Energy Shards and the Pull of Fate

Lin Xiu pressed his thumb against the edge of the wreckage's crack. His fingertip touched the metal casing, and a trace of cold seeped through the armor's nanolayer into his skin like icy silk, bringing a faint prickling pain.

Since arriving in this world, he had often wondered why he had come here. Those seemingly accidental "coincidences" lingered in his mind like mist.

The Oracle System's bloody words still danced across his retina. The flickering red light unsettled him, and he could hear his Adam's apple bobbing, the sound unusually clear in the silent laboratory—from the day he arrived, every "coincidence" had seemed like precisely calculated quantum entanglement, and the Azure Core before him might have been the first definite quantum.

"Take two steps back." He turned sideways to block Eileen's view and gently pried with his fingertips.

The metal casing cracked sharply. The sound was shrill and grating as the fissure suddenly widened, and a diamond-shaped crystal fell to the floor with a clang, its crisp ring echoing through the empty laboratory.

Azure light flowed across the crystal's surface like rippling water from a dreamlike lake, bathing the entire abandoned laboratory in a pale blue glow. The soft radiance covered everything around it as though draping the world in a mysterious veil.

Eileen sucked in a cold breath. Her flashlight beam swept across the crystal like a sharp sword cutting through the darkness. Tiny starlike glimmers appeared in the spot of light, flickering like mischievous sprites in the night sky. "Th-this isn't from Earth."

Lin Xiu said nothing.

His nanotech armor stirred beneath his skin, as though countless tiny insects were crawling over him, bringing an itchy numbness.

Three silver-white probes automatically extended from the interface on his wrist. Under the Azure light, they gleamed with a cold metallic sheen. The Oracle System was urging him to connect.

A clearer resonance rose from his chest, as if someone were plucking at his ribs with their fingertips, again and again. Each touch struck precisely where the nanotech core lay, the resonance beating rhythmically inside his chest like a drum.

"Low-Tier Cosmic Cube Energy Shard detected. Energy frequency has an 87.3% compatibility match with the Balder Core.

Absorb?"

Lin Xiu's breathing stopped.

The Tesseract. It was something from S.H.I.E.L.D.'s classified archives, the key that had triggered the Battle of New York.

Before coming to this world, he had read papers in the laboratory where professors speculated about the Tesseract's quantum properties—but now, a fragment of it lay at his feet.

He remembered the mysterious light from when he crossed over, along with the Oracle System that had suddenly appeared in his mind. He knew none of this was simple.

"Safety assessment." He lowered his voice, digging his nails deeply into his palm. The pain kept him clearheaded.

"The shard has no self-destruct protocol. Its energy fluctuations are stable.

After absorption, the Basic Combat Form can evolve into [Basic Combat Form+], and core processing speed will increase by 40%."

Eileen's hand suddenly landed on his shoulder. Its warmth traveled through the armor, carrying a trace of heat that seemed able to drive away the chill in his heart. "Who are you talking to?" Her voice trembled, but there was a desperate fierceness in it. "That day in the lab, you said the quantum experiment had gone wrong, but now..."

Lin Xiu turned to look at her.

The blast had blown her bangs upward, leaving them messily stuck to her forehead. A dark, gleaming smear of motor oil clung to the corner of her left eye. The crystal's azure light reflected in her pupils, like a fire waiting to ignite.

He suddenly remembered something his mentor had said before he crossed over: "The essence of quantum entanglement is that two particles share the same fate." Perhaps from the moment he touched the nanotech core, Eileen had become the other particle caught up in it.

"Trust me," he said, his voice softer than he expected. "If something happens to me, run east immediately. There's an unlocked manhole cover there."

Eileen's fingers tightened on his shoulder, then slowly loosened.

Lin Xiu bent down and picked up the crystal. Its temperature startled him—it was not cold, but warm, as if it had just been taken from someone's chest. The heat made his palm grow faintly hot.

The moment the probes pierced the crystal, blue ripples rose across the armor's surface and spread from his wrist like waves over water. At last, they gathered at his chest and formed clearer ancient Norse characters, glowing with mysterious light as though containing endless power.

"Bzzzz—"

His consciousness was suddenly dragged into an ocean of data streams.

He saw countless motes of light reorganize before him like a swarm of flickering fireflies. They were S.H.I.E.L.D.'s classified files, Stark Industries' energy formulas, and the meaning of "Balder" in Asgardian runes—the god of light, the god of abundance, and yet also the god prophesied to die.

"Analysis complete. Current form: Balder Armor · Basic Combat Form+.

Core processing speed: 3.2×10^9 operations per second."

Lin Xiu staggered and braced himself against the console. Cold sweat beaded on his forehead, slid down, and dripped onto the control panel with faint taps.

He could hear the blood flowing through his veins like a rushing river. He could clearly distinguish the rhythm of water dripping from a ventilation pipe thirty meters away, the sound beating by his ears like a steady drum. He could even see the curve of every fine hair at the tip of Eileen's hair—this was not enhancement, but a complete elevation of the senses.

"Y-your eyes are glowing." Eileen's voice came from far away, as though filtered through a layer of fog.

Lin Xiu reached for his face. What his palm touched was not skin, but flowing nanoparticles, sliding across his hand like liquid mercury.

The armor was reforming over his face. The nanolayer around his eye sockets became thinner, revealing an azure glow like two small lamps, especially conspicuous in the darkness.

The laboratory's fluorescent lights suddenly began to flicker, pulsing fast and slow like a heartbeat.

"Tap, tap, tap—"

The sound of metal heels striking the floor came from the stairwell. The rhythm was steady, carrying deliberate caution, each step like a heavy drumstick pounding against his nerves.

A flicker of unease rose in Lin Xiu's heart. He knew something unusual was about to happen.

Lin Xiu spun around instantly, and a miniature shield sprang from his armored arm—the person who had come was not an enemy, but someone more troublesome.

"Rex Carter." He spoke the name with certainty.

Three days earlier, in an underground bar, he had seen a photo of this retired military intelligence agent. A silver bullet-shaped earring hung from Rex's left earlobe, now swaying lightly with his steps and glinting beneath the lights.

Rex stopped five meters away, his right hand hovering over the holster at his waist.

Motor oil stained his leather jacket, giving off a pungent smell. Dark stubble covered his jaw, but his gaze was like the poisoned tip of a blade. "The energy disturbance beneath Brooklyn has increased by 17% every hour since last night." His gaze swept over the azure light on Lin Xiu's face. "Someone said there was an illegal energy deal happening here. My guess... it's you?"

Lin Xiu did not answer.

He noticed red dirt on Rex's boot soles—red dirt from the abandoned chemical plant in South Brooklyn, a transfer point for the underground intelligence network.

That meant Rex had followed him for at least six hours, from the laboratory to here.

"I'm just a graduate student," he said, while using nanoparticles to condense an ordinary circuit board in his palm. The board glimmered faintly in his hand.

Rex's gaze shifted between the crystal wreckage and the circuit board in Lin Xiu's palm. Then he suddenly smiled. "A graduate student?

Then explain why the wreckage of J-07 is here." He patted the satellite phone at his waist. "Even S.H.I.E.L.D. hasn't equipped this model on a large scale."

Eileen suddenly cut in. "How do you know about J-07?"

Rex glanced at her, his earring flashing coldly beneath the lights. "Miss, there are no secrets in the underground world." His thumb lightly rubbed the holster clasp, the gesture carrying a hint of threat. "Now you have two choices: tell me where the energy shard is, or..."

"Or what?" Lin Xiu cut him off.

The armor flowed beneath his skin, nanoparticles gathering through his veins toward his fingertips in an orderly surge, like ants moving house.

He could feel it—at a single thought, he could have nanobots corrode Rex's holster into scrap metal. But the Oracle System warned him that a miniature EMP was hidden beneath Rex's tactical vest. Acting now would expose the armor's weakness.

Rex's pupils suddenly contracted.

He stared into Lin Xiu's eyes, where the azure glow flowed slowly like some living thing. "You... aren't human."

"I'm more troublesome than a human." Lin Xiu curled his lips. "I'll give you ten minutes to find out where J-07 came from." He bent down and picked up a crystal fragment. "In ten minutes, I'll go to the old post office in Red Earth Alley in the South District. You'll find the answers you want there."

Rex did not move.

Only after Lin Xiu pulled Eileen toward the stairwell did Rex take out his phone and quickly dial several numbers. "Send two teams to keep a close watch on Red Earth Alley.

And..." He stared at the blue ripples left on the ground. "Contact Old Jin at East River Pier. Ask whether there's been any alien-tech smuggling lately."

A fine drizzle fell over Brooklyn late at night. The rain was as thin and dense as cowhair, lightly striking Lin Xiu's face and bringing a trace of chill.

Lin Xiu stood atop an abandoned factory, worrying about what Rex might do and wondering why he had chosen this place to deal with everything.

The nanoparticles on the armor's surface automatically gathered into a skintight combat suit. Rainwater slid off his shoulders and pooled by his feet, the puddles glimmering faintly in the moonlight.

He opened the laptop he carried with him. The blue glow from the screen gave his face a sickly cast—Stark Industries' database had denied access again, with the permission notice reading "S.H.I.E.L.D. Level One Classified."

"Looks like I'll have to try another way," he murmured.

His fingers flew across the keyboard, entering a string of encrypted code and sending it to Quantum Hive, a darknet forum—the secret stronghold of hackers around the world, where even S.H.I.E.L.D. could only monitor surface-level information.

The moment he pressed Send, the laptop screen suddenly flickered.

A line of blood-red code burst from the lower-right corner and formed the hourglass emblem of the Time Management Authority in the center of the screen before vanishing in an instant.

Lin Xiu's pupils narrowed—that was not an ordinary hacking attack, but dimensional-level information interference.

"Unknown surveillance detected." The Oracle System's alert carried static, harsh like grating noise. "Recommend immediately disconnecting from the network."

Lin Xiu closed the laptop and looked up at the sky.

At some point, the rain had stopped. A crack had torn through the clouds, revealing half a moon. Moonlight spilled across the ground like silver ribbons.

Under the moonlight, he saw a glow flickering on the distant horizon. It was not a star, nor an airplane. It looked more like... the residual energy of some kind of portal.

The nanotech armor suddenly grew hot over his chest, the heat burning there like flames.

He touched the spot and felt the nanoparticles arranging themselves beneath his skin into a new pattern—a tiny electronic signal icon, as if hinting at something.

"Looks like I'll have to test the new function tomorrow," he said softly, then turned and walked into the night.

Behind him, that mysterious glow flickered twice before disappearing behind the clouds.