"…There's someone knocking on the other side."
The moment Qi Ye said it, the entire convenience store seemed to tighten around the words.
The gray mist behind the black Special Goods Cabinet was no longer just split by a narrow slit.
Now the opening was being forced wider by degrees, as if wind from deep inside another world were pressing its way through.
Not ordinary cold.
It carried the bite of snow and the metallic tang of rust. As it swept along the edge of the shelves, a thin layer of frost-mist immediately bloomed across the surface of the bottled water.
Knock.
Knock.
Knock.
The sound came again.
Light. Unhurried. Perfectly clear.
Not pounding.
Not ramming.
More like someone who still possessed reason—
and was knocking with deliberate restraint.
Su Yu froze with Sui Sui in her arms.
"T-there's really a person there?"
He Qing had gone pale too.
They had seen too many doors tonight already.
The glass door with infected clawing at it from outside.
The interworld door that had let wasteland customers step through.
And now even this black cabinet that had grown out of nowhere—
someone was knocking behind it.
And worse—
it didn't sound like a monster.
Lin Wu did not look at the opening first.
She looked at the system.
[New authority prerequisite triggered: Door Chime.][Active visitor detected behind the door.][Current status: Entry not yet granted.][Options available: "Ask," "Refuse," "Delay Opening."]
Good.
Not a forced breach.
A visit.
That meant the rules were still on her side.
Lin Wu lifted her eyes toward the slit in the mist, the opening now gradually sharpening.
"Qi Ye."
"Can you tell who it is?"
Qi Ye stood very straight now, his eyes fixed on the opening. His face was colder than at any point before. The fingers around his knife hilt tightened until the tendons stood out across the back of his hand.
"Can't tell who."
His voice was low.
"But I know the rhythm."
He paused.
"Where I'm from… that's how scavenger bands ask for a door to open."
"Not a raider code. Not bait for a corpse swarm."
He swallowed once.
"It's a plea for a way to live."
The last four words came out with a thin rasp in them.
Lin Wu's gaze shifted slightly.
A way to live.
That fit.
From the very beginning, this store had never sold only goods.
It sold ways to live.
More snow-wind poured through the gap. The knocking stopped for two seconds—
then came again.
Knock.
Knock-knock.
Knock.
The rhythm was more urgent now.
As if the one outside had realized that the door was no longer fully shut.
She knew someone inside was listening.
Qin Zheng stepped forward half a pace, lowering his voice.
"Don't open it."
"Why?" Lin Wu didn't turn.
"Because you don't know whether what's coming through is really a person—or something contaminated pretending to be one." Qin Zheng stared at the slit in the mist, eyes cold. "The companion chamber just woke up. The cabinet has already answered you. Anything that can pinpoint this place and approach it right now cannot be treated as an ordinary customer."
It wasn't a stupid concern.
Professor Zhou followed immediately.
"He's right. With both halves of the key in your store, anything that can find this place precisely now is definitely not ordinary."
Pei Wan said nothing.
But the way she looked at the slit was unmistakably guarded.
Only Qi Ye, after a short silence, finally said:
"But if it really is a scavenger band runner…"
He didn't finish at once.
"In that temperature outside…"
"…they won't last long."
His voice was low and flat.
But everyone in the room heard the weight inside won't last long.
Wasteland snow was not scenery.
It killed.
Lin Wu still did not decide immediately.
She tapped the counter once with one finger.
Then she issued her first instruction to the system.
"Ask first. Don't open."
The system lit at once.
[Doorside communication mode activated.][Store owner may issue one inquiry across the door.]
Good.
Lin Wu liked transactions that still had room to test.
She looked at the slit in the mist and spoke, voice steady enough to carry through it.
"The one outside. State your name first."
Wind and snow hissed through the opening.
The other side was quiet for two seconds.
Then a woman's voice came through.
Cold. Hoarse. Like her throat had been scraped raw by too much snow and too much distance.
"Names aren't valuable."
"What I brought…"
"…is."
The moment those words landed, a light flashed in Lin Wu's eyes.
Good.
This one knew how to do business.
She had not even opened her mouth yet when Qi Ye's expression changed sharply.
Not because of the words themselves.
Because of the voice.
He stared at the slit in the mist as though, through the snow and distortion, some familiar shape had finally emerged.
"…Impossible," he said under his breath.
Lin Wu turned her head toward him.
"You know her?"
Qi Ye didn't answer immediately.
Because the woman outside had already spoken again.
"Boss Lin."
"Or whoever is calling the shots in there now."
She drew a thin breath.
"I only need to say one thing."
The wind punched harder through the slit, flipping the gray mist at the cabinet's edge.
When the woman spoke again, every word carried the weight of someone who had already reached the end of the road and was still holding on by the throat.
"I've got half a transit map of White Tower District."
"And one intact Grade-Three crystal core."
"Open the door."
"I'll pay you with enough goods to last the entire winter."
The air in the store went still.
White Tower District.
Grade-Three crystal core.
Winter goods.
The three terms struck like nails into the most sensitive places in both Qi Ye and Lin Wu.
Qi Ye's face had gone completely dark.
Of course he knew White Tower District.
It was no ordinary ruin.
It was the old experimental sector where even he had nearly died once.
The gray-white fungal growths Zhou mentioned. The data chip Lu Chen had carried out. Many deeper wasteland relics—
all of them tied back to that district.
And a Grade-Three crystal core—
that was no longer the same category as the Grade-One crystal Qi Ye had once traded for noodles.
That was hard currency.
The kind wasteland hunting teams bled over.
Lin Wu looked at the slit in the mist, and already the accounting pages in her mind had started flipping on their own.
A Grade-Three crystal core.
Half a White Tower transit map.
Winter supplies.
Any one of those would have been enough to justify opening the door for negotiations.
And the woman had made two things clear the moment she spoke:
First, she knew there was someone inside capable of deciding.
Second, she was not here by accident.
She had come to trade.
The system prompt surfaced at the same time.
[Doorside visitor possesses high trade value.][Trade inclination: Strong.][Risk Rating: Medium-High.][Note: Target condition extremely poor. Continued delay outside significantly increases death probability.]
Lin Wu read it all.
Then, instead of answering, she asked again:
"Name."
Silence on the other side.
Half a beat later, the voice came back.
"Cen Dong."
The instant those two syllables entered the room, the half-broken blade in Qi Ye's hand gave a tiny click as his grip tightened involuntarily.
This time, Lin Wu really looked at him.
"You know her."
Not a question.
Qi Ye stayed silent for a full two seconds before answering, his voice rougher than before.
"It's not that I know her."
He swallowed once.
"It's that I thought…"
"…she was dead."
That changed the atmosphere instantly.
Even Pei Wan lifted her brows slightly.
Because if the one behind the door had only been a valuable stranger, the order would merely have been large.
But if she had history with Qi Ye—
then opening this door would not just bring in goods.
It would bring in relationships. Debts. Old loyalties. Old wounds. And likely far more intelligence from the other side.
The snow-wind outside thickened.
Cen Dong's voice came again, lower this time, faster too, as if she was genuinely close to collapsing.
"Qi Ye."
"I heard your voice."
"If I weren't about to die, I wouldn't be knocking at your door."
Qi Ye's jaw tightened so hard that the line of it seemed to sharpen.
He neither stepped forward nor answered.
He only stood there like he had been nailed into the floor.
And at that moment, Lin Wu finally smiled.
Not a light smile.
The kind that surfaced only when the situation began branching into new profit lines in real time.
Good.
This door had to be opened.
But not for free.
"Cen Dong." She looked back at the slit in the mist, her tone level and clear. "My door doesn't open just because someone shouts once."
"You say you have goods. Maps. A crystal core."
She tapped the cover of the ledger once with one finger.
"Then tell me this first—"
"Why do you know there would be a door here at all?"
Silence.
The wind beyond the slit suddenly seemed much louder.
Several seconds passed before Cen Dong answered.
"Because half a month ago, on a broken wall in the deepest part of White Tower District, there was a line of writing."
"The words weren't complete. Only one sentence remained."
She paused, as if pressing down something far deeper than the cold.
"—When the black shop lights up, the door will open."
Every gaze in the room changed at once.
When the black shop lights up, the door will open.
That was no coincidence.
Not rumor either.
That meant someone—or something—on the other side had already known that a place like this store would appear.
The system burst into a dense wall of text.
[High-correlation intelligence detected from doorside visitor.][Notice: Knowledge held by this visitor may involve the origin of the store.]
That sentence was worth more than the Grade-Three core.
More than the map.
More than winter goods.
The light in Lin Wu's eyes finally stopped pretending to be small.
She flipped open a fresh page in the ledger with one clean motion and wrote two words:
Cen Dong
Then, as always, she tapped the page three times.
Tok.Tok.Tok.
She looked up at the slit.
"Fine."
"I'll open the door."
Qin Zheng's face darkened instantly.
"Lin Wu—"
"Pay extra if you want to interrupt the queue." Lin Wu didn't even turn around. "Otherwise wait your turn."
One sentence, and Qin Zheng was slammed back into place again.
The next second, Lin Wu selected [Timed Opening] on the system panel.
[Current Rule: Single entrant only.][Current Rule: Weapons frozen upon entry.][Current Rule: Immediate ejection if clear hostility is detected.]
Good.
Rules first.
Then negotiate lives.
The gray mist behind the cabinet slowly parted to both sides.
The snow-wind surged in harder at once, as if someone had forced a path through a blizzard with bare hands. A moment later, a tall but visibly unsteady figure stepped out of the white dark one foot at a time.
She wore a torn dark-gray winter cloak. Snow clung to her shoulders and hair. Her left hand was pressed tight against the right side of her abdomen, and between her fingers, the blood there had already darkened from freezing.
And yet despite all that, the Grade-Three crystal core in her right hand still burned with a deep blue glow.
Steady.
As if it were the last breath she refused to release.
The moment Qi Ye saw her face clearly, something in his eyes changed completely.
Not mere shock.
It looked more like someone had dug up a piece of his past he had already buried—and brought it back out with the snow and the blood still clinging to it.
Cen Dong saw him too.
Her lips were white with cold, but in her eyes there was the faintest trace of a smile—
sharp, exhausted, and mercilessly thin.
"I knew it."
"Someone as hard to kill as you—"
She didn't finish.
Her legs gave out beneath her, and her body pitched forward.
At the exact same moment, the Grade-Three crystal core slipped from her hand and rolled across the brightly lit floor of the convenience store.