When Li Ming came to, his ears were full of water.

  Not clean water. Murky, with sand grinding against stone somewhere down in the dark. He was lying on wet mud, half his face still underwater, and his tongue found rust before he could stop it. Blood, mixed with the river's reek.

  He checked his fingers first. Then his toes. Everything still attached. Still breathing.

  He pushed himself up, and his left eye caught fire.

  Not pain—heat. A wave of it rolling up from somewhere deep in the socket, forcing his eyelid shut. He counted to three, opened it again.

  The world had gone wrong.

  Not wrong like a hallucination. Wrong like someone had peeled back the surface of everything and showed him what was underneath. The trees weren't trees anymore—they were meshes, triangles fitted together, growth rings visible as concentric data rings inside the trunks. The bark was a texture layer. The leaves were particle systems, each one a tiny point of light suspended in a grid.

  The river was worse. He could see the individual water molecules now, or something like them—collision bodies, the UI called them, little spheres bouncing off each other in patterns that made the current. Vector fields showed him which way everything was flowing. Debug markers floated in the eddies, pale blue text he couldn't quite read.

  "Shit."

  His voice came out half-drowned, swallowed by the water noise.

  A box flickered in the corner of his vision, semi-transparent, hanging in the air about where his nose ended:

  [WARNING: Unauthorized rewrite capability detected]

  [SUGGESTION: Limit usage immediately]

  He blinked. The box faded but didn't disappear.

  A dozen steps upstream, someone was crouched by the water. Thin back, hunched shoulders, the whole body curved forward like an animal waiting to spring. Li Ming knew that posture. Chen Feng. They'd been in the outer sect together for two years. The man meditated like that—spine arched, weight on his toes, ready to bolt or bite.

  Chen Feng was drawing in the sand with his finger.

  Li Ming stepped closer. The wet mud made a sound like something dying under his feet.

  The sand was covered in characters. Some of them Li Ming recognized—Chinese, the old style they used in cultivation texts. But mixed in with those were other things. Symbols. Lines of code. The whole mess looked like someone had fed a technique manual into a grinder and tried to reassemble it by hand.

  He recognized fragments. The Basic Qi Induction Technique. The version he'd repaired in underground level three. But this was older. Raw. Characters he'd never seen interspersed with the familiar ones, like roots growing up through a floor.

  Blue-white light drifted on the water's surface. Clusters of it, semi-transparent, swaying with the current. Li Ming stared. They weren't animals. They were code—actual lines of it, floating free of some deeper structure, opening and closing like jellyfish made of light. Where they touched the rocks at the edge, the stone started to pixelate. Little squares of gray and brown, breaking apart and re-forming.

  "You're awake."

  Chen Feng didn't turn around. His voice sounded like he'd been swallowing gravel.

  "What are you doing?"

  "Rewriting."

  "Rewriting what?"

  "The technique." Chen Feng's finger dragged another line into the sand. Something glinted under his nail—a sliver of metal, dark with tarnish. Li Ming squinted. Not metal. Ceramic. A piece of a token, the edge still showing half a carved character: "Hall" in the old script.

  Law Enforcement Hall.

  "Wang Elder left this." Chen Feng said it like an answer, though Li Ming hadn't asked.

  "Wang Elder is dead."

  "The body is dead." Chen Feng finally stopped scratching. He stayed facing the water. "Some parts of him aren't."

  He stood. Turned.

  Li Ming's stomach dropped.

  Chen Feng's left eye was wrong. The white was gone—the entire eyeball had gone gray, covered in a faint grid pattern like someone had drawn coordinates across the surface. His right eye looked normal, except the pupil had blown wide, black eating almost to the edge.

  "He said you'd finish it."

  "Finish what?"

  Chen Feng shook his head. The motion was jerky, stiff, like his neck joints had rusted. "Don't know. But the techniques are broken. All of them. Every version." He pointed at the sand. "This one's missing something."

  Li Ming looked.

  A gap in the characters. A blank space where something should have been, edges jagged like torn paper. The surrounding code seemed to lean toward it, pulling inward.

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  He stared at the empty space. His left eye prickled.

  Then the code started writing itself across his vision, letter by letter:

  if error_detected():

  auto_fix_meridian()

  retry_circulation()

  The first thing he'd ever fixed. The code that had started all of this.

  "Write it," he said.

  Chen Feng was already shaking his head. "Can't use fingers. The characters touch skin, meridians reverse. You'll die."

  "Then how—"

  Chen Feng pointed at a dead branch lying in the shallows. "Dip it in water. The river buffers the contact."

  Li Ming walked over. The branch was half-rotted, soft in his grip. He bent down and dipped it in the current. The water was cold, thick with something rotting underneath.

  He crouched by the sand and wrote the two lines in the blank space.

  The first character touched down.

  The river stopped.

  Not slowed—stopped. The whole surface went rigid, waves frozen mid-crest, droplets hanging in the air like glass beads. The sound cut off. Even the wind went still.

  Three breaths.

  Then the water exploded backward.

  The current reversed. Spray hit Li Ming's face, cold and sharp. He wiped his eyes and looked—the river was flowing again, but the level had dropped. The bank was higher than it should have been, like something had been pulled out of the water and pushed upstream.

  "It worked." Chen Feng's voice came from behind him, thick with something that wasn't quite excitement.

  Li Ming looked at his hand.

  His right index finger was fading.

  Not the skin—the whole finger. He could see through the tip to the sand underneath, could see the grain of the branch where it pressed against his palm. The flesh was turning into nothing. Or something else. He couldn't tell which.

  "Every rewrite costs." Chen Feng crouched beside him, studying the transparent fingertip. "Wang Elder told me that."

  "Costs what?"

  "Matter. Your body." Chen Feng looked up. Those strange eyes caught the moonlight, one gray and gridded, one black-hole dark. "You're becoming data. Every time you use it, more of you disappears."

  Li Ming didn't answer.

  "So we need to move fast." Chen Feng stood. "Before they catch up."

  "Before who—"

  The bells hit.

  Metal screaming against glass, high and sharp, hundreds of them all at once. The sound came from everywhere, no single direction, drilling into his skull from all sides. Soul-Seeking Bells. He'd heard them before, from a distance. This was close. Close enough to pick out the footsteps underneath, the voices shouting orders, the rattle of chains.

  "Run." Chen Feng grabbed his wrist.

  They hit the tree line at a sprint. The dead leaves underfoot made no sound—Li Ming noticed that, even through the panic. His left eye kept flashing warnings:

  [Tracking talismans active in area]

  [Body stability: 87%]

  [WARNING: Sustained use will accelerate conversion]

  He tried to blink them away. More appeared. The boxes stacked up until half his vision was blocked by translucent text.

  Chen Feng pulled him through the forest, moving like he'd memorized every root and stone. They jumped a dry creek bed, ducked under a fallen trunk, pressed flat against a boulder while footsteps crunched past on the other side.

  Li Ming's chest heaved. His lungs burned. Blood taste in the back of his throat.

  "Why'd we stop?" he managed.

  Chen Feng held up a hand. Listening.

  Li Ming listened too.

  Wind. Leaves. The distant roar of the river.

  Then—

  "There!"

  A voice, close. Too close. The rattle of chains, heavy and metallic.

  Li Ming risked a look around the boulder.

  Five of them. Law Enforcement disciples in black robes, the silver trim catching what little light filtered through the canopy. Chains in their hands, the links carved with characters that glowed faint red.

  One of them pointed. "Behind the rock!"

  They came fast.

  Li Ming's body moved before his brain caught up. He stepped out from cover, raised his right hand, and swept it through the air like he was brushing away smoke.

  He didn't know what he was doing. It just felt right.

  The air tore.

  The disciples froze. Not stopped—frozen. Mid-stride, mouths open, chains still swinging. Then their edges started to blur. Skin became squares. Robes became blocks of color. Their whole bodies collapsed into pixels, stiff and jerky, like something out of an ancient game console.

  Five statues made of blocks, standing in the clearing.

  "Go." Chen Feng pulled at his arm.

  Li Ming looked down at his hand.

  His index finger was gone. The middle finger was half-transparent now, fading from the tip down. He could see through his palm to the trees behind it.

  "Every time," he said. His voice didn't sound like his own.

  "Yes." Chen Feng was already moving. "Save it for when you need it."

  They ran until the sky started to change.

  Dawn crept in from the east, turning the black water to gray. Mist hung over the river's surface, thick enough to hide the far bank. Li Ming stopped at the edge, doubled over, hands on his knees.

  His heart was trying to punch through his ribs. Every breath felt like swallowing knives.

  The warning boxes had thinned out. One remained, pulsing gently:

  [Body stability: 82%]

  "We should rest." He straightened, wiping sweat from his face. "Just for a minute."

  Chen Feng stood beside him, silent.

  Li Ming looked at the water.

  The mist was thinning. The surface was starting to reflect—his own face, pale and hollow-eyed, the left socket still glowing faint gold. Behind him, the forest. The lightening sky.

  And underneath all of that—

  Something in the river.

  At first he thought it was debris. Sunken logs, maybe. Rocks.

  But the dawn light was coming in at an angle now, cutting through the water, and he could see shapes.

  Bodies.

  Seven of them. Lying on the riverbed, side by side, faces turned up toward the surface. They hadn't floated. They were fixed in place somehow, held down by weights or spells.

  Li Ming crouched at the water's edge.

  The faces.

  They were his face.

  All seven of them. The same jaw, the same cheekbones, the same faint scar at the corner of the mouth from a fight three years ago. But their skin was gray-white, dead-looking, covered in a thin film of algae.

  On each body's chest, something had been carved. Not cut—burned in, like a brand.

  Li Ming squinted. His left eye flickered, overlaying code on the shapes.

  Masks. Administrator masks, each one different.

  The first body had a clean mask, standard pattern. The second had a crack running through the right eye. The third was covered in branching lines, like roots growing over the surface. The fourth had no mouth—just an empty space where the lips should be. The fifth was shallow, incomplete, like the carver had stopped halfway through. The sixth had no mask at all—just two hollow circles where the eyes would be.

  The seventh—

  The seventh was the most detailed. Golden lines, complex, patterns within patterns. But it was missing something.

  The left hand.

  The wrist ended in a clean cut. No blood. No bone. Just... nothing.

  "Don't look."

  Chen Feng's hand came down over his eyes.

  "Time to go." The voice was flat. Controlled. "Sun's coming up."

  Li Ming pulled away. "What are those?"

  "Bodies."

  "I can see that. Why do they have my face?"

  Chen Feng didn't answer. He was already turning away, heading up the bank toward the trees.

  Li Ming looked back at the water.

  Through Chen Feng's fingers—wait, no, Chen Feng wasn't touching him anymore. Through the gap between their bodies, he saw.

  Chen Feng's other hand. The one that had been hanging at his side, hidden by his sleeve.

  It was reaching toward the seventh body.

  And in the silt at the bottom, something was moving.

  A hand. Pale, half-rotted, severed at the wrist.

  It was floating up.