Cold Storage
The week following the incident at District AAA passed with an almost eerie quiet.
For seven days, Ruyi led the most delightfully mundane life possible. She woke up early, made tea for her mother, ignored her brother’s obnoxious video game rants, and went about her daily errands with the deliberate, unhurried pace of someone who had never even heard the word dungeon.
She knew she was being watched.
It wasn't something she saw—no obvious black sedans parked across the street or trench-coated agents hiding behind newspapers. It was a subtle pressure in the air, a faint, lingering intent that brushed against her newly heightened senses whenever she stepped outside. Two eyes on the corner of the grocery store. Another pair near the bus stop.
Ruyi simply ignored them. She bought her groceries, haggled over the price of green onions, and walked home.
By day five, the pressure faded. The guild observers, convinced she was genuinely just an extraordinarily lucky, thoroughly uninteresting civilian, pulled back. Ruyi felt their departure like a draft leaving a room—a quiet, subtle withdrawal.
Good, she thought, leaning back on the couch on a Thursday evening, watching the living room television. Stay uninterested.
On the screen, a news broadcast was showing footage from a recent Class-2 breach on the south side of City CC. A polished guild news anchor was describing the heroics of a local B-Rank strike team. The camera panned over glossy armor, glowing elemental spells, and dramatic interviews with smiling, pristine hunters.
Then the camera cut to the perimeter cleanup crew.
Ruyi’s eyes narrowed slightly as she recognized a familiar face in the background. It was the tired responder from the transport vehicle—the one who had handed her a bottle of water and told the investigator to let her breathe. He was slinging heavy iron chains over his shoulder, mud caked on his boots, looking thoroughly underpaid and exhausted as he dragged monster debris off the asphalt.
A few moments later, as Ruyi looked out her apartment window to draw the blinds, she actually spotted another off-duty responder walking down her street. He had his jacket draped over his arm, his shoulders slumping in defeat as he trudged toward the local train station. No glamour. No glory. Just people trying to survive the quiet aftermath of a world that was constantly breaking.
Ruyi pulled the blinds shut. The flashy guild lifestyle held zero appeal for her, but seeing the real cost on the streets made her even more determined to stay invisible.
There was just one problem: her body wasn't cooperating.
Over the past few days, Ruyi had noticed quiet, terrifying shifts within herself. She wasn't built like a power lifter, nor had her raw strength spiked, but her speed was becoming abnormal.
She had discovered it by accident two nights ago. She had been leaning out her bedroom window around midnight when she overheard a heated argument between a couple in the alley below. Curiosity—and a mild sense of annoyance—had gotten the better of her. She had stepped out her window onto the narrow fire escape, intending to take a closer look, only to misstep on a rusted bar.
Instead of crashing down three stories, Ruyi had moved.
It hadn't been a conscious thought. Her body had simply blurred. Before she could even register the fall, she was standing silently at the end of the alley, three blocks away, her heart hammering against her ribs. She had covered fifty meters in a fraction of a second without making a sound. Her agility had soared past human limits.
Along with her physical changes, her control over the anomaly in her chest was stabilizing.
Ruyi suspected that if she were to touch that Evaluator Core at the guild right now, the result would be very different. The first time, her uncalibrated power had acting like an unchecked drain, eating the machine's energy output and causing an error. Now? She felt she could actively suppress it. She could mimic a total non-awakener, hiding her signal behind a wall of silence.
More importantly, she was learning that the void wasn't just a weapon of absolute destruction.
It was a space.
She had spent hours in the privacy of her room testing its limits. It didn't just erase matter; it held it. She could reach into the cold, empty pocket inside her mind and place objects there. A brass key. A notebook. A ceramic mug. With a soft, barely audible whishp, the item would disappear from her hand into the dark, and with a thought, it would slide back out, completely unaltered.
Which led to a dark, persistent question that had been keeping her up at night.
What happens to a living thing?
Ruyi sat on the edge of her bed, her amethyst eyes staring down at the floorboards. She knew she shouldn't test it. She didn't want to imagine the consequences, and the thought of putting something alive into that silent, absolute nothingness made her stomach twist.
Then, she caught sight of a pest.
It scurried out from beneath the floorboards near her closet—a fat, gray alley rat. It stopped in the middle of the room, twitching its whiskers. Its tiny black eyes locked onto hers, standing still as if testing her patience.
Ruyi stared back. The room went dead silent.
"Don't look at me like that," she whispered.
The rat took a cautious step forward.
Ruyi raised her right hand. She didn't shout an attack name. She didn't channel magical runes. She simply opened that cold, quiet door in her mind and aimed the opening at the floor.
Whishp.
A tiny, spherical seam of absolute blackness folded into existence for a microsecond over the rat. Light bent around the localized distortion, and in the next heartbeat, the creature vanished.
No noise. No mess. Just an empty patch of wooden floorboards.
Ruyi held her breath. She closed her eyes, focusing on the space within her.
Inside her void, there was no sound. No heat. No direction. It was a vast, motionless pocket of non-existence. She couldn't feel the rat moving. She couldn't feel it breathing.
She waited.
One minute. She counted sixty agonizing seconds by the pulse of her own heartbeat.
"Out," she muttered softly.
With a faint pulse of displaced air, the void opened above her palm and deposited the rat onto her desk.
It tumbled onto the wood with a dull, limp thud.
Ruyi leaned forward, examining it closely.
The rat was dead.
There were no bloody wounds, no signs of physical trauma, and no crushed bones. Its fur was completely dry, and its eyes remained open, staring blankly ahead. It looked less like it had been killed and more like its life functions had simply been frozen, suffocated, and shut down the moment it entered the threshold.
Ruyi pulled back, her face going pale in the dim light of her desk lamp.
"A vacuum..." she murmured, her voice hollow. "Or a complete lack of time and air."
It wasn't a pocket dimension like the spatial bags high-ranking hunters used to store supplies. It was a black hole in miniature—an absolute null-zone where no oxygen existed, no heat transferred, and no life could bleed through. Anything living that entered her void wasn't just stored; it was terminated.
Ruyi nudged the dead rat into a small plastic bag with a pencil, her hands steady, though a cold chill lingered in her chest.
She walked over to the window, opening it to toss the bag into the trash bin down in the alley. Outside, the night sky was dark, painted with the faint, unnatural purple hue of distant, unclosed dungeon seams hovering over the horizon.
She was an anomaly. A non-awakener who could run faster than a vehicle, erase matter from reality, and carry a pocket of absolute death beneath her skin.
Ruyi pulled the window shut and locked it.
She still needed to do more research. She needed to test her limits, her range, and her stamina. But as she lay back down on her bed and stared at the ceiling, one thing was abundantly clear.
She was never going to tell the Guild a damn thing.