COZMART: Corner Shop of Visiting Gods

The silence was so loud that Eathan thought he was going to go insane.

Lindon.

A traitor?

He sat frozen, still processing the semantics behind the combination. Lindon, the milk-tea-sipping, seal-tossing medic who gave him extra napkins??

He turned—

And Lindon was already stepping forward. Expression blank. Not resisting. Not panicking. Just… walking.

Stone, Eathan thought. Like he knew.

Zhao Feyan, on the other hand, went pale. The senior MSR admin's mouth opened instinctively. "Commander White, there's been a misundersta—"

"I dislike lies," Taeril said, without even glancing up.

"But what I loathe more…" his gaze lifted, eyes cutting through air like blades—"is desperation."

She stopped breathing. Dead still.

Security didn't shackle them; they didn't need to. Both were escorted out in silence. Eathan watched as Lindon passed by—his gaze flicked up, locked with Eathan's for a heartbeat.

Then, just as quickly, the young man looked away.

***

The HQ's interrogation chamber was located nine floors underground. Its walls were pitch black. Sound didn't echo here.

Interrogation wards lined the ceiling like silent spiderwebs, each etched to deny divine tampering, lies, or illusion. A single clock ticked against the far wall—mechanical and calm, like it had nowhere else to be.

Two chairs. One table. One predator.

The room was built for silence.

Zhao Feyan fidgeted in her seat, sweat trickling past her temple. Her registrar's uniform looked too tight, like it suddenly belonged to someone else. Her fingers twitched against the steel of the chair.

Xu Lindon, by contrast, sat straight and serene. The only movement he made was a slow tap of two fingers against the rim of his jacket.

The door opened, and Taeril strolled in, carrying a mug of black coffee. Steam curled off the surface like a lazy ghost. He didn't look at them right away. Instead, he set the mug down with a slight clink, leaned back in the chair opposite them, and exhaled.

"Miss Zhao," he said, like introducing a guest on a late-night talk show. "Mid-level diagnostics admin. Specialization: log maintenance, node records, patch scripting."

He gestured.

"Mister Xu. Rift field medic. Stabilizer technician. Team B rotation."

The two didn't respond.

"Let's not waste more time," he said, resting one arm along the table edge. "I'll begin by stating, for the record, the designations of both parties present."

He then glanced up leisurely.

"Zhao Feyan. You've been with HQ for four years and have reached registry control tier four with node diagnostic override clearance…" He paused. "And you've been falsifying anchor reports for over seven weeks."

Feyan flinched, but Taeril only continued on. "And Xu Lindon. Shadow-cleared for field artifact evaluation without registry filing. You've placed three cursed objects across high-risk zones."

He leaned back, voice mild.

"Tell me if I've missed anything."

Neither responded.

Taeril smiled faintly, then gestured at the floating runes overhead. "You're both familiar with how Tribunal Recordings work. Everything said here is encoded, archived, reviewed. That part is standard."

He picked up his mug, blew gently on it. "But what is less standard…" he continued, "is that I decide what goes into the final log."

He sipped his coffee.

"And who gets to read it."

The room, already airless, tightened just a bit more. Feyan opened her mouth, then thought better of it. Beside her, Lindon didn't blink.

Taeril set the cup down, and began again, voice smooth: "Let's talk over coffee."

No one moved.

"No?" he said pleasantly. "Tea?"

Silence again, and he smiled faintly, as if disappointed.

"Suit yourselves."

He tapped the table lightly, and a glowing file shimmered into the air. "We'll start simple."

A beat.

"Zhao Feyan. Line 4428," he said, casually, like discussing the weather. "Registry loop. Discrepancy of 0.2%. That's where it started, didn't it?"

Feyan jolted reflexively. "I—"

Taeril raised a hand. Not aggressive. Just a signal. "No need. You were clever, I must say. Logging equilibrium fluctuations under real-time echo lag. Not many catch that trick. But your rhythm gave you away."

A flick of fingers brought up a pulse chart. "You type faster on Fridays."

Feyan's breath stuttered. Taeril turned to Lindon next. No smile this time.

"Sector 24F," he said. "Willow's report noted an unforeseen Class-A Rift that spontaneously spawned from a Class-D."

He let the words linger.

"That is typically impossible… unless there was a deliberate, external influence."

He set the mug down, the soft sound ringing through the air like a ghost. "You embedded a recursive anchor curse thirty-seven meters from the stabilization grid." His eyes met Lindon's for the first time. "Impressive placement."

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Lindon didn't speak.

"Did Qiongqi teach you himself?"

Still nothing.

"No?" Taeril tilted his head slightly. "Then Ao Bing must have lent you the artifact."

No confirmation. But the level of breathing in the air was enough of an indication. His smile returned—sharp this time.

"You don't know what it does, do you?"

Neither mole answered.

"That's the danger with borrowed tools," Taeril murmured almost in a sigh, fingers wrapping around his cup again. "They don't come with instruction manuals. And when they break…"

His eyes gleamed cold.

"They take more than just circuits with them."

The ticking of the clock seemed louder now. Taeril sipped his coffee. Neither Lindon nor Feyan moved. They hadn't spoken since the last line landed—sector 24F, recursive curse, 37 meters from the grid. Across the table, the White Tiger sat as if carved from shadow, framed by the slow arc of steam curling from the half-drank coffee beside him. All this time, he hadn't raised his voice once. Nor would he.

He never needed to.

"…You want to know how I knew?" Taeril asked eventually, tone like the gentle parting of silk. It wasn't a question meant to be answered. "I didn't need proof of sabotage. Only a footprint. One moment of panic."

Sustained silence pulsed like a clock between them—not oppressive, just patient. Taeril had always considered himself a man with patience.

"I had a good friend of mine build a decoy update, you see—what we called a 'hotfix patch'—masquerading as a standard node recalibration. Included a fake leak path schema. Completely fictional." He shrugged half-heartedly. "We even tagged it so that it only appeared to those who had previously accessed redline stabilization diagnostics. Meant nothing to anyone else."

Watching as the two faces grew grim, he leaned forward slightly, giving the table surface beneath them a light knock. "Only someone looking to confirm integrity loss data would ever see it—and someone did."

Feyan's mouth moved, barely. But Lindon beat her to it.

"…You were watching the logs."

Taeril tilted his head. "For twenty-two hours. Straight."

Yesterday morning, starting right after the Strike Teams' operation completion up until today, he'd been at it since. And this morning, at 1:17 AM, a secondary access signature had pinged from the infirmary suite, routed to the Node Monitoring System.

Target: the dummy patch.

Tracer logs lit up like constellations across Taeril's personal screen. He'd then spent the next six hours manually combing metadata and watching for pattern drift—reading every access timestamp, packet handshake, and redundancy call like he was reading the war maps of his past.

Then, the emergency meeting on Floor 99.

And now, they were here.

"I don't delegate that kind of work, you see," Taeril said, clasping his hands together as he faced the two with a smile. "Not when it matters."

To catch a mole wasn't about being faster. It was about timing your strike so precisely that the prey didn't know it had already been caught. Xu Lindon was a field medic and stabilizer technician, but his mistake wasn't checking the patch.

It was assuming the White Tiger wasn't watching.

Now, Taeril stared across the table—not for confessions, but for confirmation.

"You know," he said suddenly, voice light, conversational, "I've been thinking about equilibrium thresholds."

Both spies stiffened, barely perceptibly.

"Everyone talks about the 50% audit warrant threshold. The tipping point. The number that makes the Cloud-Jade System wake up and take a look."

He leaned back, elegant fingers wrapping around his mug, the heat bleeding into his bones. "But that's just protocol," he continued mildly. "Procedure. Boring bureaucracy."

His eyes met theirs, flat and dark.

"But I'm not asking about 50%. I'm asking about something else more… submerged."

A pause. Not dramatic, just there, without leaving room to breathe. He blinked towards them. "Do either of you know what happens if the equilibrium drops to forty-two percent?"

The question appeared out of nowhere. A random percentage, thrown at them without any context provided. Feyan and Lindon kept silent, gazing at their feet.

"Of course not," Taeril said, nodding like he'd already answered himself. "Your master wouldn't tell you. He needed loyal, disposable hands. Not brains."

He set the mug down with a soft clink. The sound hit like a blade laid on velvet.

"Then allow me to enlighten you."

Without prompting, he brought up a second projection with a flick of his wrist. This one was quieter, more cryptic—a system diagnostic graph.

AREA 001 LIVE STATUS:

Current Equilibrium: 52.8%

Status: Fluctuating

"You've been falsifying reports for weeks, Feyan," he said gently, without looking at her. "Your edits kept the threshold above 55%, dropping to around 52% just recently in light of the Council meeting. Pretty trick. Linear echo lag distortion across weeklies. But last night…"

He flicked two fingers, and the graph collapsed.

"…We dipped."

A new number flashed across the screen in angry red:

Recorded Equilibrium: 42.7%

"Right here. During the simultaneous Ash-Fanged Warden spike at Sector 17B and the Cryolorn surge at 24F. It was only for a brief moment, but we dipped by over 10%." He paused. "You must be thinking now: why hasn't the Cloud-Jade Ledger signal an Audit Warrant, then? But that is hardly the real implication of the drop."

Taeril peered towards them, inclining slightly as his obsidian eyes bore into their souls. "Did you know?" His voice was nearly a whisper now. "You were half a breath from wiping us off the map."

Lindon's head snapped up, while Feyan froze beside him.

"At 42%, the Cloud-Jade System initiates a Severance Protocol. The Ledger wipes the entire region's status. No audits. No notices."

The White Tiger's tone didn't change. He didn't explain how he came to know this number, but what he said next was enough to throw the room into the cold.

"System purge, full wipe, hard reset—whatever you'd like to call it. The result's the same: Area 001 collapses, registry erased, and mortals transferred to overflow zones or dumped into the Realm of the Passing. As for the others—spirit beasts, demi-deities, mid-tier anchors—whatever entities are unrecorded become forgotten."

He peered towards them.

"That's what happens at the 42% threshold—42.4%, if you wish to be precise."

It hadn't come from paranoia, though Taeril never minded being called paranoid. It had come from watching patterns, reading old logs—though he would never explain to the mortals any of this.

Millennia ago, during his years with the War Council, he'd been reviewing defunct node archives from adjacent territories, a Ledger calibration from now-defunct Area 017. A single report line:

EQ Drift: 42.4% → NULL

Two days later, the area was scrubbed. No official audit, no records, and no public warnings. Just an "update patch" and silence.

Since then, he began watching. He traced other collapses. Quiet ones. Clean ones. Every case stopped at the same number, and none passed below it. There were no reports at 41%, none at 42%, not even one at 42.3%.

Which led him to one simple conclusion:

42.4% wasn't a warning level—it was a kill switch.

So when Li Wei helped him design a decoy patch—a fake "integrity hotfix" floated to the node diagnostics system—Taeril watched and waited.

Zhao Feyan was a given. She had been feeding false numbers for weeks. However, Xu Lindon… he'd embedded himself more quietly. That was why Taeril baited the second one. Chewie's line had been the signal.

"We caught the mole."

It'd been a bluff—no, a probe.

He watched the system, cross-checking all access requests. And like clockwork, someone accessed the diagnostic schema during off-cycle hours.

Xu Lindon.

Panic always made people stupid.

And the White Tiger had been very, very patient.

In the interrogation chamber, Taeril's gaze lingered on the two across from him.

Lindon remained still. Feyan was pale, knuckles white against the edge of the table. But they were quiet now, with a different type of silence. It was no longer silence in a contest of dominance or misdirection; it was realization, a peculiar kind of realization that had arrived too late.

Now slowly, terribly—they were beginning to understand what they had been part of.

Taeril let it settle for another beat. Then, voice soft, more to the air than to them, he said, "You thought this was just about slowing an audit. About paperwork delays. You were told to weaken, not destroy."

"We were told to… just stall the audit," Feyan said hoarsely, almost eagerly, as if she wanted to prove something. "That was all."

Taeril blinked once, slowly.

"Then why embed an anchor virus with a recursive failsafe?"

His tone remained pleasant.

"Why create a triplet configuration that triggers major collapse on three synchronized points?"

No answer. Because there wasn't one. Because neither of them had known what they were triggering.

"You don't get it, do you?" Taeril murmured. "That wasn't just a rift stabilizer you corrupted. Nor were they just little jabs to hinder Area 001."

He turned his head slightly toward Lindon.

"It was an extinction clause."

Lindon—whose expression hadn't changed once since entering the chamber—lowered his gaze. "They said…" he began, voice trembling as he spoke, "that we only needed just to let it fall. Below audit. They said the system would… take care of the rest."

Taeril smiled faintly.

Indeed, that was all that was needed. Not intent; not method.

But ignorance.

He picked up his coffee again, sipping as if it were any other day in COZMART.

"That," he says softly, "was what I needed to confirm."

Then set the cup down with a sharp click—a gavel's verdict.