Four years ago, Shang Luoshu was nothing more than an ordinary ability user. If he was special at all, it was only that his power happened to be unusually lethal to the undead. That single edge had drawn capable people around him and, in a small corner of the world, earned him a reputation. For a while he believed that was his future — until the year everything changed.
On a supply run for an oil field, his team was ambushed by a horde. Every teammate he’d brought died there. He burned through nearly all his psychic energy trying to hold them off, and still he was clawed and dragged down by the infected. In the apocalypse, any wound from a zombie carried a coin flip: there was a fifty percent chance the injured would turn into something neither fully human nor quite a ghost. Knowing he’d been hurt, Shang slipped away from the others and found a quiet place to wait out the inevitable.
Instead of dying, he woke with a second power: precognition. The first thing it showed him was a single image — that one day he would command the Yancheng Base.
In a world gone mad, who wouldn’t want to carve out a place of their own? Shang wanted that — not for fame, but to give people a chance to survive. Hours passed as he absorbed the impossibility of having two abilities. Then he planned. Months later, with people who believed in him, he took Yancheng and remade it into something else. And with that, his name began to travel across the land.
By then, Lu Yinxī had already become infamous for her speech-based power — a talent people both coveted and cursed. If her words could be so miraculous, many accused, why hadn’t she simply used them to end the apocalypse? Some extremists went so far as to brand her the origin of the disaster itself.
Shang was not one to jump on that bandwagon, but he’d had his doubts. The truth, he’d learned, was something only she could answer. More practically, he wanted her at his base. He’d had men discretely look into it and found only one other person on Earth whose power rivaled his: Lu Yinxī. But she drifted, belonged to no team, and the lines of communication were bad. For three years he couldn’t find her.
Half a year ago, something changed. A fierce psychic wave brushed close to Yancheng, and his precognition reacted. It told him Lu Yinxī was the only one who could guide the world toward rebirth. Two impossible things collided — he didn’t believe in miracles — so he ran straight into the storm of that psychic signal.
He found her in the ruin of battle. Blood everywhere, and in the middle of it all, she lay like a fragile porcelain figure: covered in crimson, utterly still — and asleep, as if nothing had happened.
Now, in the warm quiet of the room, there was a pause that felt like holding one’s breath. Two soft breaths met and parted. Shang held her close and could not bring himself to tilt his head to look. He kept expecting a verdict, like a condemned man waiting for the last judge to raise a gavel. That judgment, it seemed, rested in her hands.
“So you built that psychic world for me because of the prophecy,” she said.
He nodded once.
“You mean, in Daqi, you deliberately got close to me?” Her voice dropped several degrees and cooled; she stared at some point in the air as if measuring a distant depth.
“No.” Shang released her and gently turned her shoulders until she met his eyes. “Xin — you have to believe me. I didn’t go to Daqi to find you. I honestly thought I was the Prince of Jing in Daqi back then. I didn’t even know your name. How could I have come after you on purpose?”
She looked at him, stunned for a heartbeat. Lu Yinxī had carried memories of the modern world with her when she arrived in Daqi; she’d assumed everyone there did. She had never expected him to have none.
“I didn’t have any memories,” he said earnestly. “I swear it. I had nothing.”
“Then why do I remember?” She couldn’t make sense of it. Shang had been the architect of the psychic world — he should have been its anchor. Yet it had been she who retained the life they lived before this one.
Shang frowned and thought. Then, as if shifting tack, he asked, “Do you still remember that… uncontrolled psychic force you had inside you before?”
She flinched — her face darkened, and for a moment she fought to put the thought away. Shang saw the resistance and pressed on, urgency in his voice. “Is it misbehaving again? Let me see.”
He pressed his forehead against hers, ignoring her hesitation. He checked, confirmed there was nothing immediate to fear, and finally let go. But her expression remained strained. After a long silence she spoke.
“Shang Luoshu, what if I tell you that the uncontrolled force in me came from a high-level zombie — would you think I’m a monster?”
She had realized this only after waking and seeing a friend die in front of her. In the chaos she had snapped, the world had turned hostile, and to survive she somehow absorbed the zombie’s psychic essence. People had long known you could siphon psychic energy from another — and that the donor, emptied of that energy, had no way back. Lu Yinxī had heard of such things before but never thought it would happen to her, and never imagined the donor would be infected.
She’d kept it hidden out of fear — fear that Shang would recoil.
He was quiet for only a heartbeat before he rapped his knuckles against her forehead, smiling with indulgence. “Don’t be ridiculous. Whatever your power’s source, you’re still Lu Yinxī. You’re the one I love.”
Her tension thawed like mist in the sun; tears brimmed in her voice. “You’re shameless.”
“In which case, what reward does my very sensible husband expect?” He looked at her with unmistakable intent, and the question left no room for subtlety.
Her cheeks flamed, throat flushing with heat. She turned her face away, trying to evade him, but when she spoke it didn’t come out as a refusal. “Just… just once.”
“All right.” He echoed, and the word was a promise.
They fell back into the bedding. Buttons came undone in a scatter, and the room filled with the heavy, intimate work of two people who had kept their loneliness locked inside for too long. His palm threaded through her fingers; he held her forehead to his as if to memorize every line of her face. She surrendered with soft, pleading sounds, and he moved forward slowly, reverently, as if mapping the last boundaries between them.
Outside, snow fell in thick, steady sheets. Inside, heat rolled like a tide, turning the storm into something else — a private blaze that warmed and burned all at once.