The instant the ringtone cut through the air, Su Yu's broad palm—still pressed against her back—froze in place.
There was no lingering, no hesitation. That startling heat withdrew from Rin's skin cleanly and without a trace.
He stepped back half a pace, walked to a stretch of broken brick wall a few steps away, and leaned his shoulder against it.
Su Yu slid his hands back into his hoodie pockets and tipped his chin toward the sofa, signaling for her to answer the call first.
His hands had pulled away, but the "aftershocks" set off by the qi-needles of Tai Xu Sword Qi were only just beginning to detonate.
Meridians that had been clogged all day were forced open by that surge of heat, blood and qi crashing wildly through Rin's body.
The lactic acid that had built up in heaps broke down at once, turning into fine beads of sweat that seeped out of every pore as if there were no cost to spare.
Rin looked as though she'd just been fished out of water—the back of her hoodie was soaked through, plastered flat against her spine.
A boneless, melting weakness seeped up from somewhere deep in her joints, until even lifting a finger felt like too much effort.
"Hah... hah..."
Rin's chest rose and fell in violent, uncontrollable heaves.
All she could do was slump against the arm of the sofa, dragging in great gulps of air, trying to flush that searing heat out of her lungs.
Every muscle in her body trembled as if a faint electric current were running through it.
It was nothing but a normal physiological reaction to detox, and yet here, in this dim, empty, abandoned building with a man standing just a few feet away, that helpless, ragged breathing felt utterly mortifying.
She sucked in two lungfuls of the cold, cement-dusty air, tried to steady the shake in her voice, then reached out with a still-trembling index finger and swiped the answer button on her screen.
"Hello... sis?"
Rin bit down hard on her lower lip, struggling to make her voice sound normal.
On the other end, Sakura's voice carried a teasing lilt.
"Rin, still out gaming? It's so late." Sakura paused; the sound of water being poured came through the line. "But honestly, seeing you throw yourself into something like this—it makes me happy."
Sakura truly did feel relieved.
She knew the player-location and vital-sign monitoring system built into the back end of Su Yu's Ordinal Scale would flag even an abnormal heartbeat instantly, so as long as Rin stayed within Arc City, safety was never really a question.
Compared to the sister who used to lock herself in her room, weighed down by those bloody, dark memories, flinching at the mere sight of a blade—
this Rin, who now ran around outside all day chasing game progress, made new friends, even stayed up late "grinding mobs"—this felt like a real seventeen-year-old girl living in the sunlight.
It was the scene Sakura had dreamed of for years.
Hearing the warmth in her sister's voice, something tightened painfully in Rin's chest.
She wanted to answer sweetly, the way she always did—"I'm happy too"—but right at that moment, that melting, tingling sensation surged up through her again in waves.
"Mm... sis."
Rin buried her face deeper into the crook of her arm, trying to muffle the sound.
"I'll—I'll be home soon... hah..."
Before she could finish the sentence, it felt like the air had been sucked clean out of her lungs.
A ragged, unmistakably abnormal gasp carried clearly down the line.
On the other end, Sakura's voice paused for two full seconds.
"Rin? Why are you breathing so hard? Did you overdo it?"
Rin didn't dare even glance at the shadow leaning against the wall. She just dug her fingers into a torn patch of foam on the sofa's edge and kept spinning the lie to match Sakura's question.
"Mm... the haptic feedback in this game is just... too realistic..."
She gritted her teeth.
"I just fought a huge boss... ran for ages... totally burned through my stamina, broke into a full sweat..."
Even as she told the lie, she couldn't help it—she stole a glance up through the gap in her arm.
Her gaze cut through the dim light and landed squarely on the figure leaning against the broken wall.
The man in the eerie smiley-face mask stood there, silent.
There wasn't a sound around them. The eyes looking back at her were clear, all the way down—no trace of mockery, no hint of taking advantage of her.
And it was precisely that calm that made the guilt crash over Rin like a tidal wave.
What am I even doing?
Sis trusts me so much, worries so much about my health, and here I am lying straight to her face.
I'm hiding from the sister who loves me most, alone in the dead of night with a guy I barely know, in this abandoned building without so much as a working streetlight.
And—and just from a few presses of his hand on my back, I've turned into... this... this strange mess who can't even talk straight.
The overwhelming sense of a good kid secretly doing something bad behind her parent's back left Rin momentarily paralyzed.
Mixed with that unnameable flutter she felt toward the man leaning against the wall, it triggered something dangerous—her flush spread from her ears down her long neck all the way to her collarbones.
"Is that so? Well, don't push yourself too hard."
Sakura seemed to buy the excuse, her voice softening again.
Listening to her sister's breathing gradually even out, she asked, almost offhandedly:
"By the way, Rin, did you run into Su Yu in the game today?"
The moment those two syllables landed, the air in the abandoned building seemed to freeze solid.
"I asked him to keep half an eye on you online. But that man hasn't answered a single one of my messages all day," Sakura's voice carried a note of helpless complaint. "Who knows where he's slacking off this time."
The nerve that had already been stretched to its limit snapped clean in two the instant "Su Yu" left her sister's mouth.
The guilty-conscience feeling shot up like a current straight to the crown of her head.
Rin nearly launched herself upright off the sofa on reflex, her still-weak voice suddenly jumping a full octave:
"No! Absolutely not! I've been fighting monsters all day! I haven't seen so much as a shadow of Brother Yu! Don't worry, sis!"
The instant the words left her mouth, Rin wanted to slap herself.
On the other end, five full seconds of silence followed.
Sakura had honestly just been idly grumbling about that slacker of a producer.
But Rin's reaction—that almost competitive, over-the-top denial, and that utterly unnecessary "don't worry, sis" tacked on at the end—
set off every alarm bell in Sakura's head.
What... exactly is this kid so nervous about?
"I see..."
When Sakura's voice came again, the tone hadn't changed at all—still that spring-breeze gentleness.
"Okay, if you didn't run into him, that's fine too. Come home soon. You've worked up a sweat—if the night wind catches you like that, you'll catch a cold. I've got to get back to work tonight, so head home and rest soon..."
"Mm... I'll be home in a bit."
The call ended.
During that call—
Sakura stood at the balcony railing, watching her phone screen slowly dim.
The warm smile on her face faded away bit by bit, her once-relaxed brows drawing slowly together.
As the one who'd raised Rin since childhood, the person in the whole world who knew this girl best, Sakura knew exactly what Rin looked like when she was lying.
Even without seeing her face, just through the phone line, her reactions had given away every crack in the story.
That first part of the call—the exhaustion, the heavy, labored breathing—that had absolutely been real.
That was the kind of physiological response you only got from genuine, excessive physical exertion.
But the moment that name came up—
Sakura rubbed her chin.
Su Yu's bizarre radio silence all day. Rin, drenched in sweat and gasping for breath in the middle of the night. And most damning of all, the guilty flinch the moment Su Yu's name came up.
That man...
Instincts honed from a lifetime of walking the knife's edge as an assassin, combined with an almost pathological protectiveness over her one and only little sister, sent the highest-level red alert blaring through Sakura's mind.
She didn't think Su Yu would actually do anything truly out of line to Rin, anything that would hurt her.
She knew exactly where that man's line was.
But that didn't mean the guy with the perpetually lazy grin hadn't been quietly "taking care of" her pure, innocent sister in some "strange" or "extreme" way behind her back.
The night wind rustled the potted plants on the balcony.
Sakura was just about to slip her phone back into her pocket and return to her desk to keep working, when a new recommendation on her feed caught the corner of her eye.
[Let's dig into that new streamer "Fried Tofu"—how does someone who can barely walk in a straight line end up with a five-star weapon drop?]
It was a clip from a livestream recording. The moment she tapped it, that familiar voice made Sakura's eyes go wide.
It was her sister's voice.
In the clip, her sister had been rescued by someone called "Jiahao"—who not only bailed her out, but tossed her, with an air of shameless swagger, an extremely rare high-tier weapon.
He'd finished it all off with an even more shameless parting line—"Don't fall for me, bro's just a legend"—and then vanished from the scene.
The danmaku in the stream had exploded into a chorus of wails; the cyber-parenting crowd raising their virtual daughters weren't holding back:
[Streamer, don't let that yellow-haired little punk fool you!!]
[Damn it, fam, is our precious cabbage streamer about to get snatched up by some pig?! Nooo!!]
[Sis, listen to your bro—this Jiahao is definitely no good! Whatever you do, do NOT meet him in private, I mean it!!]
Something Su Yu had said one night resurfaced in Sakura's mind.
"Sakura, you know the ID 'Jiahao' from the official livestream today? The showoff who talked big about soloing the whole server and ticked off every player in it?"
"Guess who that arrogant, attention-hogging 'gearhead' player who racked up server-wide aggro in that livestream actually turns out to be?"
Sakura's finger kept scrolling. The comment section below had already gone up in flames.
[A total stranger, some top-tier player, just hands a five-star relic weapon—one of only a handful on the whole server, [Sakura Blossom]—to some rookie streamer who can barely play? For free?]
[There's no way this isn't some inside deal, right?]
[The more I think about it, the creepier it gets! The more I think about it, the creepier it gets!!]
The implication of the comment section couldn't have been clearer.
Rin and this mysterious "Jiahao" had some kind of shady, unspoken arrangement going on.
And for Sakura, who valued her little sister's well-being above her own life—even though she knew perfectly well she was the one who'd asked Su Yu to "take care of" Rin in the first place—
for this particular sister with a serious little-sister complex, all these signals were adding up to say one and the same thing:
"Ha, buddy, looks like your little sister just got whisked away by that yellow-haired Su Yu!"
Crack—!!
Sakura's hand tightened around the railing without her even realizing it. The poor railing let out a pitiful groan under her grip, and by the time she let go, it had been crushed into a visible dent by her bare hand.
Meanwhile, elsewhere—
Rin stared at the phone screen, now gone completely black, and collapsed back onto the ragged sofa like she'd just fought her way through a life-or-death battle against something well above elite-mob difficulty.
The moment her tensed muscles finally relaxed, that deep, aching weariness swept over her whole body all over again.
But almost immediately, her exhausted body began recovering at a startling speed.
Maybe it was some effect from the potion she'd drunk earlier.
After roughly thirty seconds or so, Rin took a breath and pushed herself back to her feet.
The soreness in her body had vanished completely.
She felt as if she'd just stepped out of a hot bath, every pore of her skin humming with a soothed, refreshed feeling.
"Brother Yu."
Rin turned to look at Su Yu.
"Weren't we starting special training? Let's go."
Su Yu nodded and rose to his feet, casually pulling a steel pipe from a pile of scrap material and planting it in front of him like a staff.
"Come at me with everything you've got. Let's see where you really stand."
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