COZMART: Corner Shop of Visiting Gods

Chapter 122 - 122 | Missing Fragments

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

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

This time, when Meng Po approached, she did not stop at her own height. The air lifted her gently until she met his eyes level. It should have looked theatrical. Instead it looked old. Practical. As if she had done this so many times the realm adjusted for her without needing to be asked.

Eathan and Chewie both stared.

She was small compared to him, top of her head barely to his chest. For a second, the height difference was almost comical.

Then she rose.

Her feet never left the floor. The air lifted her instead, robes and hair sliding upward with her as if the room's gravity had rotated ninety degrees. In a blink, she and Bai Hu were eye to eye.

Eathan and Chewie both stared.

Meng Po's gaze moved over Bai Hu's face, his shoulders, the line of his throat. On some office shelf, a scroll unfurled on its own, words knitting themselves into place as if taking notes.

Then an odd expression crossed the goddess's impassive features, closer to professional disturbance than sentiment or alarm. The kind of look you might give if a notoriously terrifying colleague arrived one day speaking only in nursery rhymes.

She reached out, and for one terrible moment, Eathan thought she was about to pierce his Commander's forehead and yank his soul out.

And then she ruffled his hair.

Once. Quick. Casual. Entirely expressionless.

Eathan actually blinked to make sure it had happened.

Chewie's jaw opened a fraction.

Bai Hu stood there and accepted the head pat with complete solemnity, as if this was now part of the examination.

Meng Po withdrew her hand and looked mildly more satisfied with life.

"When did you retrieve his core?" she asked.

Eathan's brain took an extra second to rejoin the room. "Today," he said. "At the River of Oblivion."

"And you spoke to Lady Foxfire before that."

Chewie and Eathan exchanged a look.

"Yes," he admitted. "She pointed us toward the river."

Meng Po nodded, once.

"Then do not let her see this version of him," she said.

Chewie frowned. "Why?"

"Because Foxfire is capable of finding almost anything entertaining," Meng said, deadpan. "Bai Hu is already one of her favourite stories. Displaying him in this diminished, unguarded state would…"

There was a horrifying pause.

"In any case, I suspect your Commander would awaken quite displeased."

Eathan nodded slowly, his brain still buffering from the action from before. Taeril tilted his head, silver hair now distinctly ruffled.

Meng Po lifted her hand again.

"This will be more extensive," she said. "Do not interrupt unless he begins to unravel."

Before Eathan could get a chance to ask what "unravel" entailed, his voice was cut by the lavender light bloomed from her fingertips, this time richer than last.

They wound around Bai Hu without touching him, tracing the shape of his body a hair's breadth away. It thread through the war deity forehead and spread a thin film of radiance across his skin. Taeril's eyes widened, looking mesmerized as the threads twisted around him.

The room vibrated as scrolls shivered loose from shelves and began circling in a wider orbit. Several lamps dimmed of their own accord. The whole chamber felt, suddenly, like the inside of a great machine.

The sensation rolled through Eathan's bones in slow pulses. He gripped his tea cup and tried not to think about how weirdly similar it felt to sitting in one of those full-body massage chairs at the mall, if the massage chair had been built by a death goddess and powered by karmic law.

Chewie muttered, "I hate that this is kind of relaxing."

Bai Hu blinked once, eyes following the first coil of light as it passed. Then he stood very still while the divination drew itself over him, every edge of him caught and measured.

It lasted longer than Eathan's had.

For a moment, his vision doubled. Overlaid on Bai Hu's outline, he saw seven glowing pieces down the torso. Three bloomed brighter—sapphire at the chest, amber lower, amethyst near the core. The other four flickered as faint, distant echoes.

The whole process took maybe a minute, but it felt much longer.

When it finished, the braided light sank back into Meng's palm. The scrolls fluttered back to their shelves with a collective papery sigh. The pressure in the room eased.

Across the floor, Bai Hu stood exactly where she had left him, head slightly tilted, gaze on the steam above Eathan's cup as if the tea itself had become a philosophical problem.

Meng Po let out a breath that barely disturbed the surface of her tea and returned to her chair.

"The White Tiger's core," she began, "is currently functioning on three active shards.

Eathan leaned forward. "Which ones?"

The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

Eathan leaned forward before he could stop himself. "Which ones?"

Three points in the floating core model brightened.

"Amber," she said. "Sapphire. Amethyst."

Chewie folded her arms. "That means nothing to anyone who hasn't spent a few thousand years sorting ghosts."

Meng glanced at her over the rim of her cup. "Then I will translate."

Her fingers moved beneath the little sphere. The amber shard flared softly.

"Curiosity," Meng said first. "It drives his attention outward, but without discipline. He will fixate on details of no strategic importance if they interest him. Consider things like mundane objects or decorative mechanisms."

Eathan thought immediately of the floating scrolls, the theatre masks, the way Bai Hu had nearly stopped to keep watching a romantic opera about a river monster.

"That tracks," he muttered.

"Sapphire is innocence," Meng went on. "The capacity to approach something without suspicion or cynical weighting."

Chewie stared. "That exists in him?"

"Yes," Meng replied. "The part of him that once found mortals fascinating before they became responsibilities. It is the part of him that once looked at the world before he learned to sort everything into threats, obligations, or losses."

The White Tiger didn't react. He had moved on from the tea steam and was now studying the carved pattern on the desk's edge with suspicious interest.

Something tightened in Eathan's chest at that.

"And amethyst?" he asked.

"Attachment."

The word sat in the room.

Under their dumbfounded looks, her lips curved slightly.

"That one is perhaps the most disruptive at present." Meng's gaze slid to Bai Hu. "It inclines him toward emotional dependence. Toward seeking familiar anchors and staying near what feels safe rather than what is strategically sound."

Chewie looked at Bai Hu, then at Eathan, then back at Bai Hu.

"That," she said slowly, "I unfortunately understand."

Eathan chose not to comment, mostly because he did not trust his voice.

Meng, naturally, noticed that decision and continued with perfect grace.

"A complete Bai Hu does not need attachment. After all, leadership, especially over a territory like Area 001, carries burdens that require that tendency to be checked by duty and restraint," Meng said. "As he stands now, it is… less moderated."

A brief silence filled the room.

Beside the desk, Bai Hu had shifted almost imperceptibly closer. Not enough to be obvious. Enough for Eathan to notice. That was somehow worse.

Chewie rubbed a hand down her face. "So we currently have the clingy, curious, emotionally open version of our commander."

"A blunt summary," Meng said. "But not inaccurate.

She rested one finger against the hovering model. Four dark gaps rotated slowly through the light.

"As what is missing," she continued, "you should be grateful their absence only has made him inconvenient rather than catastrophic."

"That reassuring phrase somehow made me feel less reassured," Eathan said.

"It was not meant to reassure you."

Meng's fingertip moved again. The model responded. A crimson wound opened along the sphere's lower edge, followed by emerald, then gold, then obsidian.

"These hold greater structural weight," she said. "The colour alone does not tell you everything, but the pattern is informative. Crimson tends toward force. Emerald toward judgment and discernment. Gold aligns with oath, duty, and imposed structure. Obsidian… restraint, perhaps. Or the controlled edge of violence. Even I cannot name their exact traits."

Chewie's mouth flattened. "Right. So all the scary parts are gone."

"All the balancing parts," she corrected. "Do not mistake severity for uselessness. A Commander's temper is not what made Bai Hu difficult to kill. It was his ability to decide when not to move."

Eathan glanced at the man in question, who was currently mesmerised by the way steam curled from his untouched teacup.

As if noticing his gaze, Bai Hu looked up from the desk. He watched them now with that same still, unguarded focus, as if their entire conversation had become his new object of study.

There was no irritation in his face, no clipped question about why they were discussing him like a broken machine within earshot. It made Eathan's chest twist in a way he did not enjoy.

Meng Po saw that too.

"The White Tiger you knew," she said, "did not lose these qualities. He mastered them. That is not the same thing."

Her voice had changed by barely a shade, but it was enough to hold the room still.

"Someone like him does not become Heaven's preferred executioner by being simple," she went on. "He becomes that by learning how to wear contradiction without letting anyone else see the seams."

Chewie let out a quiet breath.

Eathan stared at the model, the bright three and the absent four, and thought of the man who used to lean in COZMART's doorway with one sleeve rolled up, looking halfway asleep while quietly carrying the weight of an entire Area on his back.

The office felt smaller for a second.

He cleared his throat. "We know one of the missing shards is in the River of Oblivion," he said. "We saw it shear off. The Nine-Headed Infant—"

"Nine-Headed Infant," Meng repeated, as if correcting spelling on a form. "Yes."

Chewie's eyes narrowed. "You know the thing?"

"I know of it." Meng reached for a different scroll without looking. "Its present state is not original."

That was the sort of sentence that begged for elaboration and deeply resented having to ask for it.

Eathan asked anyway.

With an oddly fond gaze, Meng unrolled the scroll. It showed an old painted scene: moonlight, riverbank, something pale in a basket, and a rabbit that looked far too pleased with itself.

"Long ago," she said, "one of Chang'e's attendants attempted to comfort a spirit that had died in childbirth. The intention was mercy. The execution…" Her eyes moved briefly to the painted rabbit. "The rabbit became involved."

Chewie leaned in. "Of course it did."

"It thought the creature looked lonely," Meng said. "It added companions."

Eathan stared at the painting. There was no polite way to ask if she meant the nine heads, but thankfully he did not need to.

"Then the river got hold of it. Oblivion does not improve unstable things," she said. "The rabbit denies all responsibility, of course."

Chewie nodded knowingly. "Immortals and accountability rarely mix."

Meng Po ignored the comment, instead setting the scroll aside. She snapped her fingers once, and another shot from the shelf and unrolled itself over the desk. This one did not hold still. Ink shifted across it, assembling itself into an aerial view of the Realm of Passing.

Eathan'a [Ledger Tap] pinged before she even finished. The [SYSTEM] woke fully, overlaying her map with his own interface and aligning markers and paths with precision.

Four pings flashed to life.

The first was immediate.

A bright pulse along the River of Oblivion, near the region they'd dove earlier. A tiny red hazard symbol pulsed next to it.

He didn't need the label to know that was the Infant's trench.

The second bloomed farther north, over a cluster of jagged lines and mirrored symbols. Meng Po tapped the calligraphy there.

"Reverie Sanctum," she said. "Mortals call it the Labyrinth of Reflections when they want the dramatic version. It's a maze designed to favour unresolved truth and tends to keep what enters it."

Her finger moved eastward to another mark.

"Pillars of Lost Intentions."

What corresponded to her touch were dozens of tall crystalline columns ringed a basin on the map; each one radiated wavering threads that looked like tears.

"Fragments of will tend to end up here," she said. "People who almost did something and didn't. Choices that rotted in the mouth."

[Calamity Radar] confirmed it: three shards, three points. One danger indicator pulsed brighter than the rest at the river.

Eathan memorized both locations on reflex, already moving pieces around in his head. River first, or maze first? Which was more dangerous? Which was more unstable? Which one would the Paladins guess?

Then his HUD pinged again. The fourth signal sat so motionless he'd almost missed it when—

Wait.

Eathan paused as he stared at the dot that sat directly on top of their location marker.

This can't be right.

For a second, he thought the system had drifted. Mapped Bai Hu's current body incorrectly. He frowned, recalibrated the overlay, checked the radius.

The marker did not move.

A thin cold line went down his spine.

At the same time, Meng spoke.

"There are four missing shards," she said softly. "One in the river. One in reflection. One among lost intentions."

Her finger rested on the final point.

Eathan looked at it.

Then at her.

The office stayed perfectly still around them, scrolls silent and teas untouched. Bai Hu looked up, head slightly tilted, as if he too sensed that something had shifted.

Meng's expression had not changed much, retaining that same composure. The same measured calm.

Only now, if you stared too long, there was the faintest hint of a curve at one corner of her mouth.

"The last," she said, "is already here."