The PC cafe on Dongfang Road was quiet for a Wednesday night. Most of the booths were occupied by students grinding through online games, a couple of office workers scrolling through things they would never admit to watching, and the usual hum of keyboards, cooling fans, and the smell of instant noodles.
Zhao Wei stood behind the service counter, waiting for someone to need help, and tried to keep his mind on absolutely nothing.
It wasn't working.
Undead. Target. "Semani" reacts to demon power. The boy who received Miss's power will also be a target.
He pressed his knuckles against the edge of the counter and looked at the rows of occupied seats. Stop. Think about the hospital bill. Think about Friday. Think about anything else.
"Hey." The manager appeared from the back room carrying a clipboard. "We've got some machines in the bay throwing four errors. The parts box is in the storage room. Can you get it?"
"Sure."
The storage room was a narrow space behind the server rack, with shelves stacked with cables and spare components in labelled boxes. Zhao Wei found the right box on the second shelf and lifted the lid.
Something hit him.
It wasn't a physical impact—nothing moved, nothing made contact—but a wave of sensation passed through him the moment the box opened. It felt like a current running along his skin, concentrating in his chest where the mechanical tick of Xue Lian's heartbeat control now sat in place of his own pulse. He staggered back a step, one hand gripping the shelf for balance.
Is this…?
"Huh? Feeling weird?"
He looked up. The manager stood in the doorway, his expression half concerned, half impatient.
"No," Zhao Wei said, straightening up. "I'm fine. Sorry."
"Don't just stand there feeling weird. Come on and work!"
"Right." He picked up the box and carried it out.
He was two steps into the main floor when he noticed.
The keyboard sounds had stopped.
Every booth in the cafe was silent—not the silence of people pausing to think or switching tabs, but the deeper silence of nobody moving at all. He looked left. The student in booth three was slumped sideways over his keyboard, head down, one arm hanging limply. In booth seven, a woman had simply folded forward onto the desk. Behind the counter, the manager lay face down on his folded arms.
Zhao Wei stood in the middle of the room and turned slowly.
Every single person in the cafe was unconscious. Customers, staff, even the delivery person who had been waiting near the door—all of them down at once, as completely and silently as if a room full of lights had been switched off.
He was the only one still standing.
What…
He moved to the nearest booth, checked the student's breathing—pulse present, just deeply asleep—then moved to the next. Same thing.
"What happened?"
His voice came out flat in the silent room.
Then the front door opened.
The figure in the doorway was female, tall, dressed in something white and bandaged that moved with her as if it were part of her. Long black hair hung around her—far too much of it—pooling on the floor at her feet and shifting slightly even though there was no wind. Dark marks crossed her forehead like old ink. Her eyes found him immediately, with the precision of something that had been looking for exactly him.
She smiled.
"Hm~" she said. "Found you."
Zhao Wei did not move. Every instinct he had—the instincts that had kept him alert through two years of late-night streets, money shortages, and a brother who needed protecting—fired at once.
She stepped into the cafe, and her smile widened. "You are~" Her eyes moved over him with an assessment that was not human curiosity but something closer to inventory. "The necrobitch's slave."
"Who—"
She moved.
No warning, no posturing. She crossed the distance between them in a fraction of a second. Zhao Wei had just enough time to turn before her hair hit him. It wasn't falling or drifting—it was striking, wrapping, pulling. He felt it coil around his arms, chest, and legs with a tensile strength entirely unlike hair and unlike anything he had encountered before. He wrenched against it. It tightened.
"NOT—" He twisted hard. "NOT HUMAN!!"
"Struggling won't help," she said, tilting her head and watching him fight her hair with the patient amusement of someone who had seen this exact reaction many times. "It's not so bad, right? Being wrapped up in my soft hair."
He went still. Not because he had stopped fighting, but because he was thinking—reading the situation the way he read coin sounds, calculating what he actually had available.
She leaned closer. "Give me your blood," she said sweetly, "so I can draw the power of Semani. The amount you have will be great."
Semani. The word landed with instant recognition. The magic stone. The stone that reacted to demon power—to Xue Lian's power and to his, because Xue Lian's power now ran through whatever he was instead of blood.
She wanted to use him to locate the stone.
Zhao Wei looked at her smiling face. Then he looked at the computer monitor sitting on the service desk, six inches to his right—within reach if he turned his wrist the right way.
He turned his wrist.
His fingers closed around the monitor's edge.
He swung it directly into her face with everything he had.
The impact was considerable. The screen cracked. She flew backward with a sound that was far more satisfying than it should have been.
"GOTTA RUN AWAY!!"
He tore the hair loose and ran straight for the stairwell door, throwing himself through it.
"GYAAAH!!"