The panel hovered.

Ethan hovered with it, in the metaphorical sense, because his body was still very much nailed to the bed like a sack of wet rice.

[New host detected. Welcome, Lin Xuan.]

He stared at the words.

The words stared back.

The pale pink glow at the edges of the panel very slowly, very deliberately, drained back into blue, as if the panel had just remembered it was supposed to be professional and was now trying very hard to pretend the last ten seconds hadn’t happened.

’Did it just... blush?’

The panel did not respond.

’Hello?’

Still nothing.

’Hey. You. Rectangle.’

The pink flickered, just once, at the bottom corner. Like a wince.

Ethan tried to sit up again. His body, in what was becoming a pattern, immediately told him to reconsider. His arms shook. His chest ached. Somewhere in the vicinity of his stomach, something that felt like a very small, very cold knife turned over in its sleep.

’Okay, that’s not good. That is not a body thing. That is a curse thing.’ 𝒇𝙧𝙚𝓮𝔀𝓮𝒃𝙣𝓸𝒗𝒆𝒍.𝙘𝒐𝒎

He knew it was a curse thing because the memories told him so. They were coming faster now, no longer one at a time but in little floods — the boy Lin Xuan, seventeen, standing on a mountain path; a cold wind; something striking him in the back; a red symbol burning itself into his spine; two years of lying in bed; servants spitting next to the door; a man with kind eyes apologizing in whispers; a boy with a cruel smile standing over his bed, saying, "It’s a waste of rice, keeping you alive."

Ethan closed his eyes.

’Right. Okay. I’ve got about thirty seconds of emotional processing time before I either start crying or commit to a personality, so let’s pick the personality.’

He opened his eyes.

"Hi," he said, to the panel. His voice came out cracked and small and felt nothing like his. It was younger. Like someone who had not used it in a long time. "Hi, floating rectangle. How are we doing."

The panel flickered.

The words dissolved.

New words formed, much slower than the first, the way someone types when they’re choosing their syllables carefully.

[ ... Hi. (ㅠ﹏ㅠ) ]

Ethan blinked.

"You’re typing like a girl who just matched with her crush on a dating app."

The panel pinked, hard, and the text vanished entirely for a full two seconds before rebuilding itself in a much more formal font.

[ LIMITLESS CULTIVATION SYSTEM — Initializing host interface. ]

[ Please hold. ]

"Oh, now we’re professional. Now we’re—"

[ Please hold. ]

"I’m literally holding. I can’t move."

The panel ignored him.

A loading bar appeared. It filled with the enthusiasm of a man who had to go into work on a Sunday.

▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓ 100%

The panel dinged again. This time, when it opened, it was bigger.

◈ LIMITLESS CULTIVATION SYSTEM ◈

— HOST ANALYSIS —

NAME: Lin Xuan

AGE: 19

SECT: Skyedge Sword Sect

STATUS: Young Master (Adopted)

└ Expulsion Pending

REALM: Body Tempering — Stage 9 (Peak) [ DETERIORATED ]

⚠ CURSE ACTIVE: Withered Meridian Curse — Level 3 / 3

└ Meridians obstructed. Dantian damaged.

└ Cultivation progress: BLOCKED.

PHYSIQUE: Sword Absolute Physique

└ STATUS: DORMANT

└ Awaiting host compatibility sync.

ORIGIN POINTS: 0

UNLOCKED:

[✓] Status Panel

[✓] Missions

[✓] Host Interface

LOCKED:

[X] Shop

[X] Daily Check-in

[X] Inventory

[X] Bestiary

[X] Titles

[X] Sword Devourer Protocol

[X] ???

[X] ???

Ethan read the whole thing once.

Then he read it again.

Then he read the part that said Expulsion Pending a third time, for good measure.

"Okay," he said, out loud, because talking to himself had been his primary coping mechanism since the age of fourteen. "Okay. So. I’m in a xianxia. I’m adopted. I’m a Young Master. I’m ’crippled.’ My entire body is broken because someone put a level three curse on my spine. I have a weird body physique that’s currently napping. I’m about to get kicked out of my own sect. And—" he squinted at the panel, "—you have eight functions locked behind progress gates and two of them are just question marks, which is honestly a little rude."

The panel flickered.

Then, slowly:

[ The ??? slots are surprises. ]

"I hate surprises."

[ You’ll like these ones. ]

"You don’t know that."

[ I kind of do. ]

Ethan opened his mouth. Closed it. Opened it again.

"...You," he said, "are not a regular system."

The panel just sat there, smug in a way that made no sense. He had no idea how a rectangle of text could manage that, but this one had it down to a thesis-level art.

[ Correct. ]

[ My name is Mira. ]

[ I picked you. ]

"You what."

[ Did I stutter? ]

"You’re a system. Systems don’t pick people. Systems descend upon the unworthy or whatever. You guys have, like, procedures."

[ I reviewed the procedures. ]

[ I did not like the procedures. ]

[ I picked you anyway. ]

"That’s not—" Ethan dragged a hand down his face, which was a mistake, because his arm was still weak and he ended up just sort of smacking himself in the nose. "Ow. Okay. Fine. Mira. Hi. I’m Ethan. Or Lin Xuan. Both. We’ll figure it out. Why am I here."

[ Because the previous tenant of this body vacated the premises. ]

"That’s a horrifying way to say he died."

[ I was being delicate. ]

"Were you?"

[ I was trying. ]

The panel dimmed for half a second, as if Mira was taking a breath she didn’t biologically need.

[ Listen, host. Short version: your body was cursed two years ago. The previous soul gave out six hours ago. I’ve been waiting here with the lights on for six hours, hoping someone compatible would get close enough to anchor to this body before it shut down for good. ]

[ And then you died on a train. ]

[ Which, frankly, was very rude of you, because I had to catch you mid-air, so to speak, and I am a little out of practice. ]

"You caught me?"

[ Like a Pokemon, I caught the soul equivalent of you. Don’t be weird about it. ]

"That’s the weirdest part of this conversation so far and I was JUST told I was an adopted Young Master."

[ Focus. ]

The panel sharpened.

[ You have a problem. ]

═══════════════════════════════

MAIN QUEST — ACTIVE

═══════════════════════════════

"The Blade That Returns"

Survive. An order for your removal was signed six days ago. Tonight, they collect.

Objectives:

▸ Survive tonight.

▸ Break Level 1 of the Withered Meridian Curse.

▸ Reach Qi Refining Stage 1.

Rewards:

▸ +500 Origin Points

▸ Shop (Tier 1) — UNLOCKED

▸ Daily Check-in — UNLOCKED

▸ Free Technique: Nine Dragons Breathing Art

[ ACCEPT? ]

═══════════════════════════════

Ethan read that one four times.

The word that kept catching was tonight.

"When you say ’tonight, they collect,’" he said, slowly, "you mean like... a bureaucratic appointment? They’re coming to ask me to sign a form? They’re—"

[ They are coming to kill you, host. ]

"Right. Yeah. I hate that I even asked."

He stared at the [ACCEPT?] button.

Somewhere outside the room, footsteps.

The footsteps were light and careful, with the nervous hesitation of a girl lingering by the door. He could hear her breathing. Ethan’s heart slammed once against his chest.

’Wait, is this the—’

The door creaked open.

It only opened halfway, because whoever was pushing it clearly had never pushed anything in her life with more than forty percent confidence. A sliver of corridor light spilled into the room. Dust moved in it.

A girl stepped in.

She was maybe sixteen. Seventeen. Slight enough to look half-hidden inside her robes, with milky skin and a maid’s outer layer faded by the neglect of a household that had stopped caring about her laundry a long time ago. Her hair was tied back in a braid that looked like it had been done by the wearer herself, in a hurry. Her sleeves were rolled up. She was carrying a tray.

On the tray: a wooden bowl. Steam. Something that smelled, against all odds, like soup.

She wasn’t looking at him.

She was looking at her own feet.

"Young Master Xuan," she whispered. Her voice shook on his name, the way a voice shakes when the person speaking has been trained to expect the person they’re speaking to to scream at them. "I brought... I brought dinner. The head maid said... she said I shouldn’t, but..."

She trailed off.

Her hands tightened on the tray.

"...but I did anyway."

Ethan — who had been, up until this precise second, very busy being a sarcastic dead analyst trapped in a cursed body being narrated at by a blushing chat window — felt something he hadn’t prepared for.

Anger.

Not a big, dramatic, tears of blood anger.

A small, specific anger. The kind that looks at a tiny girl carrying a soup bowl into the room of a boy everyone in the house calls a waste of rice and does a very quick piece of mental math.

’She’s not supposed to be feeding me. She could get in trouble for this. She’s doing it anyway.’

’How long has she been doing it anyway?’

A memory floated up, not Ethan’s.

The same girl, younger. A year ago. Maybe two. Sneaking in water when Lin Xuan — the real Lin Xuan — was too weak to lift a cup. Sneaking in warm cloths. Sneaking in company.

Getting slapped by the head maid for it.

Coming back the next day anyway.

Ethan swallowed.

The panel in front of him, which only he could see, pulsed softly.

[ Oh. ]

[ You’re going to like her. ]

’Shut up for a second, Mira.’

[ Understood. ]

[ Shutting up. ]

[ ...I was just saying. ]

’Mira.’

[ Shutting up. ]

The girl hadn’t moved from the door. She was still looking at her shoes, her knuckles white around the tray.

She had brought soup to a boy she thought was dying in a house where nobody else had bothered for two years, and now she stood there waiting for him to snap at her. Because that was what the old Lin Xuan had done these past months. The curse, the fever, the humiliation, all of it had turned him into someone who took it out on her again and again.

Ethan closed his eyes.

’Alright. New personality. Let’s not screw this one up.’

When he opened them again, he kept his voice soft, careful, the way you talked to a cat that had learned to expect a kick.

"Hey," he said. "Come in. Close the door behind you."

Her head snapped up.

For the first time, she looked at him.

Her eyes were big and brown and rimmed red, like she’d been crying recently and trying very hard to hide it. When she saw his face, saw that he was awake, that his eyes were open and clear and looking at her for the first time in six days, she flinched like he’d raised a hand.

"Y-Young Master, I—"

"What’s your name?"

She stared.

He waited.

"...Lian," she whispered. "Young Master, you... you know my name. You’ve known it for—"

"Humor me."

"Lian," she said again, smaller. "It’s Lian."

"Lian. Close the door."

She closed the door.

The soup wobbled on the tray. She steadied it with both hands. She took one tiny step forward, then stopped, as if waiting for permission to take the second.

Ethan let out a breath he hadn’t realized he was holding.

"Lian," he said, "I need you to listen to me for thirty seconds. Can you do that?"

She nodded, very fast, too fast.

"I’m not going to yell at you today and also I’m not going to yell at you tomorrow. I’m never going to yell at you again. Nod if you heard that."

She nodded.

Her eyes were wet.

"Good. Second thing." He paused, thought about how much to say, decided on the minimum. "Someone’s coming tonight. To hurt me. Maybe to hurt you too, if you’re in the room. I need you to put down the soup, go back to the kitchens, and pretend you never came in here. I need you to be somewhere very public when the sun goes down. Do you understand?"

Lian’s lip wobbled.

"...Young Master," she whispered, "are you—"

"Do you understand?"

"Yes."

"Good girl."

Something in her broke, just a little, at those two words. Her eyes spilled over. She wiped them furiously with her wrist, which did nothing. She set the tray down on the low table next to his bed with trembling hands. She bowed, too deep, too long.

Then she paused.

She looked at him, really looked at him, with those wet red eyes, and something in her face — something very small and very scared and very stubborn — set.

"...I’ll come back," she said. "Tomorrow morning. To check."

"Lian—"

"I’ll come back."

And before he could argue with her, she was gone. The door clicked shut behind her. Her footsteps down the corridor were faster than they’d been coming in.

Ethan lay there.

The soup steamed next to him.

The panel floated in front of him.

The incense kept drifting toward the ceiling, slow and patient, like it had all the time in the world.

He stared at the [ACCEPT?] button.

’Okay. Mira.’

[ Mm? ]

’Hypothetically. If I accept this quest. And we break this curse tonight. How many people do I have to hurt.’

The panel pulsed.

It thought about it for a long second.

[ Two. ]

[ Minimum. ]

’And how strong are they.’

[ Qi Refining. Stage three. Each. ]

’And how strong am I right now.’

[ Body Tempering peak. Deteriorated. No Qi. Currently unable to sit up. ]

’...Cool.’

[ You asked. ]

Ethan looked up at the ceiling.

A twenty-one-year-old economics student, two hours ago, had been complaining on a train about a fictional boy who cried tears of blood instead of punching his problems.

Now the fictional boy was him.

And the problems were coming at sundown.

He smiled.

It wasn’t a nice smile. It was a tired one. The kind of smile you make when you finally realize the universe has been setting you up for a joke for twenty-one years, and the joke is, in fact, you.

"Alright," he said, out loud, to nobody. To Mira. To the ceiling. To the dead boy whose body he was wearing like a borrowed jacket. To Lian, somewhere down the corridor, walking faster than she had in years.

"Alright, fine."

He reached out with one shaking, weak, crippled hand.

He tapped the glowing [ACCEPT?] button.

DING.

The panel bloomed gold.

[ MAIN QUEST ACCEPTED. ]

[ Good luck, host. ]

[ Try not to die. I just got you. ]

The gold faded.

The pink, very briefly, came back at the edges.

Then the panel flickered — and for one second, only one, it wasn’t a panel anymore. It was the silhouette of something else. Something almost human. Long hair. A tilted head. The impression of a smile.

A girl’s voice, not in his ears but behind his ears, the way a song gets stuck in your head when you weren’t even listening:

"Hi, Lin Xuan. Try to keep up."

And then she was gone, and the panel was blue again, and the room was dim, and the incense was still burning, and somewhere outside the walls of Skyedge Sword Sect the sun was already beginning to lean toward the mountains.

Two killers on the way.

One crippled body.

One laughing dead analyst.

One girl coming back in the morning to check.

Ethan, currently Lin Xuan, closed his eyes.

’Tears of blood, my ass.’