"How did you see that sentence in the deepest part of White Tower District?"
The moment Lin Wu asked it, the store went so still that even the faint hiss of a heat patch activating against skin could be heard.
Cen Dong leaned half against the side of the rest pod. Her face was still pale, but her breathing had steadied compared to when she first staggered in.
She lowered her eyes to the heat patch now beginning to work against the wound on her abdomen, then glanced at the ledger spread open before Lin Wu.
A faint smile tugged once at the corner of her mouth.
"This store of yours really doesn't leave people room to breathe."
"Breathing is billed separately," Lin Wu replied smoothly. "This order is running on information."
Cen Dong: "…"
At her side, Qi Ye finally spoke, low and direct.
"Say it."
Just two words.
Not loud.
But whatever thin trace of humor had been hanging in Cen Dong's eyes faded away.
She was silent for two seconds.
When she spoke, her voice was rough.
"Half a month ago, the first black snow fell over White Tower District."
"It wasn't ordinary snow."
She lifted her eyes slightly.
"When it landed, it didn't melt. It crawled into cracks in the walls."
"Like it was alive."
Zhou Qiming's face changed sharply.
"You're certain it was black snow?"
"I'm not blind." Cen Dong looked at him once. "At first nobody thought much of it. We figured White Tower was just birthing another layer of filth."
"But then team after team started going in for old warehouse stock, data chips, battery modules out of the experimental towers…"
She paused.
"Less than half of them came back."
"How did the others die?" Qin Zheng asked suddenly.
Cen Dong didn't even look at him.
She kept speaking as if he had never opened his mouth.
"Some froze to death. Hardly any wounds on them, but the blood inside their bodies felt like it had turned to ice."
"Some came back mad. They ran headfirst into walls, over and over, all while muttering the same thing—"
Her voice dropped.
"'The door opened. The door opened.'"
"And a few…"
She looked at the floor for half a beat.
"…came back not looking human anymore."
At the shelves, Su Yu felt cold all over. Without thinking, she pulled Sui Sui tighter against her chest.
Sui Sui only half understood, but she could tell instinctively that none of the adults around her were talking about anything safe.
Lin Wu, however, only took the useful thread.
"Then why did you still go in?"
Cen Dong looked at her, and for a brief instant something in her gaze deepened.
"Because the inside started producing Grade-Three goods."
Those five words made Qi Ye close his eyes once.
Yes.
That was White Tower District's real cruelty.
It was monstrously dangerous.
And monstrously rich.
Grade-One cores. Grade-Two shards. Data canisters from buried labs. Contaminated fungal growths.
The deeper layers kept turning things over from below like the place itself was baiting people with their own greed.
"Qi Ye and I weren't on the same path at first," Cen Dong said more quietly. "Later, we teamed up for a while because of the White Tower goods."
Qi Ye did not deny it.
Lin Wu's gaze shifted slightly, but she did not dig into old history.
She stayed on the line that mattered most.
"And the wall?"
Cen Dong exhaled slowly.
"In the deepest part."
"At the far end of White Tower District there's a research building that collapsed halfway. Behind it, there's no road. Just one long white wall, split apart by frost."
She spoke more slowly now.
"By day, the wall looked white."
"At night, it turned gray."
"And when the black snow fell hardest, black lines would begin to seep out from inside the wall."
At that point, something in her voice changed.
Not dramatic.
The opposite.
It was the kind of change that only came from remembering something that still made the back of your neck go cold long after the fact.
"At first, we thought the snow had too much contamination in it—that it was running down through the cracks."
She paused.
"Then we realized…"
"…it wasn't running."
"It was writing."
The store went silent.
Even the gray mist behind the Special Goods Cabinet seemed to hold still for a moment.
Cen Dong kept looking at Lin Wu as she continued.
"It wasn't written by hand."
"It wasn't carved."
"The wall itself was slowly bleeding the words outward."
She swallowed.
"Like something behind it was trying to press language through a very thick skin."
She paused again.
"The first night, only two characters came through."
"—Light up."
Lin Wu's eyes finally twitched.
"The second night, it was four."
Cen Dong's voice dropped lower.
"—Black shop lights up."
"And on the third night, the black snow fell hardest. The whole wall looked like it was bleeding black."
"That night, the sentence completed."
Her throat worked once.
Then she repeated the line that had driven her all the way here through snow and blood:
"When the black shop lights up, the door will open."
This time, spoken out loud again, the sentence felt heavier than before.
Less like information.
More like a prophecy that had been waiting behind the wall for a very long time.
The color slowly drained from Zhou Qiming's face.
He stared at Cen Dong, voice tightening.
"That's not prophecy."
"That's targeting."
Qin Zheng turned toward him sharply.
"What do you mean?"
Zhou looked from the Special Goods Cabinet to the brightly lit little store beneath Lin Wu's feet. When he spoke, his voice sounded scraped raw.
"It means whatever is behind the wall wasn't guessing whether a door would appear."
His eyes fixed on the store.
"It was waiting for this door to light up."
Pei Wan's gaze turned colder.
Qi Ye's jaw tightened too.
Only Lin Wu remained colder still than the rest.
Because she already understood what this meant.
This was no longer the store happened to connect to another world.
It was closer to the truth that—
something on the other side had already been feeling its way along the cracked wall, searching back toward her.
She tapped the ledger once.
"And then?"
"How did you know that sentence was talking about my store?"
"Because it wasn't only the words," Cen Dong answered immediately, as if this part had already been turned over in her mind a hundred times. "On the third night, after the sentence fully appeared, there was a shadow in the center of the wall."
"What kind of shadow?" Lin Wu asked.
Cen Dong looked at her, and her eyes were full of something complex enough to feel almost heavy.
"A door."
"The door was small. Not tall. More like a narrow service door behind a convenience store."
"Inside it, there was light. Outside it, there was nothing but snow."
"And the sign…"
She paused.
"…was black."
The store went still again.
This time even Su Yu understood.
Black shop.
Lights on.
Warm door.
This was no longer a vague resonance.
It was practically a projected image of Lin Wu's store thrown onto the other side in advance.
Inside Lin Wu, the cold steadiness she had kept all night finally shifted a fraction.
Not fear.
More like the sensation that someone, through an invisible wall, had seen her store before she had truly opened it for business.
The system lit silently in front of her with a new line:
[High-correlation origin intelligence detected.][Notice: The title "Black Shop" may not have originated locally.]
Excellent.
Now even the system was starting to admit it.
"Black Shop" was probably no coincidence at all.
It was likely already the name used on the other side.
"Anything else?" Lin Wu asked.
Cen Dong nodded.
"Yes."
The way she said that single word made Qi Ye's expression darken, as if he had already guessed where this was going.
And sure enough, Cen Dong continued:
"There was someone standing in the shadow of that door."
Lin Wu's eyes sharpened.
"Who?"
Cen Dong didn't answer right away.
She turned her head first and looked at Qi Ye.
By then he was fully upright, fingers cinched around the knife hilt, something deep and cold pressed hard behind his eyes.
Only then did she speak.
"You."
The store went silent enough to feel emptied out.
Qi Ye's face darkened all the way through.
Not just because he had been named.
It was the look of someone having a part of his past, something even he could not fully explain, dug out of the snow and dropped in front of him.
"That's impossible," he said, voice low.
Cen Dong did not back away.
"That's what I thought too."
"Because at the time, you weren't anywhere near White Tower."
"But the shadow inside the wall was you—standing in front of that lit door, knife in your right hand, with an old injury on your left shoulder."
She looked straight at him.
"Even the way you lower your head when you look at people was exactly the same."
Qi Ye said nothing after that.
But the hand around the knife had gone tight enough for the knuckles to pale.
Lin Wu still did not turn the focus onto him.
She went for the more valuable point.
"So it was that shadow that made you decide to look for the door?"
"Yes," Cen Dong answered instantly. "At first I didn't believe it. But three days ago, the black snow started spreading farther out from White Tower. And the wall in the deepest section began shedding its surface—like whatever was behind it could no longer be contained."
She looked at Lin Wu.
"That was when I realized the door wasn't about to open."
"It was already opening."
"And if there really was a lit black shop on the other side…"
Her eyes sharpened with the same exhausted ferocity she had carried in through the snow.
"…then this place might be the only place left that could still do business with whatever was behind the wall."
That line dropped, and for a moment the whole store seemed to hold itself still.
Because everyone in the room realized, at exactly the same time, that this store might no longer be about selling water, medicine, and noodles.
What it might be about to sell—
was the first real transaction between two worlds.
Zhou Qiming stared at the Special Goods Cabinet behind Lin Wu, his throat visibly tightening.
"If that's true…"
"Then Sample One and Companion Chamber Two aren't merely looking for a door."
"They're calibrating the coordinates for it."
"And after calibration?" Pei Wan asked, voice low.
Zhou was silent for one second.
"After that…"
"…the door will stabilize. Once."
"Then something comes through," Qin Zheng finished.
"Or we go across," Zhou said hoarsely.
Lin Wu stood under the lights and listened to all of it in silence.
But the light in her eyes grew brighter and brighter.
Everyone else heard danger.
She heard market.
A stabilized door.
Both sides waiting.
One side with goods.
The other side with demand.
That was the cleanest business entry point imaginable.
She lowered her pen and wrote four words onto a fresh page in the ledger:
Initial Gate Opening
Then she looked up at Cen Dong.
"One last question."
Cen Dong's breathing tightened.
"Ask."
"On that wall—besides the words and the shadow—was there anything else?"
Cen Dong went silent for two seconds.
And those two seconds weighed more than any earlier pause.
At last, she answered, voice lower than before:
"Yes."
"The night the words fully bled out, a very small line of text surfaced near the bottom of the wall."
"It looked half like a store rule, half like a warning."
Lin Wu's eyes sharpened again.
"What did it say?"
Cen Dong looked at her and repeated the line slowly:
"If you want to enter alive, don't come empty-handed."
At the shelves, Su Yu froze.
He Qing froze too.
Even Qin Zheng and Pei Wan's expressions changed at once.
Because the sentence sounded too much like Lin Wu's rules.
Not merely similar.
Too similar.
Not like imitation after the fact.
More like whatever stood on the other side had already known what this store—or the one running it—recognized above all else.
Lin Wu lowered her eyes and smiled slowly.
Good.
Now it seemed even the rules of her business were not entirely something she had invented alone.
Maybe the deeper logic of this store—whatever older layer had existed before she opened it—had always functioned like this.
She gently closed the ledger and raised her eyes toward the Special Goods Cabinet.
The gray mist moved softly, as if Sample One inside were listening too.
And then the system lit up again.
[High-correlation intelligence acquired.][Notice: Resonance with store rules increased.][New authority prerequisite fulfilled: Welcome Guest.]
Welcome Guest.
Not Door Chime.
Welcome Guest.
The light in Lin Wu's eyes became impossible to suppress.
She knew what came next.
This was no longer a matter of someone simply knocking on the door.
The door was beginning to do business in both directions.
She looked at Qi Ye, her tone steady.
"In a bit, you're coming with me to the door."
"Why me?" Qi Ye's voice was still dark.
"Because the figure in the wall was you." Lin Wu looked at him directly. "Whether it was a shadow, a signal, or something else, you're more qualified than anyone else to count as one of the first familiar customers from the other side."
Then she turned to Cen Dong.
"You too."
Cen Dong blinked.
"Me?"
"You brought a map, a crystal core, and information. And your life is hard enough to survive this long." Lin Wu's tone was perfectly matter-of-fact. "Customers like that get priority."
For once, Cen Dong had no reply ready.
Not because she disagreed.
But because she had honestly never seen anyone capable of sorting customers by tier this smoothly while two worlds were on the verge of colliding.
And yet—
it somehow still made sense.
Outside, the rain went on.
Inside, the store remained bright as day.
And behind the black Special Goods Cabinet, the gray mist parted just a little more—
so slightly that it almost looked like the opening itself was waiting for her to say:
Welcome.