Dax turned back to look at Ling, lying in the heap of flower petals, foaming at the mouth.

  He nudged her with the tip of his shoe. "Hey. Artwork. Have you rebooted yet? Get up and eat."

  No response.

  He nudged again.

  Still nothing.

  Dax frowned, crouched down, and patted her face.

  It really was a beautiful face.

  The one true thing that swindler Wei Xu had said was about the appearance of these Celestial Maiden bodies. The skin's texture was like unworked mutton-fat jade, cold light emanating from within, untouched by mortal dust. The curves of her brows and eyes seemed calculated through ten thousand iterations by the Celestial Mechanics Bureau—the angle of the nose bridge, the curvature of the lips, the arc where the eye tapered toward the temple… not a single excess detail, not a fraction off. Like the trajectory of stars: not one degree more, not one less.

  But right now, that perfect face had its eyes rolled back, foam crusted at the corners of her mouth, dried blood still clinging to her nostrils. Quite the unsettling image.

  "Hey." He patted her face twice more. "Stop playing dead."

  Still no response.

  He sighed, stood up, and rummaged through the corner of the warehouse until he found something buried under layers of dust.

  A lotus throne.

  The base was pure white jade, serene as fresh snowfall. Lotus petals unfurled upward in layer upon layer, each one carved with ancient runes as dense as star charts.

  Dax grabbed a slightly sour-smelling rag from nearby and gave it a few careless wipes. Dust cascaded down, revealing the material beneath—crystalline and translucent, like frozen moonlight, like flowing ice. The edges of the petals refracted faint rainbows in the dim light, and those runes seemed alive, shimmering with subtle luminescence.

  He scooped Ling up and deposited her onto it. Then he dragged over a chair, sat down, and started eating his bento. Eating and waiting.

  Five minutes later.

  Two notification tones.

  Ling slowly came to. "This is…" But her voice was still hazy.

  "Stop." Dax didn't look up. "You're still in startup mode. There are limits on what you can say. Don't waste energy."

  Ling opened her mouth and discovered she really couldn't form complete sentences.

  "Wait until you hit 30% before talking." Dax pushed a bento box toward her. "Eat first. This body needs carbohydrate intake to assist the process."

  Ling looked down at the bento box. Cold rice, several lumps of something that might have been braised pork, and some wilted vegetables. She looked back up at Dax. He was eating the same thing.

  "It was on sale," he said. "Make do. Temple budget is limited."

  Ling was silent for a few seconds. Then she picked up the chopsticks and started shoveling rice into her mouth.

  If an outsider had witnessed this scene, they would have found it deeply disturbing: a maiden dressed in rainbow-feathered gossamer robes (though now filthy and disheveled), radiating an aura of sacred luminosity (though her face was smeared with grime), squatting in a rundown warehouse like a migrant worker who hadn't eaten in three days, clutching a discount bento box and frantically stuffing her face.

  "Dainty rosebud lips." "Chewing slowly and gracefully." All such protocols had completely failed.

  The body's "Etiquette Module" attempted to intervene, but under the highest-priority directive of "Biological Energy Conversion," the etiquette system crashed entirely.

  In less than two minutes, the box was empty. She'd licked up every last grain of rice.

  Ling let out a decidedly unladylike belch.

  As the carbohydrates entered her stomach, a warm current rapidly spread through her limbs. Simultaneously, the lotus throne beneath her seemed to sense the energy fluctuation and began to hum.

  In the lower left of her vision, a pale blue progress bar finally twitched.

  [Biological Energy Conversion initiated…][Current charge: 3%][Estimated time to full charge: 12 hours 43 minutes]

  Ling stared at that snail-crawling number. Whatever gratitude she'd felt a moment ago instantly evaporated.

  "12 hours?!"

  The next second—

  A fine, tingling sensation began spreading across the surface of her skin. Like countless impossibly thin needles sliding through her pores, slowly piercing inward. Those "needles" carried some kind of warm energy, penetrating skin, penetrating muscle, seeping deeper and deeper. As if something were filling this body—filling all those hollow, dried-out, malfunctioning places.

  The runes on the lotus throne began to glow. Faint, pale cyan light crept upward from the base, flowing along the patterns on the petals, finally converging beneath where Ling sat.

  "This is spiritual energy." Dax had finished eating and was leaning against the wall, lighting a cigarette. "The condensed essence of heaven and earth. Your spells can only run on this stuff."

  "You call that a spell? Where's your shame?"

  He blew out a smoke ring. "How is it not a spell?"

  Ling didn't have the energy to retort anymore. That tingling sensation grew stronger and stronger, as if something were welding her into this body.

  Before, she had merely been "wearing" this body. Like putting on ill-fitting clothes—something always felt off.

  But now…

  Those gaps were being filled. She could feel blood flowing. Could feel her heart beating. Could feel every inch of skin, every muscle, every bone… slowly becoming .

  This feeling was unfamiliar. She had never truly "owned" a body before. But now…

  She had skin. Had temperature. Had weight.

  She could feel the lotus petals supporting her back. Could feel air flowing across her skin. Could feel her chest rising and falling.

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  She suddenly understood why ghosts would desperately try to possess bodies. Not for any other reason. Just for this sense of solidity—of being contained within a vessel.

  "How does it feel?" Dax asked.

  Ling didn't answer. She looked down at her hands.

  These hands were very pale. Very slender. The knuckles were well-defined, the nails neatly trimmed, with a thin layer of calluses on the palms—probably traces left by the previous "owner." But now, these were her hands.

  "Not bad," she said, her voice calm. "Much better than before."

  "Good." Dax stubbed out his cigarette. "Keep this lotus throne safe. Lie on it to charge every night when you sleep. Remember, at least 12 hours each time. Don't slack off."

  "Got it, Boss Jiang. I will repay your kindness." Ling's tone was somewhere between a smile and a sneer.

  Dax was rather surprised. He'd expected Ling to throw a fit and demand to settle scores. Was this little ghost plotting something again?

  What Jiang Dax didn't know was that during those five minutes of system crash, the entire game had already been rewritten. He had transformed from a cat toying with a mouse into a plump, succulent prey.

  In the days that followed, whenever Dax thought about how he had "cleverly captured" this disaster and smugly "locked" her by his side, he would wake in the middle of the night wanting to slap himself across the face.

  Time rewinds to the moment Ling entered this shell.

  The instant her consciousness was sucked into the space between the eyebrows, she knew something was wrong.

  Her consciousness was seized by an irresistible force and yanked violently downward—not into the body, but somewhere deeper.

  The Spirit Platform.

  Her consciousness was flung into an unfamiliar space. She opened her eyes and froze. This was—

  An expanse of absolute, pure golden void.

  Boundless golden light surged from all directions, soft, warm, and solemn. A strange sound echoed through the air—Sanskrit chanting. Deep, endless hymns, as if thousands upon thousands of monks were reciting sutras in unison.

  The sound was soft and cottony, like a tide resonating directly in her marrow, trying to gently knead apart her ferocity, her memories, her self, dissolving everything into this sea of golden light.

  As she listened, Ling found her knees going weak. An urge to kneel. To confess. To submit. To surrender herself entirely, to merge into this sacred radiance.

  "Fuck."

  Ling bit down hard on the tip of her tongue. The sharp pain snapped her back to clarity.

  "Playing tricks?" She let out a cold laugh. "After all that time surviving in the Hungry Ghost Realm, you think this parlor game can fool me?"

  Bestial instinct made her bristle instantly. From deep within her soul, that black malevolent energy from the Turbid Abyss erupted, transforming into a dark comet that hurtled at full speed toward the "edge" of this void.

  No sound of shattering. No sense of a boundary. Her force pierced through the golden light, through the Sanskrit chanting, through everything—And then slammed back into her from behind.

  Ling tumbled wildly through the air for several rotations before stabilizing, her expression grim. She paused for a second, then launched again, charging toward the "left"—only to come crashing back from the "right."

  She tried "up" and came back from "down." She tried "down" and came back from "up." No matter which direction she charged, her force would rebound from the opposite side. This wasn't a space with boundaries.

  "The legendary 'Infinity Shell Array'?" Ling murmured. The fury in her eyes rapidly cooled, replaced by the icy assessment of a hunter.

  This was no Spirit Platform prepared for ordinary Celestial Maidens. This was a meticulously designed "sacred prison" capable of trapping a Golden Immortal to death.

  She had once dug up a maddened Golden Immortal's bone fragment from the muck of the Turbid Abyss. That poor bastard had been trapped by this formation for three thousand full years, ultimately exhausting his last wisp of spiritual energy while running in circles.

  "Impressive technique." Ling hovered in the golden light, listening to that irritating chanting, her tone laced with mockery.

  "Too bad… for all your calculations, you forgot one thing: I've got a cheat up my sleeve."

  Ling closed her eyes.

  In that 0.01 seconds before her soul was sucked into the brow point, her beast-like instincts had screamed warnings. She had instinctively severed her spiritual attachment to Little Ear, leaving it outside.

  At this very moment, Little Ear was clinging to her physical earlobe. And on the soul level, an absolutely unbreakable "Soul Covenant"—like an invisible umbilical cord—pierced through this perfect closed loop.

  Ling smirked internally:

  The so-called "Soul Covenant" was an ancient, nearly-lost form of connection. It wasn't lost because it was difficult—though it did require insanely strict synchronization of soul frequencies. The real reason was: nobody wanted to use it.

  Once bound, both parties' thoughts became completely transparent to each other. Real-time sharing across any distance, zero privacy whatsoever. For those immortals and demons who had lived long lives and accumulated countless secrets, this kind of link was a nightmare.

  But Ling had no choice.

  From the very first day she opened her eyes in the Turbid Abyss, this broken ear had already been bound to her soul. Like an uninstallable piece of bloatware, it had accompanied her through countless days and nights of slaughter in the garbage heaps.

  "Hey… can you hear me? Little Ear?"

  A faint vibration traveled along the umbilical cord. Signal connected.

  Ling opened her eyes, a flash of savage light in her pupils.

  "Since you want to suck… then let me give you all you can handle."

  Soul smuggling: initiated.

  Ling held nothing back. Through that "Soul Covenant" channel, she continuously flooded her origin energy outward to Little Ear.

  Sure enough, the array began hunting the escapee.

  A massive suction force appeared from nowhere, forcibly drawing back the energy Ling had just transmitted to Little Ear, pouring it back into her spiritual form.

  But Ling didn't pause for even a second. Riding the momentum of that return suction, she violently flung herself out again through the "umbilical cord"!

  The surrounding golden light flickered almost imperceptibly.

  This shouldn't have been a vulnerability.

  According to the Infinity Shell Array's operational logic, once prey fell into the net, the formation would become a self-contained world. In this beginningless, endless loop where head met tail, "escape" was a false concept—like an insect trapped in amber, struggling futilely.

  Precisely because of this, the formation's spiritual energy allocation was extremely lopsided—99.9% of its essence went to maintaining that supposedly "inescapable" spatial loop, while the "valve" responsible for intake and output was actually just a low-consumption, even somewhat fragile, one-way gate.

  After all, who would install premium hinges on a door designed to only let things in? Much less that old skinflint Wei Xu.

  "Ah, so you're a lopsided student." Ling keenly seized upon this fatal weak point.

  Using Little Ear's connection, she toyed with this sluggish heaven-devouring toad—and the toad was choking to death.

  The one-way valve detected that some of the "prey" that should have been inside the trap still had remnants outside. But its narrow spiritual channels couldn't possibly withstand this level of repeated yanking. Ling's maneuver was equivalent to forcing a spring designed for only 10 cycles to compress and expand 1,000 times in one second.

  Suck in, close, leak again, forcibly restart suction!

  "Spin… for me!" Ling grinned savagely.

  The vast spiritual power originally used to maintain the higher-dimensional space was forced to divert, rushing to repair that already overheated, swollen "valve."

  The sacred, solemn Sanskrit chanting around her was starting to lose control.

  At first, the voice still struggled to maintain its compassionate tone, trying to soothe this restless soul:

  "Attachments?" Ling let out a cold laugh and sharply increased her transmission power. "My attachments are more than this broken array could burn through even if you melted yourself down!"

  Energy flow velocity broke through the critical threshold.

  The originally ethereal, beautiful chanting suddenly sounded like a duck being strangled. It began to distort, stutter, and howl, gradually revealing its true nature:

  That last phrase—"FORCED VIOLENT SUCTION"—was no longer gentle and sacred. It was the cold, harsh tone of mechanical synthesis. The golden light around her began flashing wildly. The originally peaceful flower rain transformed into scrambled blocks of color.

  She closed her eyes. In the midst of the raging energy maelstrom, she shoved once more.

  "Then… keep going!"

  "Full power!"

  Outside, the Celestial Maiden's physical body began spinning wildly, blood gushing from its nose. Inside, the sacred chanting and electrical static took turns warping:

  The perfect golden light surrounding her began strobing violently, like a cheap screen with a loose connection.

  "BREAK… for me!" Ling seized the instant the image tore, violently reversed her soul's gravity, and ripped—

  Like the crisp sound of glass shattering.

  The golden ocean, the cascading flowers, the sacred chanting—all of it peeled away, curled up, and vanished in an instant, like wallpaper being stripped from a wall.

  Revealed beneath this prison lay the husk's true nature...