96: Chapter 96 Peak Psionic Showdown: Her hair turned golden in the mist.

The three mechs ceased fire simultaneously, and the battlefield was suddenly plunged into an unnatural silence.

This wasn't the post-battle relaxation—the quiet after a battle should be filled with heavy breathing, the crisp click of gun bolts returning to place, and the friction of fabric scraping against brick as the wounded were dragged off the wall.

The silence at this moment was forcefully pressed down by an overwhelming sense of presence.

The thick fog in the direction of the swamp stopped churning, as if pinned down by the psychic pressure radiating from deep within the mist layer.

Every droplet of water hung in place, neither rising nor falling, neither gathering nor scattering; the white fog outside the entire East Wall had condensed into a static, grey-white giant wall—and behind that wall, the Chaos Bishop was walking forward, step by step.

That could hardly be called normal walking.

With every step he took, the white frost on the ground melted into a meter-wide black scorched ring beneath his feet, and the soil within the circle was visibly corroded by psychic energy, the depth of the depression apparent to the naked eye.

He was more massive than all three mech pilots stacked together, yet that wasn't entirely due to the height of his physical body—the surging psychic distortion field around him compressed the mist behind him into a dark purple cloak, its edges dragging a trail nearly three meters long through the fog.

The armor on his body was entirely forged from psychic energy; it wasn't metal, but rather more like Warp energy compressed into near-solid, translucent plates, its color slowly flowing between dark purple and deep red, like a low-pressure storm sealed inside a humanoid mold.

He wore no helmet.

In the doctrine of Khorne, covering one's face is a sign that a warrior is ashamed of their own bloodlust.

Five old claw marks were etched across his face, stretching from his forehead to his jaw; each one was the final strike of a Psyker who had died at his hands.

With his level of psychic power, regenerating a complete layer of skin would only take a few seconds, yet he chose to keep them—five scars, five psychic lives he had extinguished with his own hands.

Today, he would add a sixth.

His gaze pierced through the static mist layer, locking directly onto the silver-white figure at the highest point of the middle section of the wall.

"Level 5 Psyker—"

The voice traveled from four hundred meters away. It wasn't a roar, but a tremor pressed into the psychic resonance layer, every syllable piercing through the fog barrier and the shield, slamming directly into the bone behind the human eardrum.

It wasn't heard; it was a collision. With every word that fell, the eardrums went numb. "Three-layer shield structure, with reflection and diversion. You previously served in the Astral Knights, Third Company, designation Alpha-47."

He wasn't asking; he was stating.

Before the battle, he had infiltrated the archives of the Imperial Department of Military Affairs, mapping out Alice's psychic level, squad designation, past Commanders, and even the page torn from her file—the page concerning Isabelle Valen.

He deliberately recited her designation, not to enrage her, but to make her understand: he knew her past, he knew her fears.

He wanted to lay these things out before her, one by one, and force her to lose focus while she was holding up three layers of shields to protect two thousand people.

A Psyker's shield leaks the moment focus is lost.

He didn't need her to break down; he only needed a single gap to open, enough for his psychic bolt to pass through and destroy those five springs.

"Bishop—"

On the observation post, Vian's voice was pressed extremely low, her psychic perception already locked onto the dark purple distortion field around the Bishop.

"This isn't his true form; it's a psychic projection. His real body is still at the edge of the swamp, unmoving. The projection's high temperature melted the white frost, but the depth of corrosion is only one-third that of his true body. He is testing the reflection rate of the shield."

Lin Mo placed his laser pistol on the crenelation without raising it.

In front of the Bishop's psychic projection, the effective range of a laser pistol was no different from a toy bow.

He needed another weapon, a weapon not driven by gunpowder or batteries.

"Your projection,"

Alice's voice pierced through the mist layer from the wall, not borrowing any psychic resonance, just her own voice.

She didn't raise her volume, but simply calibrated every word to a frequency that perfectly matched the resonance layer of the shield, ensuring the sound wouldn't be deflected by the Bishop's psychic field.

"Can imitate your own psychic signature density, but there is one thing it cannot imitate. The scorched ring made by your true body is 1.2 meters in diameter; the ones your projection makes are five, each less than half a meter."

She was fighting back, not with psychic bolts, but with data analysis.

After six years in the Astral Knights, she was the first medical officer on the battlefield to dismantle a Chaos Psyker using data—she knew better than anyone that what a Chaos Psyker fears most is never firepower suppression, but being seen through.

Once the unknown becomes known, fear dissipates, and the core source of Chaos psychic energy is precisely fear.

As fear recedes, the core temperature of the psychic energy naturally drops.

The Bishop didn't reply, but his projection stopped in the fog.

It wasn't a retreat after being exposed, but a recalibration.

The true body at the edge of the swamp shifted the focus of its psychic perception from the shield structure to Alice's psychic signature itself.

He was reading her emotions—in a highly concentrated combat state, every ripple of emotion would spread across the psychic signature.

He wanted to find that ripple, to find the true weakness of this Level 5 Psyker.

It wasn't the shield structure, not the tactical judgment, not the gap in firepower.

It was the person she cared about.

The Bishop's psychic perception swept over Alice's signature, capturing a faint layer of warm traces at the edge, almost masked by the shield resonance.

That wasn't a psychic reaction; it was a deeper emotional imprint, pulsing in sync with the physiological rhythm of another non-Psyker on the wall in a non-psychic way.

That person's heartbeat, breathing, and skin electrical response always emerged within Alice's psychic perception—not that she was actively probing, but her perception unconsciously kept an open channel for him.

This was a theoretical weakness in a Psyker's defense system.

By following the direction of her perception, one could locate the person she was continuously concerned about.

The projection in the fog slowly turned at an angle, no longer facing Alice, but aiming at Lin Mo.

"Product Manager."

The three words were spoken, not in Low Gothic, but in Earth Chinese.

The pronunciation was extremely stiff, the tone of every character off by at least a degree, yet the term was so precise that it didn't seem like something a Chaos Warlock should know.

He was showing off—he knew not only her designation, but also Lin Mo's origins, and all the rules, spreadsheets, and defense plans he had built on this planet using product thinking, all of which could be dismantled into variables that could be extinguished at will in his eyes.

Lin Mo didn't react.

It wasn't that he didn't care, but he had suppressed his emotions to a depth that even a psychic perception like the Bishop's couldn't read.

Having been a Product Manager for over twenty years, he had seen too many scenes where competitors stripped his data in public at competitive analysis meetings.

The first rule of self-preservation he had learned: when your data is being stripped, never show the expression the opponent wants to see on your face.

This Product Manager's expression management was being used for the first time in a psychological battle against a Level 6 Chaos Bishop.

"Your pronunciation is problematic."

Lin Mo spoke, his voice not carrying any psychic resonance layer, just a normal person's voice, capable of piercing through the mist layer, relying on the restrained yet extremely steady rhythm in his words.

"'Product Manager' these four words, sound like they were mechanically decoded from corrupted Imperial archive fragments; you have never seen a real Product Manager. You only know who I am, not how many years I have done competitive analysis. The most basic principle of competitive analysis: never expose how much you know before you have figured out your opponent's trump card."

The Bishop remained silent, but the dark purple distortion field around the projection contracted—not in retreat, but in anger.

What made him angry wasn't Lin Mo's words; it was that he couldn't perceive any fear.

A non-Psyker's fear is the easiest to capture in a Chaos Psyker's perception, with a very low frequency and wide diffusion, almost requiring no active probing.

But when Lin Mo spoke, as he swept over the other's psychic signature, he couldn't find a trace of fear, only a base color he had never seen on any battlefield: a low-frequency fluctuation, steady to the extreme, that dismantled all fear into data and response plans.

It didn't look like courage.

Courage burns; in psychic perception, it is a bright but short-lived halo.

This person's base color was more like a piece of paper folded repeatedly, each layer pressed extremely flat, so flat that at close range, he couldn't even tell how many layers there were.

The Bishop no longer used the projection to probe.

The projection suddenly retracted, and the half-meter-wide scorched ring four hundred meters away was instantly flattened by reverse air pressure.

The true body at the edge of the swamp began to truly advance forward.

The moment he took his first step, all the torches on the city wall dimmed by an inch simultaneously.

It wasn't the wind; it was air pressure.

The Bishop maintained a psychic suppression field with a diameter of ten meters around him, and the air density inside the field was nearly forty percent higher than outside.

As the high-pressure field moved forward, the air at the edges was pushed outward, and the pressure wave slammed into the wall, still able to tilt the flames even through three layers of shields.

The new recruits standing behind the outermost crenelations only felt the pressure on their eardrums increasing with every step; for every step he drew closer, their eardrums sank inward by a fraction.

Alice walked out from behind the crenelations, not retreating, but moving forward.

She stood at the outermost edge of the wall, raising her hands slowly from her sides, and the three-layer psychic shield began to re-weave—not by adding layers, but by compressing inward.

The compressed shield would become thinner, but it absolutely did not mean it became weaker; the density was nearly three times what it was before.

She no longer tried to cover the entire East Wall with the shield, but concentrated all her power on the single point where she stood.

If the Bishop wanted to pierce the shield to hurt the people behind it, then she would plant herself at the very front of the shield.

It wasn't to block for the wall, but to clearly tell him: your opponent is me. If you want to touch the springs, you must get past me first.

"Shield compression complete, thickness is less than half a foot."

On the observation post, Vian's psychic perception captured the subtle change—the density of the compressed shield had already exceeded the physical model scope of a standard psychic shield.

That layer of gold-translucent shield, less than half a foot thick, was not a wall in psychic vision, but a layer of flowing, rotating light film.

Every time it rotated, the internal psychic structure rearranged itself, automatically switching to the optimal ratio of absorption and reflection for different types of psychic impact.

This was not a standard structure in the Imperial military regulations, but an adaptive shield that Alice had temporarily created when she took on eight psychic bolts from a Chaos Warlock.

She didn't need to know the opponent's attack type in advance; the rotation of the shield would automatically adapt the moment of contact.

The Bishop saw this shield and stopped one hundred meters from the wall.

It wasn't hesitation, but respect.

In the faith of Khorne, only an opponent worth stopping for is worthy of being slain by your own hands.

He extended his right hand, five fingers spread, and a high-speed rotating dark purple psychic core condensed at each fingertip; the five cores rotated at different speeds, each calibrated to a different psychic band.

He intended to fire five psychic bolts simultaneously, hitting different locations on the shield, using five frequencies to force the rotating structure to fail to adapt simultaneously, pushing it to its limit.

The five psychic cores shot out from his fingertips, tracing five arcs in different directions through the mist.

They weren't straight lines—straight lines would be automatically deflected by the rotating shield.

Arcs meant that every shot had independent guidance and would hit simultaneously at the last moment of contact with the shield, five forces superimposing in the same microsecond.

This precision had long exceeded the manual limit of human Psykers; the Bishop's psychic control was measured in microseconds.

The five psychic bolts slammed into the compressed shield simultaneously.

The impact point exploded with a ring of dark purple light, brighter than the scorching sun, expanding to thirty meters wide in the mist, illuminating the entire middle section of the East Wall as if a mirror had risen from hell onto the ground.

The new recruits were forced to close their eyes tightly by the glare, while the veterans could see the vascular patterns in their own eyes even through their eyelids.

The halo lasted for three seconds.

Three seconds later, the light mist dissipated, and Alice was still standing on the crenelations, and the shield was still there.

Only three pieces of the crenelation stone beneath her feet were shattered—not by being hit directly by the psychic bolts, but because the residual shockwave shattered the masonry when the shield absorbed the impact force.

A thin trace of blood seeped from the corner of her lips; it wasn't that she had been wounded, but that her gums had cracked from the shockwave when her body acted as the physical anchor for the shield.

She didn't wipe it away, her hands remained raised, and the posture of her ten fingers spread remained unchanged.

The shield was still rotating, but the rotation speed was nearly one-third slower than before.

The Bishop in the mist captured this change.

He knew the five psychic bolts were not without effect—they had consumed nearly half of the shield's rotational kinetic energy.

One more round, and the shield's rotation would stall.

A compressed shield that had lost its fluidity would only become a layer of static golden film, unable to block his subsequent attacks.

He condensed a second set of psychic bolts in his palm.

He didn't intend to hit Alice directly; the target was the city wall beneath her feet.

She had concentrated all her shields on herself, and there was no protection beneath her feet.

The psychic bolt would strike the base of the wall beneath the crenelations, and the shattered stone would knock her off the wall.

No matter how strong the shield was, if she lost her physical footing, the Psyker wouldn't be able to maintain the coordinates.

She would be forced to drop the shield while falling, and at that point, he would only need one shot—no need to aim at anyone, just point at those five springs.

On the roof of the armory, Lin Mo saw the psychic projectile in the Chaos Bishop's palm.

He was not a Psyker and couldn't discern the core's rotational speed, but he observed a more fundamental physical phenomenon: the mist above the Chaos Bishop's palm was spiraling and contracting toward the center of the projectile.

It wasn't being blown away; it was being sucked in.

The core density of this psychic projectile was already high enough to generate gravitational effects; if it could suck in mist, it could suck in stone.

If it struck any section of the city wall, the stone within five meters of the impact point would be ripped from its place.

This wasn't an ordinary impact projectile; it was a miniature psychic black hole.

"Yang Shitou," Lin Mo pressed the communicator, "besides the confirmation code, what else is in the response from the direction of Terra?"

"Root words. I told you yesterday, the encoding for 'Echo X' contains three root words: 'Key', 'Bearing', and 'Confirmation'. I compared them all night; the confirmation code is the compressed Low Gothic form of 'Confirmation'. The signal isn't coming from an automatic transponder—automatic transponder signals lack a sense of 'breathing'. This was manually replied to." Yang Shitou's voice was very low. "You're asking about this—are you planning to help her?"

"Yes. Expand the encoding of the 'Key' root word into a modulatable signal and transmit it from the communication station's antenna, directed due north. Don't send it toward the Salt Flats; send it underground, at seventeen-minute intervals, synchronized with the subterranean pulse source."

Yang Shitou didn't ask for the reason; he directly turned the frequency knob on the console two notches to the left—that was an extremely low-frequency band he had never touched before.

Calling up the spectrum for 'Echo X' on the terminal, he re-compressed the 'Key' root word into a set of extremely short high-frequency pulses on the keyboard and layered them into the antenna's next calibration pulse.

The beam pointed due north, matching exactly the bearing of the subterranean pulse source that Zhao Laonian had brought back three days ago.

The moment the beam was emitted, the layer of mist outside the city wall trembled slightly.

It wasn't a sound, but a deep tremor coming from deep underground, with a seventeen-minute cycle that matched perfectly with the subterranean pulse measured in the swamp, and it also aligned perfectly with the flow rhythm of the silver patterns inside the XV-091 crystal.

The crystal in Lin Mo's pocket suddenly became hot—not from body heat, but because the silver patterns inside were accelerating their flow, creating a resonant frequency with the subterranean pulse.

He pulled out the crystal; its surface was glowing. It wasn't reflecting skylight—there was no skylight in the mist—it was shining on its own.

The silver light shone through the crystal, dyeing his palm a nearly transparent, bright silver.

The next second, the mirror of the emperor flashed at the edge of his vision.

This time there was no golden silhouette, only a latitude and longitude coordinate precise to three decimal places, located exactly beneath the metal wall that Old Tom had buried twenty years ago.

The depth was marked with three asterisks, meaning this depth was not measured in meters—it was a unit that the system of the mirror of the emperor could not directly translate.

At this moment, the psychic projectile in the Chaos Bishop's palm had reached its peak charge.

He raised his right hand, and the miniature psychic black hole tore a vacuum channel through the mist, its muzzle aimed steadily at the battlement at Alice's feet.

Alice did not retreat.

At the final moment when the barrier's rotation speed dropped to its limit, she manually switched to the final layer of static defense.

She knew she might not be able to block this shot, but her posture did not waver in the slightest.

Her long silver-white hair was pulled forward by the gravitational field of the psychic projectile; the way her strands were pulled straight made her look like a completely different person from the one who, after finishing a late-night shift at the Medical Station, would open a window to let the night breeze dry her sweat.

This was the final composure of someone who had prepared for the worst.

Just then, her hair began to change color.

It wasn't being reflected by the dark purple light of the psychic projectile; starting from the roots, a layer of gold, as faint as sunlight piercing through mist, slowly spread upward along her hair strands.

She knew what this was.

The sealed archives of the Astral Knights recorded it—during the era of the Great Crusade, the descendants of the seventeenth batch of survivors of human psychic gene experiments would trigger an involuntary awakening of their bloodline when facing death in an extreme psychic confrontation, at the very moment their barrier was compressed to its thinnest.

She hadn't actively triggered it, nor had she ever received training for bloodline awakening.

But the moment her body sensed that the barrier was about to shatter, an ancient program that had been dormant for who knows how many millennia received the final initiation command and automatically began to run.

The gold spread from her roots to her tips, dyeing her long silver-white hair into an entire waterfall of burning pale gold.

Her ice-blue eyes also turned into a color of intertwined gold and blue in the instant of her bloodline awakening; it was as if it were the temperature of the light itself that was melting the ice on the surface of her pupils.

She spread her ten fingers.

The layer of translucent golden light membrane, which had been compressed to less than half a foot in thickness, suddenly expanded by nearly double under the impact of the bloodline awakening.

It wasn't an increase in thickness, but an expansion in area—spreading out from where she stood, encompassing the battlement beneath her feet, the veteran beside her, and the entire middle section of the East Wall behind her.

It didn't become thinner as it expanded; Vian shook her head in disbelief at the observation post—the density was nearly half again as high as it had been when compressed.

The Chaos Bishop saw this scene.

His psychic perception told him that the Psyker before him was no longer the Level 5 Psyker from the files.

In just a few seconds, her psychic signature had expanded by at least two levels, surpassing Level 6 and directly touching the threshold of a high-level Psyker.

The psychic black hole that could have blown apart the city wall just a moment ago would likely not even be able to penetrate the first layer against this expanded golden barrier now.

But the Chaos Bishop did not retreat.

In the faith of Khorne, retreat is blasphemy.

He chose not to retreat and, with a backhand motion, hurled the psychic projectile out.

The miniature psychic black hole tore through the air, dragging a vacuum channel through the mist; the mist at its edges was pulled into a spiral by gravity, leaving behind fleeting mist vortices.

The instant the projectile struck the golden barrier, there was no halo, no explosion, only an extremely small, extremely dark point that silently expanded at the interface—that was the process of consumption.

The psychic black hole attempted to suck a portion of the barrier's mass into its core radius; as long as it could tear off a small piece, a gap would appear in the barrier.

Alice did not give it that chance.

She no longer defended passively; she directly switched the barrier to an active counterattack.

Tens of thousands of golden psychic fibers, thinner than a strand of hair, suddenly differentiated from the surface of the golden barrier, each rotating independently and drilling into the core of the psychic black hole.

It wasn't blocking; it was using fibers finer than the core's structure to dismantle its compressed framework from the inside.

A full ten seconds.

Ten seconds later, the psychic black hole silently disintegrated on the surface of the barrier.

The residual energy was evenly diffused by the barrier's reflective diversion layer into the air at both ends of the East Wall; the sandbags at both ends of the wall were plated with a faint golden shimmer that flashed and vanished.

But after the gravel inside the sandbags had been plated by the residual psychic heat, its density was several times higher than before.

In the mist, the Chaos Bishop stood where he was, his right hand still maintaining the open posture after throwing the projectile, the dark purple psychic core in his palm having completely extinguished.

He gazed at the Psyker on the city wall with hair dyed gold, and in her psychic signature, he read something he had never anticipated before the battle began.

It was not courage, not hatred, not a vow to protect unto death.

It was a kind of certainty that was harder to deal with than any psychic level.

Before she even awakened, she had already judged his failure—not because she was stronger, but because she had chosen not to retreat, even knowing she couldn't block that psychic black hole.

And in that moment, her bloodline responded to her choice.

"Your files need updating," Alice stood on the battlement, looking down at the Chaos Bishop in the mist.

Her voice was as precise as usual, every word plated with a faint, almost inhuman luster upon the resonant layer of the golden barrier.

It wasn't that she had changed; it was her psychic power speaking for her. "Not Alpha-47, not a Level 5 Psyker, not any existence in your files that can be numbered. My name is Lieutenant Alice Vian, and this is my own name. It's not in your files, but now it is."

She slowly withdrew her hands, but the barrier did not shrink, still maintaining its expanded area and density.

She no longer needed gestures to maintain the barrier—it wasn't a technical breakthrough; it was that the relationship between the barrier and her was no longer one of control and being controlled.

The moment of awakening, the barrier had merged with her psychic core, becoming a part of her body.

The Chaos Bishop stood in the mist for a long time, so long that the new recruits thought he was waiting for something.

Then, he slowly, step by step, retreated.

It was not a rout, but an orderly withdrawal.

He withdrew the psychic suppression field from outside the city wall back toward the swamp; the flames of the torches returned to vertical inch by inch, and the pressure on the eardrums on the city wall returned to normal bit by bit.

He retreated to the edge of the swamp and stopped.

He had not left completely, had not given up on the decisive battle, but in today's one-on-one psychic duel, he had been forced back.

This was the first time he had retreated since the war began.

The psychic duel concluded, and Alice stood on the battlement for a while longer.

The pale gold on her hair strands was slowly fading back to silver-white—not instantly, but slowly receding from the tips to the roots, like the setting sun withdrawing its afterglow from the edge of the clouds bit by bit.

Vian walked to her side from the observation post, said nothing, and just stuffed a piece of clean gauze into her hand.

Alice looked down at the gauze, then touched the dried bloodstain at the corner of her mouth.

She wiped her lips, her fingers pausing on the gauze.

On the thin cotton gauze, besides the blood, there was a layer of extremely faint, almost invisible golden luster.

It wasn't the color of blood; it was more like, after experiencing this battle, her body was changing everything she touched in a way she did not yet fully understand.

Lin Mo walked back from the armory and stood beside her on the city wall, in the same position as last night, standing side by side, less than an inch between them.

He saw the fine lines that had newly appeared beside the corners of her eyes—not fatigue lines, but temporary vascular dilation caused by the golden light piercing through when her psychic power was extremely concentrated.

Vian said it was fine, she just needed rest. Alice didn't say she didn't need rest, only that she would wait until the final reconnaissance was over.

She closed her eyes, pushing her psychic perception to its limit.

In the direction of the swamp, the Chaos Bishop's true form had retreated to a low-lying area one kilometer from the city wall, and the remnants of his heavy armor were reforming their ranks.

His psychic signature had not faded; he was waiting—waiting for reinforcements.

She could sense that, in the direction of the sky further behind the Chaos Bishop, three to five days' voyage away, a main force of Chaos, far larger in scale than the advance fleet, was sailing toward Hope Star along the Warp route.

The Chaos Bishop was only the vanguard; behind him was a higher-level Commander.

That Commander's psychic signature was so large in her perceptual field that it almost filled the entire star region south of the swamp.

She didn't say it on the spot. It wasn't concealment; it was that saying it now was useless.

The two thousand people on the city wall had just survived the first day of battle; Locke had smashed three mechs, and Old Tom had finished tempering the wall-locking springs—they needed this night as a buffer.

At tomorrow's military council, there would be plenty of time to lay out the scale of the main force.

She withdrew her perception and opened her eyes.

After the pale gold faded from her ice-blue pupils, they had an added depth they hadn't had before.

It wasn't a change in color, but a kind of quieter, deeper thickness.

In Lin Mo's eyes, she saw the same confirmation as when he had looked at her open palm on the city wall last night—not a label, not a number, not a digit in a combat sequence.

"Is it over?" Locke walked up the stone steps slowly from the base of the city wall, his left arm in a sling.

It wasn't a fracture; it was that Vian had come down and given him six stitches, advising him to keep it in a sling to heal.

He hadn't wanted anesthesia when getting the stitches, saying he still had to swing his axe after they were done, and anesthesia would make the muscles holding the axe react thirty percent slower.

Upon reaching the city wall, he first glanced at the pale gold remaining on Alice's hair tips, then looked at Lin Mo.

"It's over," Alice said.

"It's over for today," Lin Mo corrected.

He moved his gaze from Alice's face to the layer of mist gathering again outside the wall—after the Chaos Bishop's psychic field retreated, the mist began to circulate on its own again.

But deep in the mist layer, that dark red psychic light spot had not disappeared; it was at the edge of the swamp, waiting quietly.

"Tomorrow," Vian scanned the edge of the mist curtain with binoculars, saying softly, "his main force will enter attack range after dawn. It won't be three mechs; it will be a full-scale frontal assault."

Lin Mo didn't answer; he engaged the safety on his laser pistol and set it on the stone beside the battlement.

He turned around and leaned his back against the battlement, his posture exactly the same as last night.

Last night he had been waiting for the enemy, and for Alice; tonight, the position he stood in was the place where Alice had stood last night.

Below the wall, not a single one of the springs Old Tom had embedded was missing; on the city gate, the dent in the iron sheet pushed out by the cannon barrel was still there.

Locke sat on the steps of the city wall, his left arm in a sling, his right hand still gripping the axe handle.

Aunt Zhang was at the base of the wall, refilling the thermos that had been empty for half the day with hot water.

Alice stood by the battlement for a moment, then looked down at her open palm.

The extremely fine pale golden line in the center of her palm, which had previously only flickered in and out of sight in the moonlight, was now shining even in the mist.

It wasn't a reflection; it was her own psychic core shining.

The last time she was called by a number was six years ago during the camp roll call.

And today, the moment the mist was dyed gold by her hair—

The owner of that number personally declared its demise.

There was a light in her palm that remained shining even after the mist had dispersed.

That was not the awakened bloodline.

It was the bond between her and this wall, this town, and this person—

A bond that could never be numbered again.