The chamber doors had slammed shut, sealing them in the morgue, and the triumphant chime of 'Victory Imminent' had quickly soured into the discovery of a soul-binding trap. Feixing had barely registered the full horror of becoming the next eternal core, replacing Rong Qinglin, when a suffocating pressure clamped down, not on his body, but on his very essence. It was the App, reaching deep, attempting to rewrite his existence into its code. He felt less like he was being crushed and more like he was being stretched thin, pulled apart into a thousand shimmering threads. Grey static hissed at the edges of his vision, coalescing into swirling vortexes of sepia and blood-red. Then, with a sickening lurch, the world stabilized. The oppressive silence of the morgue was replaced by the muffled, frantic shouts of men and the distinct scent of fresh blood and burning opium. He stood not in the present, but on the polished floor of what looked like the main receiving hall of Ci’an General, decades ago. Ornate wooden archways, now chipped and decaying in the waking world, gleamed with dark varnish. Sunlight, pale and weak, streamed through tall windows, illuminating dust motes dancing in the air. Before him, the scene unfurled with sickening clarity, a memory replaying on an endless loop. Rong Qinglin, younger, her fierce gaze undimmed by time, was surrounded. Her uniform, crisp and dark, was already stained at the shoulder. Two burly men, their faces a blur of cruel intent, held her arms, wrenching an officer's sidearm from her grasp. Another, a corpulent man with a greasy smile, approached from the side, a glinting surgical scalpel in his hand. He recognized the betrayal from the file Shaobai had found. This was the moment. Her moment of disarmament, of vulnerability, of ultimate violation. Feixing watched, an apparition in the tableau. He wasn’t a player here, not truly. He was merely an intrusion, an error in the App’s meticulously reconstructed historical atrocity. The air thrummed with the inevitability of what was about to happen. This wasn't a puzzle to solve or a monster to outsmart; it was a fixed point, a wound in time that the App repeatedly picked at, using Qinglin's trauma as its anchor. Most people would try to fight the spectral men, scream a warning, or perhaps, in desperation, find a way to escape the memory. But Feixing, ever the pragmatist of laziness, saw the futility in direct confrontation with an unchangeable past. Why bother with the tedious effort of changing the entire course of history when a small, precise nudge would suffice? The handgun, an elegant steel piece, lay discarded on the floor, kicked away by one of Qinglin's captors. He took a casual step forward, breaching the shimmering, invisible boundary between observer and participant. The projected figures didn't react to him. He was a ripple in their predetermined pond, an anomaly they couldn't process. Qinglin's eyes, wide with a despairing defiance, were fixed on the approaching scalpel. Her throat tightened against a ragged gasp, a silent battle raging within her. Feixing bent down, unhurried, picking up the sidearm. It felt cool and heavy in his palm, utterly real. He straightened, then with the practiced nonchalance of a street performer, he reached out. His hand brushed the illusory Qinglin’s, a spark of almost-contact across the decades, as he slid the weapon back into her grip. His lips curved into a faint, charming smile, the kind he reserved for marks he found particularly appealing. “A lady should always be armed, wouldn’t you agree?” he murmured, his voice a low, anachronistic whisper in the cacophony of the past. “Especially at her own wedding.” Her eyes, previously filled with helpless fury, snapped to his. For a flicker of a second, confusion warred with a dawning, impossible understanding. The memory's captors, oblivious, continued their grim march. The corpulent man raised the scalpel. But Qinglin’s hand, now clutching the silver pistol, curled tight. A tremor of agency, historically denied, surged through the carefully constructed memory. The entire tableau fractured. The sunlight through the windows cracked like broken glass. The shouts dissolved into a discordant wail. Feixing felt the world rip apart again, but this time, it wasn’t pulling him into the App’s control. It felt like an unraveling, a tearing of the fabric of the instance itself. The grey static returned, but now it was a roar, a furious protest from the App’s core. He tumbled through a kaleidoscopic void, then landed with a jarring thud back on the cold, stone floor of the morgue. His groom’s robes felt heavy. The air was thick with the scent of lilies and dried blood. Across from him, Rong Qinglin stood, no longer a defeated spirit, no longer an unknowing victim. The red veil she still wore seemed to pulsate with an internal light. Her hands, which had previously hung limp or reached out for him in quiet despair, now clenched into white-knuckled fists. Her eyes, visible just barely through the sheer silk, burned with an infernal, vengeful fire. It wasn't directed at him, or even at the ghosts of her past. It was an incandescent rage, focused, precise, and utterly terrifying, aimed squarely at the invisible, overarching code that had imprisoned her for so long.

A Silver Pistol in the Past