No. 7 stood at the alley’s deepest end.

The wooden gate, left slightly ajar, yielded to a push. Inside, the first bloom of wisteria hung under the eaves, its pale purple clusters softened and dreamlike behind the veil of rain. The courtyard was paved with grey bricks, their seams cushioned with velvety moss. A stone cistern held half a basin of rainwater, a few lily pads drifting on its surface.

Everything was just as she remembered.

And just as it had been in the photograph.

She set her pack down under the eaves but didn’t enter the house immediately. First, she scanned—a killer’s fundamental discipline.

The courtyard perimeter measured forty-two meters. The wall stood two-point-eight meters high, its top embedded with broken glass, though several gaps were evident. Two gates, front and rear; the back one was barred from the inside, but the wooden bolt showed signs of recent movement. The main house was a two-story wooden structure with six rooms. Signs of use were in the ground-floor living area—tea things were damp, an ashtray held three cigarette butts, the brand was

"Liqun,"

her Master’s usual smoke.

But her Master had died four years ago.

Officially, at least.

She climbed to the second floor. The master bedroom door was closed. She pushed it open.

The room was impeccably clean, sterile, as if no one had lived there for years. But the bed sheets bore creases; a few men’s clothes—in her Master’s size—hung in the wardrobe. She pulled open the nightstand drawer. Inside lay a Type 92 pistol, well-maintained, magazine full.

And a note, freshly written:

"Food in the fridge. Don’t go to the teahouse east of town."

The handwriting was her Master’s.

X stood by the window, the note held tight in her fingers. Rain blurred the rice-paper window, turning the world outside into a smudged watercolour. She stood there a long time. Then she pocketed the note and went downstairs.

She did not go to the teahouse east of town.

She went to the kitchen and opened the refrigerator. It was stocked: vacuum-sealed rice and noodles, tins, fresh vegetables and meat, all still good.

Enough for one person for a month.

She took out some ingredients and began to cook. Her movements were practiced—a basic survival skill her Master had taught her. Washing, chopping, lighting the stove, the sizzle of the wok. Soon, the kitchen was filled with the smells of oil, smoke, and cooking food.

Outside, the rain continued to fall.

By evening, she ate alone in the living room, seated at the large, empty square table. The room was lit by an old-fashioned incandescent bulb, its yellowish glow feeling especially warm on this rainy night.

And especially lonely.

After the meal, she began her true preparations for retreat.

X stood in the center of the courtyard, eyes closed, trying to perceive the so-called "genetic lock."

At first, she felt nothing. Her body was just her body; pain was pain, fatigue was fatigue. No abstract lock, no invisible cage.

She changed tactics.

She started with memory—her Master had taught her an internal visualization technique for assessing injuries and toxin spread. She focused, imagining her consciousness as a probe scanning her body from within.

Still, nothing.

Until the third night.

That day, she had pushed through eight hours of extreme physical training: weighted squats, pull-ups, long-distance running, dagger drills. Her body hit its fatigue limit; muscle fibers were tearing at the microscopic level.

It happened just after her cold shower, as she stood panting under the eaves. A sensation arrived.

Not pain, not an itch. More like… a grating resistance.

Like rusty gears forcing a turn, like sand grating in a joint. It was most pronounced when she tried to summon deeper muscular strength. It didn’t originate from muscles or bones, but from somewhere deeper—the cellular level? The molecular level?

She sat cross-legged on the ground, relaxing her entire body, focusing on the sensation.

The feeling varied slightly in different areas:

Around her spine, it was thickest, like layer upon layer of ice encasing the nerve bundles.

Near her heart, it felt most dangerous, each heartbeat straining against invisible shackles.

At her temples, it was sharpest, like countless fine needles piercing her brain tissue.

And at her dantian—the energy center of traditional martial arts. Here, the resistance felt most… alien. It wasn’t entirely resistance; it felt more like an emptiness, a void where something should have been, but had been scooped out.

X opened her eyes.

Moonlight washed the courtyard like water. Wisteria shadows traced intricate patterns on the ground.

She understood.

The "genetic lock" wasn’t something foreign. It was part of her very body, a restrictive mechanism formed naturally during her growth, a safety valve installed by her genes to maintain stability.

To break it wasn’t to "unlock" it.

It was to break herself.

---

The first attempt came at dawn on the fifth day.

X stood in the courtyard, upper body bare. The pre-dawn temperature hovered around fifteen degrees Celsius; the damp, cold air raised goosebumps on her skin.

She took three deep breaths, then began.

First, she forcibly overdrived her Arcana. The essence of Cryokinesis was manipulating the kinetic energy of water molecules, dropping local temperatures. Normally, her limit was creating a zone of minus fifty degrees Celsius for three minutes.

Now, she would surpass it.

She raised her hands, palms facing each other. Channeling all her concentration, she visualized the heat between her palms being violently ripped away.

The temperature began to drop.

Minus ten, twenty, thirty degrees Celsius…

Moisture in the air crystallized into ice, glittering like crushed diamonds in the moonlight.

Minus forty degrees.

Her arms began to tremble—not from the cold, but from muscle spasms caused by energy overexertion.

Minus forty-five.

Her vision started to blur. Microscopic ice crystals formed in the vitreous humor of her eyes, refracting light abnormally.

Minus forty-eight.

Her previous record.

She clenched her jaw, pushing further.

Minus fifty.

Minus fifty-two.

Minus fifty-five—

!

Something detonated.

Not from her palm, but from deep within her body. It was as if countless ice needles were erupting from her very core, piercing through her diaphragm, her chest wall, thrusting towards the skin.

She looked down. Beneath the skin of her chest, a network of blue veins was rapidly spreading, branching out like lightning.

The patterns were glowing.

A cold, phosphorescent light.

She tried to stop it, but it was too late.

Arcana overload.

Spleen: ruptured.

A minor branch of the splenic artery, punctured by internally-formed ice crystals, causing intra-abdominal hemorrhage. Estimated blood loss: approximately 300 ml.

Synovial fluid in major joints crystallized, locking the joints, severely restricting movement.

X collapsed on the ground.

Conscious, but her body no longer obeyed. In her vision, wisteria branches swayed in the moonlight, a slow, languid dance.

She knew she was dying.

This was not a metaphor. A ruptured spleen, left untreated, leads to hemorrhagic shock within twenty minutes. Combined with her existing cardiac and renal issues, she had perhaps an hour to live.

But she felt no panic.

Instead, a strange calm settled over her.

So this was death. Simple. No bullet, no poison. Just one wrong decision.

She closed her eyes and waited.

But death did not come.

Instead, a stranger sensation—something was moving inside her.

Not muscle, not blood vessels. Something deeper. Like a seed sprouting in soil, a chrysalis splitting open in its cocoon.

She turned her awareness inward again.

And she saw it.

The "locks"—that sensation of stagnation—were fracturing.

Not all, just a few. Concentrated around the spleen. As the ruptured vessel was frozen, the necrotic tissue preserved by the intense cold, the body's self-repair mechanisms forcibly activated by the extreme stress…

The genetic locks had shifted.

X opened her eyes.

She raised her right hand, the one she could still move, and looked at her palm.

A slight focus of will.

A filament of ice extruded from her palm.

Not the crude, superficial suturing thread from before. This filament was gossamer-thin, semi-transparent, with an intricate helical structure inside. It writhed in the air as if alive, seeking something.

X guided it with her mind.

The ice filament retreated into her palm, slid along a blood vessel, back inside her body.

She could "see" it. Not with her eyes, but through a more direct perception—perhaps a neural feedback granted by her Arcana, or something else.

The filament navigated her vasculature, a microscopic catheter. It reached the splenic rupture, branched into even finer threads, coiling around the bleeding vessel.

Then, it solidified.

Not a crude freezing of the entire area, but a precise cryo-seal limited to a three-millimeter radius around the vascular tear. The temperature held precisely at zero degrees Celsius—enough to staunch the bleeding without further damaging surrounding tissue.

The hemorrhage stopped.

More locks shattered.

She lay on the ground, body cold, internal organs injured, joints locked.

But she smiled—she had seen the path.

She attempted a second internal survey. The splenic rupture showed preliminary healing—not conventional scar tissue, but a translucent, crystalline connective substance. Stronger than normal tissue, but more brittle.

This time, it felt different.

Her body was the same, yet the internal "map" had changed. She perceived finer details—the elasticity of a specific vessel, the fatigue level of a particular muscle, even the secretory state of a gland.

She could also perceive the "locks" more clearly.

They were distributed throughout her body, but unevenly: densest around the heart, then the brain, the spine, sparsest in the limbs.

Each lock had a different structure: some like nets, some like shells, some like tangled thread.

She began to understand 092A's words:

"Forced expression under extreme conditions."

Indeed, the locks only loosened when the body was pushed to the brink.

They were designed as a restraint—to curb excess, to keep the flame from consuming its own source. A failsafe.

To break it, you must first demonstrate that the safeguard itself has become the slow, sure cause of your demise.

【True power demands the wager of a life】

And in this town, the drowning season felt eternal—a ceaseless whisper against tile and stone.

Drizzle, Unceasing.