COZMART: Corner Shop of Visiting Gods

MAIN FIELD. SOUTHEASTERN RIDGE.

Above the fractured island, twin currents of qi clashed—silver against teal, fierce yet oddly balanced. Bai Hu's movements were sharp, each strike a study in efficiency. Quine Long, by contrast, fought fluidly, almost casually, as if defying the very gravity of their encounter.

A arc of silver narrowly missed the Azure Dragon's flank, slicing a crescent-shaped scar through distant mountains. He responded with teal currents that surged forward to entangle Bai Hu's strike, deflecting it upward. Thunder rumbled in response, as if acknowledging the scale of their celestial skirmish.

Bai Hu's eyes narrowed. "Stalling for mortals. How pathetic you've become."

"Jealous?" Quine Long twisted aside, robes flaring behind him. "Even your insults sound increasingly mundane."

Their collision tore brief gaps in the clouds, illuminating the darkened sky with splashes of colours. Below them, the land groaned with pain.

In mid-motion, Bai Hu froze. His gaze snapped toward the island's core, drawn by an unmistakable familiarity that washed over the land like a tide.

Quine Long paused, twisting to witness the sight. "Well, well," he murmured, scales flickering beneath the spreading light. "It seems your intern is proving even more interesting than anticipated."

"You…" Bai Hu turned to him. "You were never aiming for victory."

A weary smirk tilted his lips upward as Quine Long halted mid-air. "Some games aren't about winning, old friend."

The White Tiger didn't respond—couldn't respond. Something deeper than logic compelled him now. Without warning, he broke away, plummeting downward, a comet streaking toward the island's core.

Quine Long watched as the White Tiger faded below in silence, making no move to intercept.

At the island's center, he spring lay still as glass, a pale iris under the island's torn sky. Eathan hovered an arm's length above it, light crawling spirals along his forearms, over his collarbones, through the circuits of glyphs that had settled there like extra skin. The water rose to meet him on each breath, then smoothed again, as if fearing to disturb him.

Bai Hu landed at the stone lip. Dust lifted and fell obediently out of his way as he did so.

They measured each other across the span of the spring. No words. Only a silence with weight—a ledger of favors and debts, laughter and funerals, promises made at this very waterline and kept far too long.

Though separated by mere meters, the silence between them seemed to span millennia, filling the space with buried history.

Bai Hu's eyes traced the patterns of golden lines weaving across Eathan's form, a faint furrow appearing in his brow. Eathan's eyes lifted slowly, golden irises fracturing like lotus petals. He floated, hands relaxed at his sides, and let the resonance do what it did best: listen.

Even the White Tiger's stillness had sound if you knew how to hear it.

"Bai Hu," Eathan said, not loud, yet the syllables carried on the flat air, "That's enough."

For a moment, the air stilled around them. The tiger's gaze lingered over the etched gold in Eathan's skin and didn't blink for a long time. Finally, he tilted his head, eyes narrowed as though shedding a thought he refused to admit was surfacing.

"Who dares…" he whispered, "to wear that form?"

Without warning, he lunged forward. Silver carved from his palm in the next heartbeat, and the bolt tore the air between them into white fissures.

In response, golden energy surged around Eathan. The collision erupted outward, sending ripples cascading like perfect rings from his ankles, petals lifting and falling like coins. The shock slid past and spent itself on the far stones.

The Pale Judgement's strike, powerful as it was, failed to penetrate fully. Bai Hu's mouth didn't change. His eyes did, barely—a narrower narrow. His second attack came three beats later, yet something else flickered across his expression, uncertain if he was facing immense power or if something within himself was holding him back.

They moved in a way only two beings in the world could read. Silver lines, golden arcs. A slash answered by a yield. Bai Hu's blows tested space; Eathan's answers braided force with patience and sent it back diffused. Neither violence nor anger truly defined their confrontation; rather, it felt like a negotiation in a language known only to its wielders.

With every pass of Qilin-aura, something old and unguarded flickered under the White Tiger's composure. Flashes emerged without warning—flashes of battles long past, fragments of shared battlefields, laughter exchanged over quiet moments at this very spring, a gentle promise whispered in trust—a wrapped bundle of mercy pressed into his hand and not spoken of again.

The fragments didn't slow him, not yet. They did make the right hand take a fraction longer to lift on the next strike.

"Speak your identity," Bai Hu said again, not to hear but to anchor himself.

Eathan didn't answer. He simply regarded him.

"Bai Hu," he spoke, almost gently, "you judge balance, yet bitterness has clouded you."

Those words thrust Bai Hu into another fragment of memory—he stood by the spring once again, younger and less hardened, the tranquility of moonlit waters reflecting shared promises. Qilin's gentle gaze had pierced him then as surely as this moment did now. In that instant, Bai Hu saw past and present overlapping, unable to fully separate the two.

He attacked again—though this time, it was with visible strain. "Who…are you?"

Eathan paused. The golden light around him dimmed momentarily as human consciousness surfaced beneath the ancient deity. His gaze softened further, the mortal visible behind divine eyes.

"I'm your intern," he said softly, "unfortunate for us both."

The word did not fit this era. It landed anyway. The White Tiger's balance faltered and, for the briefest moment, he looked truly at a loss.

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"Intern, you say?"

Eathan did not smile. "The version of you that hires one exists," he said. "So does the world that needs him."

The images that hit him were mundane and therefore lethal: the bitter aroma of poorly brewed coffee; the creak of a stool; a boy's voice calling "boss" without fear; unfamiliar faces he would someday recognise; an ordinary future startling in its gentle complexity.

Senseless ephemera—and yet they lodged where swords usually failed. The familiar-yet-unfamiliar moments mingled with his current fury. Bai Hu shook his head, grasping for clarity amidst the chaos.

Silver brightened. The White Tiger's next blow came steep and without wind-up. Eathan caught it and let it roll along his forearm, the glyphs there flaring and then calming like a living set of brakes.

"You judge balance," he said, gentler. "You've let bitterness weight your hand."

"You dare—"

Bai Hu's voice faltered.

It was at that moment. The memory cut then, not as a vision forced by another, but as a self-inflicted flash.

Taeril White—an alien yet inevitably familiar figure—appeared in the fragmented dream, lingering at the edge of lucidity. Small acts of kindness, absurd yet oddly comforting scenes of mortal interaction flickered through Bai Hu's mind. It was him, undoubtedly, but equally strange. It version of himself the current White Tiger would never fathom.

Bai Hu's breath hitched once. Not audible. Visible. He looked up and met Eathan's calm gaze, a thousand unsaid questions buried in obsidian eyes.

"What have you done," he asked, voice flat, "to my mind?"

"It's not a vision," Eathan said. "Just a possibility."

Bai Hu's stance tightened, fingers flexing minutely. "Impossible," he said. "Sentiment fogs judgement." He spoke the line the way a solider checks a lock.

"Perhaps." Eathan's response was quiet, carrying echoes of Qilin's strength. "Yet without compassion, judgement forgets what it's for."

Wind pressed the reeds flat and let them rise. The White Tiger stepped in one pace. The spring answered with a ring. For a long breath they did nothing, and in that stillness lay the whole ledger: millennia of hard arithmetic. At last—

"I have judged worlds," Bai Hu's voice was low, almost stubborn. "Balanced scales without hesitation. Yet here, you threaten my judgment."

Eathan shook his head. "Not me," he replied. "The scales you set were already unbalanced—long before now."

The stillness between them deepened, filled by invisible threads of shared history. Bai Hu drew a silent breath, eyes fixed on the mortal. The resonance washed over him again, and he finally spoke, voice barely audible:

"What is left, then?"

Eathan met Bai Hu's gaze, offering neither comfort nor condemnation. Instead, he extended a hand slowly. An invitation not to pull, but to stand with.

"Perhaps mercy," he said, "is not a weakness, but strength."

It was ridiculous to offer a hand to a god who could sever the island with his gaze. But the hand was there, steady. And in the White Tiger's eyes, behind the frost, something thawed enough to show the man who had once accepted a cup at this spring without looking away.

The island around them trembled, not from the ruptured leylines this time, but from the resonant weight of an internal war waged in silence.

"Mercy," he said one last time, "weakens judgment. It corrupts clarity."

Eathan regarded him quietly, radiance pulsing from his golden glyphs.

"You've chosen it once," he said, "you can choose it again."

Something flickered behind Bai Hu's obsidian eyes—a flash, fleeting yet there. In that instant, his posture softened just slightly, the austere deity replaced by a more… humane presence.

Taeril White surfaced—subtly, like a shadow passing under clear water. The mouth shaped not a smile but the memory of remembering how to.

Then, he laughed. The sound was light, yet tinged with unmistakable bitterness.

"You truly are the cruelest illusion."

The hand that reached next did not take Eathan's. It folded into claws and went inward. The White Tiger's chest opened like a lock he'd made to fit his own key. Light leapt out—something that abraded the names for colours—and formed a core that pulsed in his grip.

Eathan's eyes widened, the resonance almost tripping as human alarm surged through god-calm.

"Mister White, don't—!"

Bai Hu's face was unreadable again; only the minute tremor along one tendon in the wrist betrayed that any choice had cost him. He pulled.

The island answered in a single convulsion, and a forge of energy slammed across the entire island. From pavilions to trenches, their bones rang from the impact. More light from the White Tiger's fist expanded, unrolled, and became a wall. Mortals dropped in place; cultivators went to their knees; demons hid their faces from a brightness they were not made to see.

Eathan threw everything he had to bend the wave—Qilin-threading, human stubbornness, everything. Gold lapped at silver, slowed it, recharted it. The surge still hit like truth. His teeth sang.

High above, Quine Long arrived a breath too late, jade antlers bright in the stormlight. He hung there for one stunned heartbeat—actually stunned—then snarled something lost under the roar and flung a lattice of azure qi across the sky. The barrier held for half a blink, then the Tiger's wave sheared through it as if slicing mist; the dragon's cloak snapped backward, hair whipped to ribbons by pressure alone.

Across the island, the air changed form. Willow dropped to one knee and threw both arms around Finn, her gauntlets sparking as she forced a shield into being; it cracked down the center like ice. Finn went boneless, breath punched out of him, freckles leeched pale. Chewie managed half a curse, stumbled two steps, then folded as the world tilted—eyes wide with a shock that never got the chance to become anger.

On the far ridge, Demon Prince Cang froze mid-command, armor rimmed in cold light; for once even his disdain had no place to stand.

Higher than mortal sky, a skein of code wavered. Threads of script fluttered like a startled school of fish. The one watching there did not breathe and did not blink. Cipher Venerable hovered between stacks, twinned by his own shadow. Their hand was half-lifted, the way a friend reaches for a glass falling off a table that did not exactly belong.

Protocols cinched. The ghost deity stayed their hand.

Eathan's knees hit stone. Vision guttered to white at the edges. Still through the riot of ringing bone and boiling air, he saw it: Bai Hu standing alone, one hand buried in his own chest, silver threads of divinity spilling from him in slow curtains. The light wasn't blood; it was star-metal unwoven, pouring into the open night.

Their gazes met, and for a sliver of time the god's mask softened into something entirely belonging to Taeril White. Eyes gentle, weary, and profoundly obsidian.

Taeril looked tired. Not defeated, not afraid—just tired. His form shimmered, fading as the nightmare environment lost its solidity. From mountains to camp banners, every contour lost pigment and then volume, dropping into wireframe. Colours bled into stark white nothingness. Lines sketched themselves, hesitated, and pulled free.

What had been nightmare revealed the grid that had always been beneath it..

The White Tiger's mouth curved—an expression too light for the sound that followed—and he let the last line go.

"I suppose, in the end, mercy found me after all."

He burst like frost touched by sun, dissolving into silver motes of light, dispersing into the rest of the fading reality.

Eathan slumped forward, Qilin withdrawing from the top of his mind to the place behind his ribs where breath lives, the golden glyphs dulling to honest sweat and tremor. The wireframe flickered once more, then the entire stage unstitched—white swallowing white until there was nothing left to hold on to in the false reality.

Then, silence pressed down. The world had ceased to shake by now, replaced instead by an unnatural quiet.

A world momentarily emptied of conflict, suspended in time.

Overhead, the Cloud‑Jade Ledger's countdown hung motionless, a red wound in empty air.

[TIME REMAINING]:

18:17:04

The numbers shivered and distorted, digits bleeding together as if glitched by some unseen hand. They reassembled in a colour that had no business on a battlefield—soft, bureaucratic green. Text scrolled as if embarrassed to intrude:

Congratulations! Team 001 has completed Game Three: The Commander's Nightmare!

Scenario terminating...

Returning players returning to the Realm-Barrier Arena…

Yet no cheers greeted the message. Silence lay thick and profound, punctuated only by shallow breaths of bodies scattered beneath the empty sky. Team 001, like the rest, lay unconscious, limbs tangled in exhaustion, strewn like fallen petals upon the barren ground.

Their victory—if it could be called that—hung suspended, unnoticed, and tragically still.