Playing Along with the Scheme

The afternoon classroom was bathed in lazy sunlight, chalk dust drifting through the beams. The new transfer student, Su Rui, rested her chin on her hand, her gaze like a probe as she precisely scanned every microexpression on Xiang Yi's face and every curl of his fingers as he faced the impossibly difficult chaos problem—standard intelligence-gathering posture.

"Hey, Xiang Yi," she said intimately, tapping the problem with a fingertip. "This one's really hard. Can you solve it?" Her tone was asking, but her eyes held a cold evaluation.

Xiang Yi lowered his gaze to the paper. On his twelve-year-old face, he piled on just the right amount of confusion, his brow faintly furrowed, his voice carrying a boy's particular hesitation. "It looks so complicated... These symbols are like heavenly script." He deliberately called the Greek letter "σ" a "curvy O," seeming utterly clumsy.

The line of Su Rui's lips relaxed by an imperceptible degree. It was the reaction she had expected. "Give it a try! You solved the geometry problem fastest last time." She leaned closer, her eyes sweeping over the blank sheet of scratch paper covered only in messy doodles—completing her confirmation scan.

"Okay..." Xiang Yi picked up his pen, his movements deliberately awkward. The pen tip hovered, then fell, writing several basic, slightly crooked formulas. He "struggled" through the derivation, pausing at the right moments, a look of sudden realization appearing on his face before he continued writing—only to "accidentally" substitute the wrong value for a key coefficient, sending the whole approach off course.

Every pause, every flash of realization, fit perfectly into the rhythm of a hardworking young genius. Only the faint beads of sweat at his temples revealed the strain of his meticulous disguise.

"Ah! Here... should I use iteration?" Xiang Yi had a timely "flash of inspiration," his face showing embarrassed excitement, while the logic beneath his pen remained fractured and wrong.

Su Rui watched his diligent yet misguided steps, and her shoulders lowered almost imperceptibly—a sign that her vigilance had eased. She nodded slightly, encouraging him. "Your approach is right! But here..." Her finger precisely indicated the computational mistake. "Did you get the coefficient wrong? Shouldn't it be 1/φ?"

From the corner of his eye, Xiang Yi precisely caught that subtle shift in her shoulders—like a hunter noting the rhythm of prey's breathing. He immediately showed a grateful look of realization. "Oh! Right! Thank you, Su Rui!" He quickly corrected it, playing the "clever but guideable boy" she wanted.

At the back of the classroom, in an unnoticed corner, Guiguzi's phantom blended into the surroundings. His withered fingers silently formed seals, light particles flickering at the edges of his projection like a dying candle in the wind. Every time Xuan Weizi altered the ceiling camera data—perfectly replacing Xiang Yi's true derivation process with footage of chaotic scratch work befitting a "hardworking genius"—the Spirit Core at Guiguzi's old wound sent stabbing pain through him. He endured it, maintaining the fragile balance and turning precise cognitive distortion into indecipherable "visual dust" on the surveillance footage.

Ring-ring-ring—

The dismissal bell rang. Su Rui swiftly packed her bag, and as she turned and swung it over her shoulder, there came a soft click—a silver keychain, an eagle with spread wings encircling a ring, was "carelessly" flicked loose and slid precisely to Xiang Yi's feet—the emblem of S.H.I.E.L.D.!

The instant the emblem hit the ground, Xiang Yi had already scanned it completely. His frozen will did not stir in the slightest. Maintaining a boy's curiosity and calm, he bent down and picked up the cold emblem. "Su Rui, you dropped something." His voice was steady.

Su Rui turned around, her face displaying just the right amount of surprise and chagrin. "Oh! Thank you!" She snatched it back quickly. "It's a souvenir my uncle brought back from abroad. I almost lost it." Her tone was light and natural.

"Oh, pretty cool." Xiang Yi nodded blandly and lowered his head to pack his bag.

The classroom emptied. Xiang Yi walked to an old, blurry mirror by the wall beside the back door. In the reflection, the deliberate innocence and curiosity on that twelve-year-old face receded like the tide, leaving only bottomless exhaustion and a near-vacant calm. The corners of his mouth were stiff from maintaining the disguise for so long.

"I'll play along to the end." Facing his reflection, his lips moved soundlessly, cold determination burning beneath his weary eyes.

He pushed open the door and merged into the crowd of students leaving school. As he forced himself to remain calm while passing through the dim corridor of the base, his eyes swept across a row of surveillance screens on the wall. On one of them, Xiao Yu sat quietly in a corner, pale, slender fingers unconsciously toying with several colored pebbles. The instant her fingertips touched one, a faint pale-green glow, dimmer than a firefly's light and nearly transparent, flickered and vanished in an instant—so fast it could have been an illusion. In the cold image, her tiny figure was like a candle by a window on a blizzard night, liable to go out at any moment, so fragile it made the heart clench. The image flashed through his exhausted mind.

Hidden Star Court, underground core. The cold air carried the scent of ozone. When Xiang Yi pushed open the heavy alloy door, the last trace of boyishness vanished from his face, leaving only profound exhaustion and rock-like composure. At the center of the massive holographic screen was a frozen image of him bending down to pick up the eagle emblem.

"Analysis report." Xiang Yi's voice was utterly flat.

Guiguzi's phantom solidified. Stroking his beard, he said, "The probe was obvious. Dropping the token was seventy percent testing, thirty percent warning. The surveillance footage has been handled cleanly." With a light sweep of his sleeve, the screen switched to a replay from the security room—showing only a focused boy performing slightly clumsy calculations. "What ordinary eyes see is all by my design. Even if an expert reviews it, they will struggle to distinguish truth from falsehood."

The Lanling King's figure seemed to condense from the shadows, appearing half a step behind Xiang Yi. His voice was low, like a blade leaving its sheath, while his thumb unconsciously pushed his dagger out until a sliver of cold light showed. "My lord, should this girl... be eliminated?" The air instantly froze.

"No need." Xiang Yi raised a hand, his gaze fixed on the screen. "She is bait, and she is also a mouthpiece. Killing her would be the same as exposing ourselves." A cold curve formed at his lips. "Since they want to see a Xiang Yi who is 'smart but harmless,' then we'll put on a show for them. I can play this role."

The killing intent in the Lanling King's deep-purple eyes receded like a tide, becoming deeper solemnity. He nodded and silently stepped half a pace back.

"Mr. Guiguzi, keep monitoring Su Rui. Her communication trail after she leaves school is the priority."

"Yes."

"Lanling, raise the outer perimeter alert by one level."

"By your command."

Xiang Yi turned his gaze toward Ming Shiyin, who was resting with his eyes closed. "Mr. Ming, where is the momentum heading? Is S.H.I.E.L.D.'s attention a disaster or a blessing? Is there any turning point?"

Ming Shiyin slowly opened his eyes, galaxies rising and fading within them. His gaunt fingers pointed toward the core of the floating Armillary Sphere. The star tracks spun faster, emitting a profound hum.

The moment his fingertip touched the core, the violet-black energy left behind by the Ancient One's gaze, coiled around Xiang Yi's mental core, suddenly erupted! Like a starving venomous dragon, it sensed the power of divination and lunged at the star-track core! The star tracks were instantly stained an ominous violet-black, their structure creaking as it twisted! Ming Shiyin's body jerked backward as if struck by a hammer. His face turned a sickly gold, and with a pfft, he sprayed a mouthful of blood over the floating star chart! Scarlet droplets rolled between the star tracks and evaporated, filling the air with the sharp stench of iron!

Just as the violet-black venomous dragon was about to crush the star tracks—

A faint yet resilient cyan starlight stubbornly pierced through at the edge of the dim nebula representing Xiang Yi's fate track! The frequency of that cyan glow's flickering unexpectedly achieved a perfect resonance, exact down to the fraction of a second, with the green waveform on a split screen in the corner of the main console—pulsing in real time to represent Xiao Yu's life frequency—for 0.7 seconds! The cyan light and green wave flashed in unison, and their resonant gleam even briefly drove away the violet-black corruption on the star tracks!

"A variable has emerged! A thread of life is hidden within this 'Tender Bud'!" Ming Shiyin's bloodstained finger trembled as it nearly pierced the virtual cyan star. His hoarse voice rose, filled with fear and weakness, while his gaze shot toward Xiang Yi like lightning. "But this hope is like drinking poison to quench thirst! Borrow a fraction of its life force, and you erode a fraction of its source of life! To seize it by force would be no different from—FORCING! FLOWERS! TO BLOOM! AND BREAKING! THE BUD!!!"

The identity of "Tender Bud"—Xiao Yu—had been revealed through the energy resonance!

The warning of life and its price—"forcing flowers to bloom and breaking the bud"—was cruel enough to suffocate!

Xiang Yi froze like an ice sculpture. The frail little figure on the surveillance screen, the faint green glow that had flashed at her fingertips, instantly overlapped with the cyan star representing life in the blood-lit divination! "Forcing flowers to bloom and breaking the bud..." Ming Shiyin's bloody warning was like a poisoned ice spike, driving viciously into the deepest nerve in his heart—the one called "bottom line"! For the first time, an almost instinctive, fierce resistance and alarm exploded beyond his cold calculations! He stared fixedly at Xiao Yu on the surveillance screen. Unaware of the danger, radiating that faint green light, she now appeared impossibly fragile and impossibly glaring against the divination's bloody glow.

The base's cold air solidified. All that remained was the Armillary Sphere's low, intermittent hum after being damaged, the glaring scarlet slowly flowing across the star chart, and on the screen, that tender figure, so thin it was suffocating to behold beneath the cyan starlight and blood-red glow. A cruel choice concerning survival and his bottom line settled silently upon Xiang Yi's shoulders like heavy shackles.