COZMART: Corner Shop of Visiting Gods

In a pathway not too far from the demon prince's smoke-filled camp, Team 001 crouched on a half-crumpled parapet just outside its glow.

Finn's stealth veil fluttered around them in ragged pulses. His right pupil flickered like a dying filament, and a sheath of sweat silvered his freckles. Eathan watched as each pulse in the man's eyeball peeled another slice of hellish scenery into view, then stitched it back into shadow.

Eathan knelt beside him, one hand on Finn's shoulder, the other shading his own eyes from the sudden glare. He considered activating [Minor Reconstitution] again, but whatever was happening in Finn's eye wasn't exactly a wound.

"How long before your stealth thing gutters out?"

"Eye-battery reads five percent," Finn muttered nonsensically, pressing a palm over the violet glyph strobing behind his bangs. "Four… three—"

"Find us a fresh charger or shut up," Willow whispered, scanning the wall-tops for sentries.

Eathan risked a glance down the slope. He hadn't noticed it during the earlier encounter, where Bai Hu was trying to kill them, but now he did. Just stretching from the center of the field was a ritual of glowing engines. Mortals—dozens of them—were shackled in concentric rings, skin parchment-thin, souls siphoned in red threads that fed a crystalline engine. With each pulse, the captives withered, qi siphoned into vats that glowed like molten rubies.

His stomach curled. "We need a miracle or an exit."

A breeze rustled empty air beside them, and Chewie's head snapped around first. "Where's the dragon?"

They all looked—nothing but crumbling stone. Quine Long had vanished between one heartbeat and the next.

Finn let out a strangled squeak. "He ditched us?!"

"Or got bored, like the stupidly unreliable immortal he is," Willow grunted. "Either way, we're on our own."

Brief panic surged—four mouths talking at once—then they collectively strangled it, the way soldiers tourniquet a wound they can't afford to feel.

"Okay," Eathan breathed, marshalling logic. "The demon prince's seen us with the Azure Dragon. That buys thirty seconds of respect. We convince him: If Bai Hu nukes the island, his legion evaporates too. He withdraws, war ends, Bai Hu loses the reason to push the big red button."

Willow sighed, sliding the last shard of a shattered shield talisman back into its pouch. "Final pitch—tiger's distracted, dragon's out, demon prince's the only immortal left on the dance floor. Let's go."

No time to fret. They pushed to the ledge, hearts syncing to the stomp of demon boots below. Finn's veil gave a last pathetic fizz, then in a blaze of visibility they stood—center stage from the Prince Cang's command ring.

"…"

"Next time, ask for a longer trial," Chewie deadpanned.

At the stony platform, Cang stood among fused obsidian, abyssal armour etched in a winding scripture that hugged his frame. He barely finished barking orders to the captain's corps when he noticed the new guests.

With a lazy ripple of qi, he drifted forward almost immediately, narrowing the gap until the heat off his aura dried the sweat on Eathan's skin. A slow smile curved his lips.

"So. Qing Long truly delights in tossing mortal marionettes onto my stage." He then sighed, almost regrettably. "But the tiger is already a pain in the neck. I truly hope the dragon would keep hold of his own strings."

Chewie stepped past Eathan. War-banner glyphs flared scarlet beneath her bare feet, scorching a spiral into the grit. "Cang. Pull a puppet's strings wrong and the crossbeam cracks your skull."

"Chi You—demon of ten thousand battlefields." Cang's smile thinned, recognition flashing across his crimson pupils. "Yet you seem to stand only half a legend, wearing half the power."

He paused, tapping his lips in contemplation.

"Must be true then. Word was you were vacationing in exile."

"Word travels slow through ash," Chewie replied. "Want a fresh headline?"

At that, the demon prince chuckled. "Tempting. But I've rituals to tend." He gestured toward the dais. "Mortals are lending excess life-force, bless them. We steep it, refine it, turn it into seed-qi perfect for demon cores. Efficient ecology, really."

Eathan couldn't unclench his jaw. "Efficient genocide, you mean."

"This that." Cang turned back, curiosity flickering. "Speak your message, little envoys."

Willow angled herself forward, shield talisman coiled under her palm. "We're here to save you from collateral damage. If the White Tiger erases this island, your legion dies with everything else."

Cang chuckled again—a rich, rolling sound. "Humans breed faster than rabbits; cultivators always sprout more disciples. Balance will recover, and my legion will march elsewhere."

Finn's eye, now normal, darted from shackle to shackle. "Prince, you're missing the part where you get erased too."

"White Tiger may be a menace, but he acts slow." Cang's gaze flicked across them. "When his paw finally falls, my legions will retreat through abyssal gates. The mortals and the self-righteous cultivators will drown in the fallout for us."

"Unless he decides to strike before you smell the smoke," Willow said.

"Prove it."

"Ask the three border sectors he glassed after the Null Incursion." Chewie rolled her eyes.

The demon prince fell silent, assessing them the way a warlord measures supply ledgers—losses, gains, acceptable burn rates. Behind him, a mortal collapsed, skin now grey parchment. The ruby vats brightened.

Eathan's stomach twisted, but he forced himself to speak. "You think you can outrun judgment, but you're chained to this place by your own rituals. When the White Tiger strikes, those vats go first. The backlash won't wait for your gates."

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"Yet such are only your one-sided claims."

Eathan forced the infamous quote past dry lips. "'If you creatures insist on fighting endlessly over this dirt—'"

Cang arched an eyebrow.

"—'I'll spare you the trouble by removing its existence.' Three thousand years from now every archive will echo these words, spoken by the Pale Judgment himself. They are what brought the entire Southern Ridge's downfall."

"And you know this because?"

Eathan opened his mouth to explain, but Chewie yanked him by the collar as she strode forward to face the demon prince instead.

"Quit wasting time," she said. "Don't you have the Truth Intake skill? Use it and see for yourself."

Her crimson eyes focused on Cang, who held her gaze with intrigue. Without another word, he stepped forward, and his own crimson irises narrowed into a vertical slit. The air around them shifted, and for a second, Eathan could feel something clench at his heart as the demon prince's gaze fell onto him.

The next second, Cang stepped back and brushed his sleeves.

"...How interesting," he mused," that a mortal like you seems to be speaking truth from the future."

"There you have it." Chewie laid out her hands. "So unless you want your troops and yourself to evaporate under the Pale Judgement, better to bail now."

A long moment stretched; camp torches guttered in the hot, dry wind. Cang's eyes flickered—calculating, still not fully convinced but no longer amused. The ritual dais pulsed behind him, throwing long, hungry shadows. Smoke curled over the battlefield; somewhere distant, the crack of guardian combat echoed like gods clashing anvils.

Finally, the demon prince inclined his head a fraction. "Compelling… but talk is still wind. The Abyssal Legion does not retreat from the weak, so instead—how about we play a game?"

"Game?" Eathan creased his brows.

"Indeed," Cang said, drawing his gaze to the rows of obsidian structures behind him. "The Pale Judgement may be a sporadic threat, but if he is the only, it'll be quite a shame to back out just like that."

Under Team 001's cautious looks, he raised an arm and, upon clenching his fingers, the engines flared in amplification. What immediately followed was a flood of agonizing screams.

"Cang! What are you doing?" Willow said.

"Starting the Game, naturally. We, the Abyssal Legion, do not obey the weak. Telling us what to do? Well, you should naturally follow the rules." He tapped a claw against his gauntlet. "What do you bunch call it—'mortal solidarity', was it? Let's see if your kind vanishes first under my engines, or my engines disappear first under your fists. You have—until that sandglass empties."

A captain slid forward promptly and produced an hourglass of black crystal, crimson sand already trickling.

Willow exhaled through her teeth. Eathan stared at the falling sand—every grain a dying breath somewhere behind those bars.

Finn blanched. "One battlefield hour?"

"Long enough to entertain me," Cang said, amused again. "Fail, and I finish my harvest. Succeed, perhaps I recall my banners."

He pivoted, cloak-wings flaring, and stalked back toward the ritual dais. "Timer's ticking."

***

The War Council's main camp boulevard fell silent as the Azure Dragon crossed the perimeter for the second time that day.

Teal robes flared behind him like storm banners, each step slicing dust into neat, whirling spirals. Legionaries—demon and heavenly alike—recalled his earlier visit and cleared a silent path with practiced haste. By the time the dragon reached the command pavilion, the guards were already kneeling, forced to become fascinated by the patterned floors.

Quine Long pushed through the tent flap without so much as a nod. Inside, the air smelled of iron and cedar ink. Bai Hu stood over a waist-high sandboard, moving iron figurines across carved trenches that mirrored the island's fractured topography. Dried blood stippled the cuff of his white sleeve like rust on snow.

He did not look up. "You again."

"Me again." Quine Long's smile was pure sunshine. He dropped onto a supply crate as though it were a chaise. "Just checking whether you'd downgraded from homicidal to sulking."

The White Tiger repositioned a single marker—his own sigil—squarely atop the island's center. The only answer was the scratch of metal on sand.

Naturally, the Azure Dragon paid the silence no mind. He flipped over from the chair, resting his chin on the top of the backrest and peering at the white-haired deity.

"I've been wondering, Bai Hu, about this nightmare of yours." He drummed lazy rhythms on the chair frame. "Of all the memories the Ledger could dredge up, why choose the war after the Null Incursion—two millennia after the wound itself?"

Bai Hu's silence was glacier-cold.

"After all," he went on, half to himself, "I was certain your nightmare would be the Incursion itself—Qilin's last stand, your claws on the beast's throat, all that lovely trauma condensed into a single frame. Yet the Games landed us here—two thousand years later. You already wear the mask; the bleeding's internal now. Did you numb yourself so thoroughly that despair needed two thousand years to catch up?"

No reaction. Of course not. Bai Hu had perfected silence into a weapon long before mortals learned to speak.

The White Tiger gave him a sidelong glance, saying nothing. Quine Long studied him, head slightly tilted.

"What? You expected me to plead like those interns you swatted earlier? Persuasion only works when the listener still differentiates between pawns. But to you…" His hand swept the sandboard. "Mortals, demons, cultivators, even the heavenly clerks who stamped your order—all specks of dust. No one debates individual motes floating in sunlight."

Nothing but the distant rumble of siege engines outside. Yet qi around them thickened, metal prickling at the back of the Azure Dragon's neck.

"So, it must still be the non-dust mote," he decided with a nod. "Because this war reminds you of the Incursion. Because you're still brooding over the fact that Qilin chose Judgment Mode over Mercy. Funny, right? Especially so considering the decision came from the beast who'd taught you compassion in the first place, only to burn the handbook himself."

Tiger-stripe rays flared overhead, searing through the tent cloth like searchlights. Sandbags, maps, and a half-ton of stone floor levitated, rattling in the sudden pressure drop.

The entire war table jumped, and an iron piece burst into slag beneath the White Tiger's palm.

Quine Long's grin widened. "Touched a nerve?"

The answer came in a silent blow—metal-qi compressing the air into a fist that tried to erase distance and dragon alike.

The fist tore through a wall of water and crashed into open sky, but just milliseconds before, Quine Long blurred, a teal vortex ripping open beneath his feet, and sea-salt wind roaring out of nowhere. The entire pavilion launched skyward, levitating for a heartbeat before gravity remembered its job.

The next second, they burst through the pavilion's roof together—white streak and teal surge—spinning above the camp like twin comets. Quine Long's aura unravelled into serpentine coils the colour of storm-crests; Bai Hu answered with arcs of dusk that sliced clouds cleanly in half. Where claw met tide, the island groaned.

The Azure Dragon wheeled, laughing over the thunder. "I'd call this cat-and-dragon, but you're scarcely playful these days!"

Hills folded, fortifications toppling as though kicked by an invisible giant. A raking swipe from the White Tiger carved a canyon three miles long; the Azure Dragon answered with a thunder-charged roar, lightning fanging from the sky. Below them, shockwaves flipped siege towers like dice. Troops—mortals and demons—threw themselves to the dirt, ears ringing, as a pressure front rolled across the plain.

The sky bruised violet where their auras clashed. RealmNet live feeds, hanging above the arena, glitched into static. Safety filters failed; countless spectators saw raw, uncensored godfire for the first time.

High above the ruin, Bai Hu spun, cloak a smear of winter sunset. Quine met him head-on—and for an instant they hung there, locked, neither gaining a hair's breadth. Sparks hissed across the contact point; frost blossomed on Quine's sleeve where Tiger-metal tried to burn.

"Mercy only leads to rust," Bai Hu said, voice flat as a tombstone.

"Yet here you are, still quoting the gardener who planted it in you," Quine Long answered, breath steaming. "You can bury the seed, Bai Hu, but you can't pretend the soil never tasted it."

Another clash—brighter, louder—drove both sideways. They separated, hovering at opposite ends of a sky now webbed with cracks of light.

Then, without warning, both froze, heads snapping east.

A fragrance—new-grass and first-thaw—rose from the chasm far below. A breath of divinity.

It was warm, gold, and impossibly gentle.

Bai Hu's eyes widened; a fissure of raw grief split his mask before he crushed it shut. Quine Long's own gaze lowered in an almost fond way.

"Now would you look at that," he whispered. "The little auspice."

Without a word—or perhaps with every word they'd never spoken—the Tiger and Dragon folded their wings of light and dove. White and teal auras fused into a single streak aimed straight for Demon Prince Cang's ritual ground, for the impossible flare blossoming around one trembling, golden-lit mortal.

The war-camp, the island, the very sky held its breath as they fell.