COZMART: Corner Shop of Visiting Gods

Chapter 121 - 121 | Full-Body Scan

OBSIDIAN SPIRES. REALM OF PASSING.

The tea helped.

Eathan hadn't expected it to. It looked too harmless—pale gold in thin porcelain, steam rising in little patient loops. Still, once he wrapped both hands around the cup, warmth began to seep into his fingers, then into the stiffness in his wrists, then somewhere deeper, loosening the hard knot that had been living under his ribs since the River of Oblivion.

Beside him, Chewie regarded her tea with all the suspicion of a general staring down enemy rations.

"I don't trust calming drinks," she muttered. "That's how they get you."

"It's tea," Eathan said.

"That's what they said about the River too."

He let that go. There were stronger battles to choose from.

Lady Meng sat opposite them, one elbow resting near a tower of forms that seemed to replenish themselves if you looked away for too long. She had the kind of stillness that made fidgeting feel immature. The office adhered to that. Scrolls drifted from shelf to desk without rustling; inkstones stayed full. Somewhere behind her, a queue bell chimed, but even that sounded quieter than it should have.

To Eathan's right, Bai Hu had wandered all of three steps before becoming engrossed in a cluster of floating scrolls sorting themselves by colour, era, and probable regret value. The White Tiger's gaze followed their motion with focused solemnity.

He still carried himself beautifully—too beautifully, maybe, given the circumstances.The tears were gone for now, lashes dry, but a terrible quiet still wrapped tightly around him. Eathan didn't find that comforting.

"Relax," Lady Meng said, not looking away from her own cup. "It isn't sedative."

Eathan looked back at her. "That really was the first thing I was thinking."

"If I intended to subdue you, I would not bother disguising the method."

Chewie took a sip after that, nodded once, and muttered, "Weirdly reassuring."

Lady Meng let that sit between them. Then she set her cup down.

"I was informed," she said, "that two unregistered visitors with poor judgment and a habit of surviving impossible situations had entered my realm."

Eathan felt something loosen slightly in his chest.

"Li Wei," he said.

Her gaze rested on him. "Commander Li sent a request worded under the guise of a professional courtesy. It was not especially convincing."

Chewie leaned back in her chair a little. "He asked you for help, and you said yes?"

"He asked for watchfulness," Meng corrected. "Help is a more flexible word."

That sounded about right for Li Wei. It also sounded about right for her.

Eathan turned his cup once on the desk, watching tea cling to the rim. "Then you know why we're here."

"Enough to understand why Heaven's enforcers are already looking for you." Meng folded her hands.

At that, Chewie leaned forward. "Those Paladins," she said. "What exactly is their issue? I know they're Heaven's elites, but they're… intense."

"The Platinum Paladin Elite Force does not belong to Heaven as a whole," Meng said. "They belong to the Jade Deity. There is a difference."

Eathan looked up at that.

She went on in the same even tone, as if she were explaining filing priorities instead of celestial power structures.

"They are not consensus-driven. They are not obligated to reason," she said. "They only answer to the Jade Deity. An embodiment of will—his authority incarnate, so to speak. When he points, they go. When he stops, they wait."

"Right," Chewie said. "Guard dogs."

"Guard dogs implies they bark first." Meng took a small sip of tea. "These ones tend to arrive after the judgment has already been made. If they've been ordered to retrieve the White Tiger's fragmented core…"

She paused.

"You should consider the threat most dire."

The room quieted again.

The warmth from the tea seemed a little thinner.

Eathan's heart sank at her words. The anonymous RealmNet warning echoed briefly in his mind, raising a fresh wave of unease.

His fingers tightened around the cup again. "Why would the Jade Deity even want Mister White's core?" he asked. "If his issue is order, then leaving it scattered would've been cleaner, wouldn't it?"

Meng considered him for a moment.

"You assume his motives are singular," she said at last. "They rarely are. A Guardian's core is not merely power. It is memory, command imprint, karmic weight, historical authority. Bai Hu's in particular…" Her eyes flicked briefly toward the white-haired figure by the shelves. "...would be both dangerous and useful in the wrong hands."

"So not goodwill," Chewie said.

"No."

That landed cleanly.

Eathan let his gaze drop to the tea again, watching the steam thin into the room.

At least now they knew where things stood. Or part of where they stood. Meng Po was helping them because Li Wei had asked and because a half-reassembled war god stumbling around her jurisdiction counted as everyone's problem. That didn't make her theirs. It made her aligned with them for the moment.

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He could work with the moment.

He glanced back at Taeril, who was now studying a scroll depicting the reincarnation cycle as if it was the most fascinating discovery of his existence.

"I did a deep scan on him earlier," he said, "on his core. There were seven nodes in the core structure, but four were missing."

"Seven is common," Meng said. "Not universal, but common."

She drew one finger through the air. Lavender qi answered immediately, gathering above the desk in a thin thread, then several, then many.

They wove themselves into a sphere.

It spun slowly above the papers, a fractured constellation of colour. Eathan's breath caught. The whole thing looked alive in a way his earlier HUD readout hadn't—less like a diagram, more like something that wanted very badly to be complete.

Several points in the sphere pulsed brightly. Others were hollow, just outlines of themselves, empty sockets in the pattern.

Chewie squinted at it. "That his brain?"

Meng Po looked at her over the top of her cup. "That is his core."

"Close enough," Chewie muttered.

"A divine core is not identical to a mortal soul, though the comparison is serviceable," Meng went on. "It is architecture. Identity distributed across stable concentrations. Temperament, instinct, memory, duty, restraint, inclination—different paths cultivate different arrangements. War deities fracture differently from healers. River gods differently from judges. Bai Hu's construction reflects both what he is and what he has repeatedly chosen to become."

Eathan watched the crimson void rotate past, then the dim place where emerald should have burned. "Can you tell what the missing pieces are?"

Meng's eyes went from the projection to him. "I can tell what remains strongly enough to infer what is absent," she said. "But inference is not the same thing as certainty. For more than inference, I would need to examine him directly."

Her gaze shifted to Bai Hu and stayed there for a beat.

"If I have consent."

He felt Chewie tense beside him before he did. His own instincts screamed at the idea of someone poking around Mister White's insides, even if that someone ran reincarnation on an entire realm.

And of course, Meng Po noticed both their reactions.

"I am not proposing disassembly," she said. "Karmic Thread Divination lets me examine the configuration of a core without tearing it apart. Think of it as reading the pattern of threads rather than unravelling the cloth."

Chewie's face remained unconvinced. "That still sounds like sticking your hand into someone's spiritual wiring."

"It is," Meng said. "But carefully."

Eathan paused, weighing the options carefully. Trust here was a luxury they couldn't easily afford. Even though Meng Po had helped them by Li Wei's request, their time in the Passing had taught them to remain vigilant.

Eathan swallowed. "Could you… try it on me first?"

Both women looked at him.

He could feel Chewie turning fully toward him without moving at all.

Meng Po's expression did not change much, but the stillness in her face sharpened. "You would volunteer to expose your own karmic vulnerabilities," she said, "before I touch his."

"Yes."

It came out faster than he meant it to, so he forced himself to breathe before continuing.

"You can understand why we're cautious," he said. "You're helping us, but that doesn't mean we know all your stakes yet. If this is safe, show us first. If it isn't, then at least he stays untouched."

Chewie gave a low whistle. "The boss leave you unsupervised for couple of months and you grow this much backbone?"

"I'm not brave," Eathan muttered. "I'm cornered. There's a difference."

Meng Po looked at him for a long moment, then rose from her chair.

"Cornered things are often the most honest," she said.

She rose from her seat, and the room seemed to adjust with her. The lamplight dimmed slightly, as if the space itself seemed to lean toward her. The floating scrolls slowed. Even the steam from the tea steadied.

"Stand," she said.

He did.

She circled the desk and stopped in front of him. Smaller than him by a fair margin, she somehow still made him feel like the one being measured from above.

"Do not resist," she said.

"That's getting repeated enough that I'm concerned."

"Good."

Before he could answer, she lifted her hand.

It hovered an inch from his chest, and Eathan sucked in a breath.

The first sensation was not pain. It was pressure, deep and low, like a second heartbeat answering his own. Then came the threads—lavender light unfurling from her fingers and sinking through fabric, skin, sternum, something deeper than any of those.

Eathan's breath caught.

The Spires seemed to inhale around them.

Scrolls rose from nearby shelves in slow, silent arcs, circling above their heads. The ornaments in Meng Po's hair lifted slightly, bone-white clips swaying without wind.

Threads of light arced from her fingertips into his chest. Eathan inhaled sharply. The sensation was… strange. Not invasive. It felt like someone kneading at the knots behind his ribs, finding places even he hadn't known were tight.

He felt his own life open in fragments: COZMART's counter under his hands, the snap of a camera shot, the feeling of saying yes when he could've said no, the bone-deep exhaustion in his shoulders, a roaring white sky over stone steps…

He also felt something else.

Something older pressed against that flood, deeper and larger than his years should hold. A weight coiled around a mountain peak. Rain against scaled skin. Laughter like bells. That part of him stayed just out of focus, as if viewed through frosted glass.

Then the pressure receded.

The floating scrolls settled back where they had been, and Meng Po withdrew her hand and returned to her chair as if she hadn't just rearranged the makeup of his nerve structure.

Eathan sat down more from instinct than grace. His hands had found the chair arms at some point and were still gripping hard enough to ache.

Chewie leaned in. "You look like someone just politely excavated your spine."

"Accurate," he said.

Meng Po had one hand wrapped around her cup again. She watched him for a heartbeat longer than was polite.

"Well?" he asked, a touch hoarse.

"Curious," she said. "Two souls cohabiting one mortal vessel. Intertwined deeply enough that removing either would destabilise the whole."

Eathan's stomach dropped with such precision it almost felt rehearsed. He exchanged a startled glance with Chewie. Meng Po's expression gave away nothing more, so he chose his words carefully.

"Two," he heard himself ask. "What exactly does that mean?"

Your own, and another occupant." She didn't soften it. "The other one is much older. Much… cleaner. Its threads are very even. There's hues for anxiety, tenacity, an unusual clarity of purpose… and altruism. The colour is—" she paused, searching— "auspicious. Difficult to describe otherwise, but it does not sit over you. It sits with you."

Chewie made a face. "Like a roommate."

Meng's gaze flicked to her. "An unreasonable old one, perhaps, but yes."

Eathan forced himself not to look away. "Can you see what it is?"

"No." The answer came clean and immediate. "Age obscures. I can read younger threads than my own. I cannot read what predates my office. Whatever lives inside you is older than my jurisdiction over this realm, possibly older than the structures that made my office necessary."

He hadn't realised how badly he wanted her to say Qilin until she didn't.

Something in his expression must have betrayed him, because Meng's voice gentled by a fraction when she added, "Opacity is not the same as danger."

Eathan swallowed.

Older than the overseer of reincarnation herself? He had to fight back the impulse to reveal everything for more answers. Some stupid part of him wanted to ask if that should comfort him. Another part wanted to ask if this meant he was doomed. Instead he latched onto the question that had been rotting in him for months.

"If you can't see clearly," he ventured cautiously, "can you at least tell me why? Why me specifically? There are a lot of mortals. Why would something that old pick this one?" He gestured at himself vaguely. "I'm not exactly—"

"Extraordinary?" Meng supplied.

"Thanks," he said faintly.

"The choice is rarely personal," she said. "Vessels are selected according to patterns we don't fully see. But your karma threads are unusually aligned—elastic under pressure, inclined toward others, capable of carrying a second presence without fracturing outright." She studied him for a breath. "What lives in you needed that. You fit."

It was not the answer he wanted.

It was also more answer than anyone else had given him.

He sat with it for a moment, then let it go. Not because he was satisfied. Because Bai Hu stood across the room with his hands folded into his sleeves, staring at a hanging document like it was about to reveal the meaning of existence.

"Can you check him now?" he asked quietly.

Meng Po set her cup down.

Bai Hu looked over when she turned toward him. He had been watching quietly, head tilted just enough to signal interest. No fear, no recognition of danger—just a kind of openness that, on anyone else, would have felt harmless. On him it was eerie.

"Commander Bai Hu." Meng Po turned to him. "If you are ready."

"Mister White," Eathan said, keeping his voice as level as he could. "She might be able to help."

The White Tiger studied him for a beat, then stepped forward.