COZMART: Corner Shop of Visiting Gods

The veranda sat suspended in moonlight, a pocket of serenity that felt absurd against the chaos Eathan had just left. Hovering in faint jade numerals over the veranda's pond was the Game's countdown:

[TIME REMAINING]:

45:12:37

Eathan forced his eyes from the numbers to the deity across from him. Bai Hu poured tea into a porcelain cup, the faint trickle sounding like an hourglass countdown to doom. He did not offer a cup to Eathan.

"Name," Bai Hu said, not lifting his eyes. "Species. Patron."

Eathan swallowed hard, his heartbeat pounding so loudly he wondered if the god could hear it.

"Eathan Lin," he started hesitantly, "mortal intern at COZMART, Area 003. Currently part of Team 001."

He wasn't sure if the White Tiger even understood what he was saying, but he pushed on anyway. A truthful answer was better than no answer in this situation.

"My patron... well, it's actually you."

Bai Hu didn't even blink, continuing to pour tea into his own cup. Taking the silence as an invitation—or at least not an immediate death sentence—Eathan risked another attempt, pushing where he knew he shouldn't.

"Mister… Pale Judgement. You must understand, the war outside is nothing but an elaborate illusion-loop—"

"Your temporal qi signature is displaced," Bai Hu cut in. He lifted his gaze at last, piercing Eathan like a needle. "Your karmic trace is fragmented. You claim to be a mortal from the future, yet carry within you a resonance distinctly divine."

Eathan's mind raced. "Divine?"

"Explain why you bear the aura of Qilin."

Qilin?

Eathan's blood chilled, confusion swirling inside him. He had a feeling the people around him had taken him as a placeholder for something, from the way the Azure Dragon would call him "vessel" all the time, but he didn't expect it to be the Auspicious Beast itself.

He'd had theories, questions, denial. None of them belonged here, across from this version of Taeril—Supreme Judge-Executor, clean of office coffee and office pity. Across from this man, the wrong word would become a verdict.

Eathan couldn't help but feel a sense of being wronged. Mister White had never mentioned anything about it, or anything remotely related to his origins—although admittedly, "Hey, Eathan, you're hosting fragments of an ancient divine beast" probably wasn't covered in employee onboarding.

But still—if he'd said something, anything, then maybe Eathan would have more to share with the current Pale Judgement, instead of sitting here desperately attempting to avoid eye contact.

He opened his mouth, trying a different route, "Look, if we pause the purge—just long enough to talk to your forces—"

"This is an interrogation," Bai Hu said. "Not a negotiation."

Eathan stared. "And you're interrogating… an intern."

"You are anomalous," Bai Hu replied. "I do not squander time on anomalies without cause."

Eathan glanced helplessly at the floating countdown, its numbers flickering in cruel red digits. Forty-five hours left; he grimly wondered whether he'd survive even one more.

He cursed his offline [Calamity Radar] inwardly. With it, he could at least gauge the stakes involved in the interrogation; without it, he felt blind. Each of the White Tiger's questions felt dangerously loaded, concealed behind procedural formality.

Without warning, Bai Hu withdrew a small jade bead from his sleeve and rolled it across the table. A thumb-sized, milky jade, carved with a faint nine-ring pattern. It halted neatly before Eathan.

He blinked twice. A divine artifact—he had seen diagrams in security manuals back in Area 001. Truth relay beads: they latched to a subject's ledger thread, closed a karmic loop, then pulsed green for oath-kept, black for oath-broken.

It was not a tool Bai Hu used on mortals. He didn't waste beads on crumbs.

"Touch it," Bai Hu said. "Repeat your claims."

He hesitated. He could dodge, keep dancing, but the clock floated over the pond and Bai Hu's patience had never been a large thing. Eathan spread his hands in a small, tired gesture and leaned in, setting his fingers onto the bead.

His palm barely grazed the jade before the bead shivered violently. For a breath it glowed white, tiny characters flickering across its skin as it reached for his internal qi circuit—then the light stuttered. Eathan felt it: one thread that wasn't a thread, a mark that wasn't only his; a loop that tried to close through two timelines and a divine fragment and found no single end to bite.

Before he could process it, the bead had darkened to a sickly black, fractures spiderwebbing across its surface. A hairline crack snapped audibly just as Eathan jerked his hand back.

Bai Hu's expression finally shifted—calm surface taking on fine red veins beneath. The veranda boards groaned under an unseen pressure as he tapped a single finger against the table.

"The bead demands a closed karmic loop. Yet your qi had overloaded it. Either you lie, or the karmic cycle itself has been compromised," he said, each word clipped. "Both demand immediate correction."

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"I swear, I don't know—" Eathan started, panic surging.

Bai Hu's gaze did not soften. He set the cracked bead aside, letting it dissolve with a single flick of the wrist. "Ignorance remains indistinguishable from deceit at the point of decision."

Eathan's laugh came out thin. It wasn't that he wanted to be ignorant, he wanted answers of his own—what had happened when [Auspice Ignition] ate the world clean, why the Pale Judgement who didn't waste tea on mortals cared enough to test a bead in the first place—but survival came first. Mister White would answer later; this was the War Council's butcher at his youngest, not the commander who tolerated bad coffee.

He took a deep breath, trying to steady himself under the scrutiny. "I said all that I know. I don't know how the Qilin part works. I didn't wake up and select it from a dropdown. I said yes to a job. The yes kept getting bigger."

"'Yes,'" Bai Hu repeated, as if testing the weight. "To whom?"

"To Taeril White," Eathan said. This time, he held the gaze. "Not to you."

Something minute passed through Bai Hu's eyes, like a fish beneath still water.

"I've seen your future," Eathan blurted out, words tumbling out. "I've seen Taeril White—the one you become—quietly drinking awful office coffee, protecting mortals in his spare moments. I don't know what changed, but you eventually choose compassion over cold logic. You become someone who—"

"Compassion?"

The word dripped with disdain. Bai Hu looked at him, fingers gripping the porcelain cup with controlled strength.

"Sentiment is a parasite. If what you speak of truly becomes my future, then I am deeply disappointed."

"…Disappointed?"

Eathan stared at Bai Hu, a chill creeping down his spine. The divide between them was simply too vast—logic and humanity clashed irreconcilably. This Bai Hu, three millennia younger, spoke through him, not to him; he was searching for something intangible Eathan himself barely understood. He was a mere vessel, a cipher in some greater puzzle. Despair tightened his chest.

"Look," Eathan said, steeling himself for a final gamble "if I stop talking now, I die. If I fail, I die anyway, and so do those mortals. So here's a proposition—take me hostage, pause the purge. At least give the others a chance."

Silence stretched between them. The only sound was tea cooling, the pond breathing.

"A mortal hostage holds no strategic value. However," Bai Hu paused, "your anomalous existence warrants further containment."

The word rode a current. Without warning, the wooden boards beneath Eathan unknotted themselves. The moonlit verand around them vanished, and the iron-dust air of the nightmare returned in a blink.

Eathan hit the ground hard, knees jarring. For a moment, he just lay stunned, staring at the darkened walls of a holding pit. Guards surrounded him immediately, snapping cold suppression cuffs onto his wrists. His HUD flashed in his vision.

[SYSTEM] NOTIFICATION:

Access to Qi Tokens is restricted in this area!

"Huh?"

Eathan stared, blinking dust from his eyes. He didn't know prison cells in the olden days came with built-in debuffs.

"Quiet," growled a War Council guard, jerking him up by the collar.

Eathan's chain collar snapped unexpectedly, whipping back and cracking against his nose with a painful sting.

[SYSTEM] NOTIFICATION:

[HP] has decreased by 4% due to the Host's lack of [Defense]! (78% → 74%)

"Seriously?" he gasped.

Another guard stumbled, knocking an oil lantern forward. Flame caught briefly on Eathan's sleeve, scorching through fabric until the guard doused it irritably with water.

Shoved into a barred alcove, Eathan slumped onto the rough stone floor. A guard tossed him a bowl of something foul-smelling, but before he could even investigate its contents, a fat rat darted out from the shadows, snatched it from his hands, and fled.

Eathan stared with open jaws.

"…Did the entire universe just conspire against me in the last thirty seconds?"

Letting out a groan, he slumped against the damp cell wall. The next second, a cold drip splashed onto his ear; the sharp sting made him jerk upright. His HUD pinged another warning:

Toxic content detected!

[HP] has decreased by 3% due to Host's lack of [Defense]! (74% → 71%)

"And whose fault is it that I wasn't given any [Defense]?!" Eathan's voice echoed through the cells, yielding naturally no response.

He shuffled sideways to the corner of the cell, only for another cold drip to fall exactly from where he was sitting.

[HP] has decreased by 3%! (71% → 68%)

He stared bleakly. Without any [Defense] stat and [Auspicious Aura] inverted from the side effect, he'd be lucky to survive the next few hours.

Eathan grabbed the nearest fragmented brick and held it over his head to prevent more toxic liquid from burning through his skull. He let out a long sigh.

"I'm about to die in the dumbest way possible."

***

Back on the island's surface, Finn paced left and right, anxiously gnawing on his thumbnail until a demon courier skidded through the barricade, stumbling over himself in haste. Finn immediately recognized him—one of Cang's soldiers he'd patched up less than an hour earlier.

He caught the demon's arm. "Where's Eathan?"

"Alive." The courier's pupils were blown wide. "But the Pale Judgment declared him a 'mortal anomaly.' Thrown into the holding pits under the War Council ring. Suppression wards. Rotations doubled."

"Alive for now," Finn exhaled.

He turned around and caught Chewie rolling her sleeves once, the embroidered seams flashing like tiny warning runes.

"We move," she said simply. "If Bai Hu has harmed him, it's lawful reprisal."

"Best law on the books," Finn muttered.

Willow, already halfway into her field armour, tossed Finn his gear without comment. Her silence spoke loudly enough—no more games, no negotiation. Rescue first, questions later.

The Azure Dragon lounged against a cracked pillar as if the world were a mild inconvenience. Willow's stare pinned him.

"Stand there one more second, and I'll list you as baggage. We've got work to do."

A beat of silence, then Quine Long sighed, pushing off the stone. "Your commander's hospitality dwindles. Shall we earn a third invitation?"

Despite their determination, a rescue mission from the Pale Judgment's territory was easier said than done.

They hunkered beneath a broken timber while demon wind rasped over the basalt. Willow drew lines in soot with a knife tip: three rings around the War Council camp, a teardrop for the pit, arrows for patrol sweep. Her voice was all vector.

"Let's consider our options. Number one—hard breach?" She flicked the knife. "Fails. We don't have the mass. Decoy?" Another flick. "Risk of spooking the judge and losing the hostage. Infiltrate?"

"Not openly," Finn said.

Charging mindlessly into the War Council encampment would end in disaster—especially since the White Tiger had shown visible interest in their unfortunate, now semi-mortal intern. Not to mention, their own spiritual reserves were dwindling fast, which meant they needed extra preparation.

"We need to gather tools for the subterranean. Ward disruptors, patterns of guard rotations," Chewie said.

"And someone to keep the War Council looking left while we walk right." Quine Long tapped two fingers to his jaw. "Vessel's little outbreak already taught the demon prince prudence; let's turn prudence into currency."

"Three calls," Willow said. "Mortals for ground. Cultivators for tools. Demons for clocks."

They looked at each other once; the plan was already choosing its own spine.