COZMART: Corner Shop of Visiting Gods

The world outside the transport window blurred into a collage of neon haze and half-flooded streets.

Area 001 slept uneasily beneath the towers of glass and hollow spires, the equilibrium anchors pulsing against the smog-choked sky.

Eathan slumped into the SUV car seat, the adrenaline finally draining from his limbs, leaving behind only a jittery exhaustion that made his hands tremble slightly when he flexed them. Across from him, Meng Yao sat poised, tapping quietly through rift stabilization reports on a slim holopad. Chewie had already stretched herself across the backseat, arms behind her head, eyes closed but not truly asleep.

The air inside the vehicle smelled faintly of scorched qi and old paperwork. No one spoke for a while, but the silence wasn't heavy. It was a particular type of quiet, the kind that comes from people who have done what was needed and are already rationing what is left for the next battle.

Finally, Meng Yao flicked her gaze up from the holopad. Her eyes, under the dim shuttle lights, seemed sharper than they had inside the tunnels.

"You adapted faster than projected," she said.

Eathan, caught halfway between trying not to pass out and wondering if the blood pounding in his ears was normal, blinked at her.

"...I did?"

Meng Yao's lips tilted in what could almost be called amusement. "Rift closure requires a trained mind to avoid collapsing under information overflow," she said, sliding her thumb across a readout. "Most new assets can barely function during first deployment. They either drown in the adrenaline or simply freeze."

She glanced at him, voice light but not unkind.

"You didn't freeze."

Eathan leaned his head back against the seat, feeling the vehicle sway around a broken curb. "Honestly," he muttered, "I think I almost did."

Meng Yao didn't argue. She set the holopad aside, folding her hands neatly in her lap. "It doesn't matter if you almost did," she said. "You didn't."

Outside, the crumbling skeletons of hidden Node towers flickered past, their foundations still thrumming faint spiritual frequencies into mortal air.

Old protections.

Fractured, but still humming.

***

The rest of the ride back was a blur of exhaust fumes and urgency. With the belated jet lag hitting him, Eathan barely had time to nap before he was forced out of the black sedan alongside Chewie the moment they skidded to a halt in the underground parking deck.

Just like the night before, the entire building above them looked deceptively normal—glass panels, modest banners, the smell of fresh concrete—but as they followed Meng Yao through a side door and into an elevator sealed by five layers of verification, that illusion cracked.

The higher they ascended, the more the world seemed to tilt sideways.

No labels on the buttons. No lights in the halls. Only a faint, humming energy in the walls—dense, unseen—pressing like static against the skin.

When the doors slid open with a whisper, Eathan instinctively shrank back.

The meeting room they entered was vast, yet eerily dim. Only the wide digital map at the far end was lit, casting a flickering blue glow that painted the room like an underwater trench. Rows of black-clad operatives sat along the long table, their faces blurred into shadow.

And at the head of it all—standing alone, hands loosely tucked in his pockets—was Taeril White.

The cold illumination carved the planes of his face into something almost inhuman. A wall-sized map behind him flashed with dozens of red marks: rift locations across the mortal sectors. Tendrils of golden stabilizer data tried weakly to clamp down each breach, many already fraying and glitching.

It was the first time Eathan had truly seen him like this—not as his perpetually sleepy boss, but as something older, colder, and infinitely more daunting.

He swallowed dryly, until his gaze caught something by the side table:

A ridiculous, oversized coffee cup.

Only then did Eathan finally exhale.

They filed in silently and took their seats. Meng Yao, expression like carved jade, stepped forward and began the report.

"Current rift status: Thirty branches remaining. One contained by Strike Team Delta. Two eliminated by Squad Yao." She nodded briefly toward Chewie and Eathan. "Spirit Registry for Yangpu District has dropped to 46% stability and is declining. Stabilization nodes at Sectors 17B and 24F remain offline. All repair requests denied due to emergency funding freeze."

Every word echoed sharply off the cold stone before they settled in silence. The Strike Team members stiffened visibly under Taeril's gaze.

"If three people can neutralize more rifts than the entire registered squad..." he spoke, as nonchalantly as if they were discussing the recent price trends for groceries. "Then there's no point keeping the rest."

Without changing his relaxed posture, Taeril gestured once toward the main console—and Meng Yao's screen flickered, rearranging.

In seconds, the squads were reorganized: fewer redundancies, tighter patrols, more flexible deployment windows. Every name and sector assignment shifted with brutal efficiency. Strike Team Delta and Strike Team Theta merged. Backup Scribes were reassigned directly to field support, while combat-capable registrars were forcibly moved to stabilization relay shifts.

The orders were locked in without even asking for input.

Eathan blinked rapidly, barely keeping up.

Gahhh, he's terrifying when he's serious...

"Questions?" Taeril asked dryly.

None came. Not even a squeak.

It was then that Meng Yao cleared her throat lightly. "Commander," she said. "New recruits have been assigned to assist on mortal operations."

She gestured slightly, and two new figures stepped forward.

The first was a woman with a sharp, half-buzz cut that split her head and at least twenty different piercings distributed across her face and ears. She wore an expression like she was seconds from splitting the table in half.

"Hu Willow. Offense Div. Affinity: Spirit-Beast Heibao bloodline. Specializes in mid-range rift neutralization."

At Meng Yao's brief intro, the woman gave a two-fingered salute, golden eyes glinting in the darkness. "Hope you all like colourful vocabulary."

The second was a refined-looking man with pale eyes and a perfectly pressed uniform, already tapping something onto a shimmering rune holopad as he bowed smoothly.

"Yan Xenis. Registry Division, Memory Lineage. Stabilizer and data specialist."

"Good evening." Xenis straightened, smiling with alarming brightness. "And just a heads up—if you see me laughing at a disaster, it's not personal. I just have a coping mechanism involving sarcasm and spreadsheets."

Eathan gawked, feeling slightly more alive surrounded by this level of absurdity.

Amidst his inner laments, Meng Yao's brisk voice echoed through the conference room. "Current equilibrium threshold: 52.5%."

She tapped the console, and dozens of smaller screens bloomed across the table: rift charts, stabilizer arrays, node integrity statistics.

A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

"Elder Sector rift leaks account for 30% destabilization. Spirit Registry lagging contributes another 10%. Remaining 7% projected from cumulative mortal resonance drift."

In short, even without new disasters, the mere existence of humans was pulling Area 001 downward.

And they were running out of days.

Xenis adjusted his silver-rimmed glasses and chimed in. "Realistically, even with rapid patchwork operations, if registry functionality stays below 55% and field stabilization falls behind by another point..."

He paused delicately.

"...We will not survive the next audit sweep."

Eathan sucked in a breath, gripping his seat tighter. The atmosphere around the long table thickened like slow-falling ash.

Meng Yao's status report had barely faded when Willow—serious as a funeral and twice as blunt—pushed up her sleeves and dropped another bomb.

"RealmNet's already blowing up," she said, scrolling through her comm-glass with a deadpan grimace. "Word's out about the Council Hearing in eight mortal days. Guess who's the main event?"

She didn't even need to say it.

A ripple of something heavy—part tension, part reluctant acknowledgment—passed over the gathered strike team.

The White Tiger.

Commander of Area 001, the target of a pending tribunal for negligence.

Fifteen years of absence, fifteen years of ghost-command—and now, the sharks were finally circling.

Eathan felt himself shrink an inch lower in his seat, guilt blooming awkwardly in his chest.

Fifteen years…

It lined up far too perfectly with when he first met Mister White. When he was five years old, staggering lost through that heavy crowd. The thought twisted something uneasy inside him.

...Could all this really have something to do with me?

But then again, that was a ridiculous amount of weight to pin on himself. Eathan wasn't some ancient artifact or political weapon—he was just some college kid who knew how to work a microwave and lose Wi-Fi signals at critical moments.

"…"

Probably.

The others, too, said nothing aloud—but their expressions betrayed their inner calculations. They were painfully aware of the truth:

Absence had consequences, no matter who you were.

Unfazed by the silence, Willow continued tapping through her device. "Our main goal should be stabilizing Area 001 above the auto-audit range before the Council hearing," she said crisply. "Once the Hearing starts, equilibrium numbers are the first thing reviewed. If a sector's points drop below audit threshold... well."

She looked around grimly.

"Best case? They strip the commander of title and fine the entire territory. Middle case? They gut our operations, divide Area 001 between neighbouring sectors, and throw us to the dragons."

"Absolute worst case?" Xenis hopped in, smiling humourlessly. "They shut Area 001 down completely. Every agent forcibly transferred or unemployed, and we munch on air for the rest of our lives."

Eathan's stomach twisted. Even the long-timers at the table went stiff, breaths held slightly tighter, because what Willow and Xenis didn't say was obvious to all:

If Area 001 fell before the Hearing—triggering a premature audit—then Taeril White wouldn't even get the chance to defend himself.

The White Tiger would lose without a fight.

That word, lose—left a strange ringing silence over the whole room, almost impossible to imagine.

Eathan stole a glance at Taeril sitting calmly at the head of the table, coffee cup resting lightly between his fingers, looking half-asleep. If he noticed the tension, he gave no indication. Instead, he spoke without even lifting his gaze:

"Xenis."

The bespectacled scribe, who had been pretending very hard not to draw attention to himself, immediately straightened in his chair like a soldier under inspection.

"Yes, Commander!" His glasses flashed, cheeks slightly pink with the effort of being Useful and Valued.

"If you can see this much," Taeril said, voice low and dangerously amused, "then you must see even further ahead. No?"

Xenis beamed like a puppy being handed a gold medal. "Naturally, sir!"

Under his prompting, the new battle plan unfurled across the glowing map, and the magnitude of their disadvantage became clearer:

Area 001 was a proper MSR division, but compared to Area 003, which was under Li Wei's command…

It was:

Severely understaffed—due to recent years of funding freezes and political sabotage.

Technically skilled, but field-inexperienced—most agents trained for spirit registry logistics, not direct rift combat.

Morale-fragmented—a side effect of fifteen years of absent leadership, no matter how much loyalty remained toward the commander.

Even Eathan, with his spotty internship brain, could feel the difference just by sitting in the room. The loyalty to the White Tiger was absolute, but the cohesion under fire... was another matter.

Taeril, however, moved on as if none of these obstacles existed. He tapped the map once, and the table rearranged itself again with a soft hum.

"New structure," Meng Yao announced crisply.

According to the Deputy Director's plan, the new response team would be divided into two:

Team A would be known as the "Fast-response Rift Suppression Unit," with Meng Yao as its Field Commander and Chewie as its Rapid Squad Captain.

Chewie, seated at the far end, crunched down on a stolen cupcake without comment. Several operatives blinked in confusion at her assignment, but wisely said nothing—most had already heard the legends about the eleven-year-old terminator.

As for the second team, Team B was called the "Rapid Stabilization and Containment Unit," spearheaded by Hu Willow as Captain and Yan Xenis as Stabilizer Lead.

The registry scribe looked like he might cry from sheer professional joy.

Eathan, just starting to feel safe in the background, flinched when Taeril's voice drawled smoothly.

"And you."

The White Tiger's gaze landed squarely on him—casual, but somehow leaving Eathan pinned in place like a bug under glass.

"You'll be with Team B, under Willow."

Several heads swivelled, followed by a ton of unrestrained staring. Some curious, others judging.

Why the hell is this random boy in a hoodie getting field placement under a strike team captain? —was what their eyes screamed.

Taeril, unbothered, sipped his coffee. "You'll handle minor rift signatures," he added calmly. "Your skills will be... efficient."

The way he said it made it sound almost impressive—almost. In reality, however, Eathan knew exactly what he meant:

Patchwork. Scut work. Panic button.

Or more specifically:

Use your [SYSTEM] to duct-tape reality faster than it falls apart.

Just as he thought that, his [SYSTEM] pinged with a vibration that rattled his spine.

[Main Quest (new!)]

Operation: Prevent Area 001 Audit!

▸ Hold Area 001's Equilibrium Score ≥ 50% for until the Council Hearing

▸ Note: Side Quests will be unlocked daily

Reward: +1000 Karma, +200 Qi Tokens, +5% Integrity, Special Title unlock upon success.

Eathan stared at the blinking notification. Come to think of it, this was the first time the [SYSTEM] actually gave him a Main Quest, other than the one that had been telling him to "Collect the Shattered Fragments" since Day 1. He sank lower in his seat under the pressure of sudden expectations.

With the Strike Teams' placements figured out, the rest was miscellaneous work. HQ Staff would handle registry patching, mortal awareness suppression, and low-tier stabilization maintenance. Critical rift zones would be prioritized based on energy readings and mortal proximity. Something noteworthy: interventions above Class-A rifts would trigger mandatory the commander's involvement—meaning the White Tiger would solo the worst rift incidents personally, if necessary.

Of course, none of his subordinates liked that last part. They fidgeted and stiffened but said nothing, understanding instinctively that even if the war deity stood with them again...

He could no longer fight for them.

Taeril—true to form—simply leaned back, sipping his coffee like this entire catastrophic strategy session was merely a board game move.

"From this moment onward, Area 001 will no longer lag behind. I need every single one of you to pull yourself together and fulfill your part in this game." His eyes, darker than obsidian, swept the room. "Do not waste my time by dying."

As Meng Yao finished outlining the final deployment orders, the room slowly shifted from tense anticipation to determined readiness. Agents began gathering their devices and task memos, low murmurs of strategizing buzzing through the dim conference room.

Just as Eathan was mentally preparing to stand—

Buzz.

He glanced down at his wristpad under the table.

[LUKE TAM]: Dude where tf were you today?? Algorithms was a bloodbath.

Eathan froze. Slowly, he looked up at the table filled with grim-faced, uniformed field agents, then back at his screen, where Luke had just sent over a PDF of Homework 8 with the caption:

[LUKE TAM]: Pls help pls save me pls.

Eathan fell into a very complicated internal silence.

On one hand: life-threatening rift breaches. On the other: Luke's desperate partial derivatives.

He exhaled and tapped out a hasty reply:

[EATHAN LIN]: Sorry, family stuff. Will check HW later.

A harmless lie. Probably.

Except—he had forgotten one minor, fatal detail.

Luke, being Luke, had Spirit Static Link set up on both their wristpads ever since a disastrous camping trip last year involving a lost cooler, a wild bear, and forty missed calls.

Meaning—

Buzz buzz.

[LUKE TAM]: fam stuff?

[LUKE TAM]: BRO.

[LUKE TAM]: U DO KNOW I CAN SEE UR IN SHANGHAI RIGHT??? BRO??????????

[LUKE TAM]: SPRING BREAK IS NEXT WEEK.

[LUKE TAM]: DID U GO ON A TRIP WITHOUT ME???????

Eathan facepalmed with a quiet thud against the table. Across from him, Willow raised an eyebrow briefly at his suffering but mercifully said nothing.

Eathan typed back through gritted teeth:

[EATHAN LIN]: It's complicated.

[EATHAN LIN]: Take notes for me. Algorithms pls.

Luke took exactly four seconds to sulk before replying:

[LUKE TAM]: Fine. Be glad u have me.

[LUKE TAM]: Want CHN 104 notes too?

Eathan side-eyed the deadly serious, militarized command room again.

Taeril was still sipping coffee at the head seat, casually preparing strategies for keeping the entire Area 001 jurisdiction from collapsing. Meng Yao was issuing strike rotations like a general marshalling the last human defenses in an alien invasion movie. Chewie was tucking her hair back with grim determination, inspecting her spare field blades like she was ready to go full apocalypse mode.

And Eathan?

Eathan calmly typed back:

[EATHAN LIN]: No need.

[EATHAN LIN]: Pretty sure what I'm learning right now is a little more advanced than whatever fake history Prof. Long's been feeding us.

He turned his phone off with a soft click, tucking it into his jacket. Squaring his shoulders, Eathan shifted his full attention back to the war table—

where the true survival battle for Area 001 had just begun.