COZMART: Corner Shop of Visiting Gods

Chapter 124 124 | Super-House

The Echoing Lantern felt warmer once they crossed out of Meng Po's office and back into the open veins of the Realm.

At first, Eathan thought that was his imagination—leftover nerves, leftover tea, leftover everything. Then a ghost in line for reincarnation drifted straight past him carrying a tray of soul-stamped permits and did not so much as blink at the white-haired war god walking at his side.

So the lantern was working.

The effect wasn't invisibility. Something slipperier.

Midnight Avenue still existed around them in full force—lantern glare, crowd noise, stall smoke, six different songs competing for dominance. Whatever Hai Xianmo had done while they were gone, it'd reverted the Avenue back to its familiar chaos.

But when someone's gaze drifted toward them, it lost traction and thoughts snagged somewhere else.

Chewie glanced at the lantern once, then at him. "If this thing fails halfway through the Avenue, I'm blaming you."

Eathan adjusted his grip. One of the etched circles around the lantern's frame dimmed, then brightened again.

"Meng Po made it herself," he said. "If we can't trust the woman who runs reincarnation to build a decent stealth tool, I'm not sure the concept of trust survives at all."

"Comforting."

"Barely."

They moved through the main street. Eathan kept Bai Hu between himself and Chewie as they moved west, trying to look like a group of perfectly ordinary ghosts out for a late errand instead of two fugitives dragging a half-restored Guardian across the market.

Bai Hu was trying very hard to cooperate.

That did not stop him from turning his head every few steps to stare at something new.

Chewie caught him just as he paused beside a carved stone basin where paper tags floated in circles over the water.

Eathan stopped too, hand still wrapped around the lantern's handle.

"Mister White," he said.

Bai Hu looked from the tags to him. "They're organized by regret."

"Yes."

"There seems to be many."

Eathan held his stare for a beat, then jerked his chin down the path. "Come on."

For a while, that was all it was. Herding. Steering the White Tiger around stalls, through the thinner bands of traffic, away from anything shiny, scented, or mechanically interesting. The Echoing Lantern swallowed enough of their presence that even when someone bumped shoulders with Eathan, they turned and apologized to empty air before moving on.

He kept his hand around the lantern and let Mingrui's directions play back in his head, each one somehow sounding more ridiculous now that he was actually following them.

They reached the west side of Eternal Pavilion with a little time to spare.

KarmaCafé glowed across the lane, all tasteful brushed-gold signage and floor-to-ceiling glass through which attractively miserable ghosts stared into drinks with names like Second Life Matcha and Regret-Free Oolong. The wall beside it looked entirely ordinary.

Chewie followed his gaze, then looked at him.

"Tell me again," she said, "why we're about to stand in public and stare at a wall."

Eathan cleared his throat with the gravity of a man reading military coordinates. "By Eternal Pavilion's west end, next to KarmaCafé. Impossible to miss, provided we arrive exactly three minutes before midnight, then look up at precisely a sixty-degree angle for seven consecutive seconds. Oh, and ignore any temporary spatial instability."

Chewie stared at him.

"That sounds like precisely detailed nonsense."

"Which somehow made it less trustworthy and more likely at the same time."

They took their position.

At exactly three minutes to midnight, Eathan tipped his chin up. Chewie did the same after a beat, expression flattening into spiritual resignation. Bai Hu followed a second later, because at this point he had decided that whatever these two were doing was, regrettably, probably correct.

They stood shoulder to shoulder in the middle of a very busy district, all three gazing at an angle so precise it had to be embarrassing.

A passing ghost slowed just long enough to frown. "Cult?"

"Architecture students," Chewie said without lowering her head.

The ghost passed with a shiver.

Midnight struck.

The brick wall in front of them buckled like light on oil.

The air around rippled like a faulty hologram, and out of nowhere, a seam of lavender light split apart. A doorway unfolded where there had not been one a blink ago, bleeding out light, noise, and a burst of perfume so expensive Eathan nearly took a step back on reflex.

Chewie raised an eyebrow despite herself. "Wild."

They stepped forward into the portal.

Inside, Super-House made less sense than the directions had.

It was a studio, a warehouse, a beauty lab, a merch floor, and at least three minor personalities stacked on top of each other in heels.

Screens hovered in the air at different heights, each streaming something from product unboxings to outfit breakdowns to "healing after your fourth betrayal" advice sessions and one extremely heated live debate on whether ghostly contour counted as karmic fraud. Assistants moved through it all with rails of clothes, trays of crystal powders, lights, lenses, steaming drinks, and exactly the kind of controlled panic that came from impossible deadlines and too many personalities in one building.

A sign overhead rotated through branding slogans every few seconds:

SUPER-HOUSE

Curating afterlife presence since before your third reincarnation.

Eathan had to admit, with some reluctance, that he was impressed.

Chewie looked around once and made a face. "If this place explodes, five subcultures die with it."

"Maybe six," he said. "I think I just saw a wellness commune."

At the center of the madness stood Mingrui.

She was exactly where she'd expected herself to be—on the largest platform in the center of the studio, framed by six hovering ring lights and three separate camera angles.

Golden hair fell in a gleaming sheet over one shoulder, every strand arranged for maximum light-catching efficiency. Her current outfit was some fever dream of jade, puffed sleeves and even more bracelets that chimed every time she lifted a hand.

"—and if your posthumous skin still looks dull, darling, that's not grief, that's dehydration. Celestial Silk Mists are twenty percent off if you order before—"

Her gaze slid across the floor, and the line died in her throat.

Mingrui didn't just brighten at the sight of them this time. The performance dropped away from her face at once, revealing something faster and far more useful under the fan-girl gloss.

The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

It was recognition.

She killed the stream without finishing the sentence.

Half the platform staff made pained noises. Mingrui ignored them and crossed the room so quickly the nearest camera orb had to swerve not to get body-checked.

"Close the side feeds," she snapped to someone over her shoulder. "If anybody clips this room from my backup angles, I will personally ruin their engagement for a month."

She took in the three of them in one sweep—Eathan, the lantern, Chewie, then Bai Hu in his current impossible state.

When she spoke, her voice came lower than he'd heard it before.

"Oh, this is not a social visit."

Chewie's mouth twitched. "Very astute."

Mingrui ignored her. Her usual sparkle was still there, but it had gone sharp at the edges. She stopped in front of Bai Hu and, because she was still Mingrui, instinct overrode caution for half a second.

"Commander," she breathed, almost reverently.

Bai Hu looked at her, then at the lights, then back at her. "Hello."

Mingrui nearly folded.

Eathan glanced at Chewie.

"She's gone," he murmured.

"She'll be back," Chewie murmured back.

Mingrui did, in fact, recover. Fast.

"So the Paladin sightings aren't random," she said, a glint in her eyes. "And if Heaven sent the Elite Force into my district, they're either after a relic, a god, or a scandal that could turn into both." Her gaze stayed on Bai Hu. "I can count."

Eathan didn't answer right away.

That was answer enough.

Mingrui exhaled through her nose. "Right." Then, lower, "You should know I'm offended on principle. If the Jade Deity wants to step into the Passing with that kind of force, the least he could do is buy ad space first."

Chewie gave her a long look. "You say the weirdest useful things."

"It's a gift."

For half a second, nobody moved. Somewhere behind them, a producer hissed at a junior assistant for moving the wrong divine mist machine. The rest of Super-House kept humming around the stillness.

Then Mingrui clapped once and the whole mood shifted.

"Fine," she said. "You're here because Meng's lantern only buys you so much, and because if anyone outside this building looks twice at him right now, your life expectancy goes from tragic to comedic. So. We fix the optics."

That… was exactly right.

Chewie's eyes narrowed slightly. "You figured all that out from one glance?"

Mingrui's mouth pulled into a small, unimpressed smile. "Please. Half my career is built on reading expressions before they become statements. The other half is built on noticing when high-ranking ghosts suddenly start pretending not to notice something."

She turned and snapped her fingers. "Ning! Privacy mode on. If I see a single rec light in this place, all loses next month's pay."

A distressed chorus answered from somewhere in the upper lofts.

That, more than the fan-girl meltdown, made Eathan trust her a little. Or at least trust her priorities.

"My sanctuary is your sanctuary," she said. "Follow me."

She spun on her heel and led them through the studio at a pace that forced everyone else to flatten themselves against walls or rolling costume racks.

As they moved, Mingrui kept talking—not because she liked silence, though she didn't, but because she thought in streams and expected the world to keep up.

"The thing about Heaven," she said, flicking aside a curtain of hanging charms, "is that they still think information moves top down. Decrees, condemnations, official notices, al that. Very dignified. Very slow."

"And?" Eathan asked.

"And if you want to survive a political hunt," Mingrui said, "you need to understand that everyone else has been living horizontally for a long time. Think about comment sections. Private channels. Gossip accounts pretending to be public safety monitors. I know about the Paladins because three food streamers saw them wreck a tea stall and then another channel used the footage to sell anti-surveillance face powder."

Chewie blinked. "That's a sentence."

"It's also the economy."

Mingrui pushed open a lacquered door at the back.

The wardrobe chamber beyond could have outfitted a noble procession, a military parade, and an apocalypse-themed gala without running out of stock.

Clothing in long, sorted rows. Cabinets of glasses, pins, gloves, veils, masks, boots. Enchanted fabrics humming softly in their hangers. A central worktable under white light. Mirrors everywhere.

Mingrui turned, looked at the three of them, and got clinical.

"Current problem," she said, pointing at Bai Hu, "he is impossible to erase. So we stop trying. We distort instead. Make the eye hesitate."

Then she pointed at Eathan.

"You're actually worse."

That offended him on instinct. "Rude."

"True," she said. "You still look exactly like the mortal intern everyone's been quietly speculating about, which means anyone hunting him will look twice at you before they ever look at him."

Chewie folded her arms, deeply pleased by this. "Continue."

"And you," Mingrui said, swinging that same sharp attention onto her, "already look like trouble. We lean into it."

She moved fast once she started.

For Eathan, the solution was mercifully restrained: black, tailored, clean lines, a jacket cut close with silver thread so subtle it only showed when the light turned.

As Eathan glanced at himself in the mirror, he couldn't help but feel faintly like Li Wei's assistant after a very strict dress code update.

"For the record," Mingrui said, adjusting one sleeve, "this says 'quietly dangerous aide' rather than 'haunted intern.'"

She whirled on Chewie next.

"For you," Mingrui told her, "we need managerial menace."

Mingrui dragged out a jacket too oversized to be innocent, black with crimson piping, matched it with heavy boots, then hung red headphones around her neck with all the ceremonial precision of crowning a tyrant.

Chewie looked at herself. Looked at Mingrui. Looked back at herself.

"This says 'manager' to you?"

"This," Mingrui said, stepping back, "says 'speak quickly or don't speak at all.' Which, frankly, is the safest possible signal."

Then came Bai Hu.

The room shifted around Mingrui the moment she approached him. Eathan saw it happen. The over-bright streaming persona dimmed. The hands that moved too much when she talked steadied. Even her voice lowered.

"Commander," she said. "With apologies."

Bai Hu looked at her, then at the arranged options, then back again. "Okay."

Eathan had to look away for a second.

Mingrui didn't over-design him. That would have been a mistake. Nothing could fully hide what he was. Instead she altered the lines around the obvious truths—swapped the coat's silhouette, wound a dark scarf threaded with faint constellations high around his throat, and settled dark glasses over his eyes that hid the immediate, unmistakable black of his eyes.

And the suppression work stitched into the lining mattered more than the fashion.

Mingrui adjusted the final fold of the scarf and stepped back to look at her work with shining eyes.

"He looks like a limited-edition collaboration."

Bai Hu touched the glasses once, then the scarf, examining both with grave interest. He seemed eager to ask a question, but then caught looks from both Eathan and Chewie and instead turned to the ghost influencer.

"Thank you," he said.

Mingrui closed her eyes for a very sincere second.

When she opened them, she was all business again.

"I assume you're what brought upon the Paladins earlier tonight," she said.

There it was.

"Officially, Paladins have been seen in twos and threes, never the full group in public. But that chaos earlier had been fully censored from all RealmNet traction," she went on. "That means they're not trying to intimidate the district. They're still searching. Trying to retrieve something before the district understands what it is."

Mingrui looked between the three of them, her gaze snagging on Bai Hu for one bare second before sliding away with tact she hadn't shown earlier.

"And if they're doing that under direct Jade authority," she went on, "it means the Passing is no longer being allowed to handle its own mess internally. Which is, frankly, insulting."

Chewie's eyes narrowed. "That bothers you."

"It should bother everyone," Mingrui said. "Lady Meng runs the dead. Lady Foxfire runs half the economy. Chang'e's shadow still sits over the old mechanisms. Sending Heaven's private knives in here says one thing very clearly: they don't trust the realm not to choose for itself."

Eathan watched her carefully.

There it was. The thing he'd half-seen when they first met her in the alley and hadn't fully trusted yet. Mingrui performed delight for a living, yes. She monetized attention and weaponized aesthetics and probably had three separate sponsorship deals with celestial skin mists.

She was also shrewd.

She knew exactly which layer of the world she belonged to, and she had no interest in watching Heaven step on it without complaint.

That made her useful in a way Eathan could respect.

Mingrui crossed her arms. "So here's my price."

Chewie tensed instantly.

"I'm not selling you out," Mingrui said. "If I wanted that, I could've gone live the second I saw him. I'm asking for terms."

She held up one finger.

"When all of this is over and nobody is actively trying to confiscate anyone's essence, I get the first properly sanctioned interview about how Commander White became the kind of story people whispered before he was even officially missing."

"That's not up to me," Eathan said.

"It never is with good stories," Mingrui replied. "Second, you don't die in the district. It's terrible for morale and worse for analytics."

Chewie looked at him. "Annoyingly reasonable."

"That's what I'm afraid of," he said.

Mingrui brightened at once, as if the serious version of herself had only been a guest lecturer.

"Oh, and one more thing," she said. "If you absolutely must flee for your lives at some point, favor your left side. It photographs better."

They all stared at her.

"…What?" she said. "If you're going to die, at least die viral."

The confidentiality contract happened after that because Chewie, bless her deeply cursed little heart, trusted no one until there was paperwork with consequences attached.

Mingrui read the title, the penalties, the binding clauses, and signed with only one visible wince.

"Your legal instincts are vile," she told Chewie.

"I try."

When they were finally ready to leave, Mingrui raised her camera by instinct, froze, lowered it, and let out a mournful sigh.

"One day," she said to Bai Hu with mournful sincerity, "you and I are taking a proper studio portrait."

The White Tiger, now in glasses and a constellated scarf, nodded solemnly as if accepting a battlefield treaty.

"One day," he said.

Mingrui nearly dissolved on the spot.

By the time they stepped back out of Super-House, Midnight Avenue had shifted into one of its later faces. The crowds were thinner. The lights harsher. The Echoing Lantern in Eathan's hand had dimmed from a veil into a simple, steady guide-glow.

The disguise would have to carry the rest.

Bai Hu adjusted the scarf at his throat and glanced at Eathan.

"Debut?" he asked again, sounding as if he'd been testing the word in his head and still found it suspicious.

Chewie rubbed a hand over her face. "No debut," she said. "No channels. No parasocial warfare. We're heading to a mirror maze to recover the stabby parts of your personality."

Bai Hu processed that.

Then he nodded once. "Oh."

Eathan lifted the lantern, checked the map in his head one more time, then looked toward where the lights thinned and the roads sharpened into darker geometry.

"Ready?" he asked.

Chewie shrugged, sliding headphones into place and shoving hands into jacket pockets. "When did readiness ever mattered for us?"

That answer felt familiar enough to count as comfort.

Eathan looked once more at Bai Hu—disguised, diminished, still unmistakably himself in the ways that mattered—and then toward the road ahead.

He drew in a breath.

"Alright," he said. "Let's go. Reverie Sanctum."