To Ren and Jian, seeing through [Spirit Sight], it was a rolling buffet.
He sat in the back, conserving every ounce of strength. He watched a middle-aged salaryman sleeping across the aisle.
Perched on the man's shoulder was a Fatigue Imp—a small, grey creature with a long proboscis buried in the man's neck, drinking his energy like a mosquito.
"Imp," Jian noted, bored. "Level 1. My dad usually squashes those with a newspaper."
"Don't look at it," Ren whispered. "If you make eye contact, it thinks you're inviting it over."
"I'm not looking at the Imp," Jian whispered, adjusting his glasses. "I'm looking at the Aura on that guy. He's got 'Death Marks' all over him. He works at the hospital, doesn't he?"
Ren nodded. "He's an orderly. He brings the scent home."
"So, the recipe," Jian whispered, leaning in. "What are we stealing? Ectoplasm? Soul Shards?"
"No. We need Death Dew."
Jian froze. His face went pale.
"Death Dew? Ren, are you insane? That's a Class-B Controlled Substance. The Logistics Division tracks that stuff by the gram. If we get caught with that, it's not a fine. It's mandatory 're-education' in the Salt Mines."
"Only if we get caught," Ren said, sounding like he was discussing the weather.
"Market price is 50 Spirit Coins per ounce. Hospitals wipe it away with bleach because they lack the proper permits to harvest it. We are just... recycling."
Jian looked green. "My dad arrests people for 'recycling' Death Dew. He calls them Vultures."
"Then today," Ren said as the bus screeched to a halt, "we are Vultures."
The Factory of Pain
St. Jude's Hospital loomed over the street like a fortress.
It was a massive block of concrete and glass. Ambulances idled at the emergency bay, their lights flashing rhythmically.
To Ren, it didn't look like a place of healing.
It looked like a smokestack.
Thick, black clouds of misery were billowing from the upper windows—the Oncology Ward, the ICU, the Trauma Center. Pain was being generated here on an industrial scale.
"Security is tight," Jian whispered, scanning the entrance. "I see three Wards on the main door. Basic 'Aversion' hexes to keep low-level spirits out. We can walk through them, but they'll log our entry."
"We aren't breaking in," Ren said, dropping his backpack. "We are inspecting."
He unzipped the bag and pulled out two items he had stolen from the school janitor's closet:
A high-visibility orange vest.
And a clipboard.
"Put this on."
"A vest?" Jian asked, holding it like it was radioactive. "Ren, this is not a disguise. This is a target."
"You are thinking like a thief," Ren said, slipping his own vest on over his hoodie. "Thieves try to hide in the shadows. Auditors hide in plain sight."
He handed Jian the clipboard.
"Nobody questions a man in a high-vis vest holding a clipboard," Ren said, leaning heavily on his own board to hide his limp. "It implies authorized boredom. It suggests that if you stop us, we might ask you to fill out a form."
Ren straightened his posture. He buried the pain of his broken ribs under a mask of bureaucratic indifference.
"Follow me. And look annoyed. You hate your job."
"I don't have to act," Jian muttered, putting on the vest. "I hate this job already. And if my dad finds out I impersonated a city official, he's going to ground me until I'm forty."
The Infiltration
They walked to the loading dock where the medical waste trucks were idling.
A security guard sat in a booth, watching a football game on his phone. He looked up as they approached.
"Hey!" the guard called out, sliding the window open. "Deliveries are around the—"
Ren didn't stop. He didn't even look at the guard.
He stared at his clipboard, tapping it aggressively with a pen.
"HVAC inspection," Ren barked, not slowing down. "Ventilation failure in Sector 4. Unless you want the cooling units to fail and the bodies to rot by morning, I suggest you let us pass."
The guard hesitated.
Ren stopped. He turned slowly to look at the guard. He didn't look scared; he looked exhausted and litigious.
"Or," Ren added, "I can note in my report that Security delayed critical maintenance. Your supervisor is Greg, right?"
The guard blinked. "Uh... no, it's Steve."
"Steve," Ren corrected without missing a beat. "Right. Does Steve like filling out incident reports?"
The guard crumpled. "Just... go ahead. Make it quick."
They walked past the booth and into the service corridor.
The doors hissed shut behind them, cutting off the noise of the city.
"See?" Ren whispered, wiping a bead of cold sweat from his forehead. "Bureaucracy is the ultimate stealth."
"That was terrifying," Jian whispered. "You lied about a federal inspection. That's another felony to add to the list."
The Cold Room
They navigated the labyrinth of the basement. The air got colder with every step. The smell of antiseptic grew stronger, masking the underlying scent of copper and decay.
Ren stopped at a set of heavy double doors marked MORGUE - AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY.
He placed his hand on the metal.
It was freezing.
"Inside," Ren whispered. "Quickly."
He pushed the doors open.
The room was vast, lined with stainless steel drawers from floor to ceiling. The hum of the refrigeration units was deafening.
In the center of the room, three bodies lay on gurneys, waiting to be processed. They were covered in white sheets.
Ren's eyes glowed green.
[SPIRIT SIGHT: ACTIVE]
The room changed.
The fluorescent lights dimmed. The shadows stretched.
The bodies on the tables weren't just lumps under sheets. They were shimmering with a faint, blueish frost.
[RESOURCE DETECTED: FRESH DEATH DEW]
[QUALITY: HIGH]
[QUANTITY: ~12 OUNCES]
"Jackpot," Ren murmured, limping toward the first gurney. "600 coins worth of product."
He pulled a glass jar and a silver scraper from his pocket.
"Jian, watch the door."
"Ren, look at the frost," Jian whispered, pointing at the bodies. "That's high-grade. If we harvest this, we're stealing from the Reapers. This is their 'tip'. They collect this when they pick up the soul."
"They aren't using it," Ren said, pulling back the sheet on the first body.
It was an old man. His face was peaceful, but his skin was coated in a thin layer of glowing blue rime.
"The soul is gone. This is just the residue. It's waste."
Ren touched the frost with the silver scraper.
HISSS.
It sizzled like dry ice hitting a hot pan.
"Cold," Ren hissed, his fingers numbing instantly through the metal tool.
Harvesting Death Dew wasn't easy. It fought back. It wanted to stay with the vessel.
Ren scraped the glowing frost into the jar. It swirled inside like liquid smoke, heavy and cold.
He finished the first body.
He moved to the second—a young woman.
He scraped the frost from her arms, her neck, her face. The jar began to glow with an eerie indigo light.
He was moving to the third body when the air pressure in the room dropped.
Not AC cold. Grave cold.
Ren froze.
The hair on his arms stood up.
The lights overhead flickered. BZZZT.
"Ren," Jian hissed, his voice tight with panic. "That's not the HVAC. That's a Breach."
Ren capped the jar instantly, shoving it into his pocket.
"Hide."
"What?"
"HIDE!" Ren shoved Jian behind a stack of gurneys and dove behind a metal supply cabinet.
The double doors swung open.
They didn't make a sound. There was no squeak of hinges. Just a rush of freezing air.
Two figures floated in.
They wore long, grey trench coats that dragged on the floor, and wide-brimmed fedoras that shadowed their faces completely.
They didn't walk; they drifted inches above the linoleum.
In their hands, they held iron lanterns.
The lanterns emitted no light. Instead, they projected Anti-Light—beams of darkness that scanned the room like searchlights.
[ENTITY: REAPER PATROL (CLASS D)]
[AFFILIATION: NETHER-CORE LOGISTICS]
[MISSION: ASSET PROTECTION]
Ren held his breath. He pressed his hand over his chest to muffle the pounding of his heart.
Reapers, he realized. Not just spirits. Actual employees.
"I smell it," one Reaper rasped. Its voice sounded like dry leaves dragging on pavement. "Unauthorized harvest."
The other Reaper swung its lantern. The beam of darkness swept across the room.
It passed over the first gurney.
The sheet turned black where the light touched it, rotting instantly.
"Someone is stealing the Dew," the second Reaper growled. "Find them. The Manager hates rats."
Ren watched through the crack in the cabinet.
Frost was creeping up the side of the metal, numbing his fingers.
He checked his status.
[MANA: 0]
[INTEGRITY: 9%]
He had zero magic.
His skills were on cooldown.
His body was falling apart.
If they found him, he couldn't fight. He couldn't run.
The Reaper floated closer. It stopped right in front of Jian's hiding spot.
It sniffed the air, turning its faceless hood toward the pile of gurneys.
"Come out, little rat..." the Reaper whispered.
Ren's mind raced.
He looked at the clipboard in his hand.
He looked at the Reapers.
I can't fight them, Ren thought, a dangerous smile touching his lips.
So I have to fire them.
[SYSTEM ALERT]
[FIELD AUDIT: INITIATED]