Revive, My Girl!

After shouting that line, the agent leading the team put away his recorder and sighed in resignation.

Nearby, the supermarket manager clutched half a freezer door's glass panel and wept as though his own father had died.

"My seafood tank... my compressor... Third time this month..."

"Manager, stop crying." An older woman walked past with a reusable bag. "Boxed meals are half price. Keep crying and you won't even get any soup."

The fresh-food section soon returned to its usual bustle.

The monster was dead, boxed meals were half price, and life went on.

Xingfuli Apartment, Room 703.

The kitchen light buzzed overhead.

Su Bai sat cross-legged at the dining table with four boxes of teriyaki chicken-leg meals in front of him.

Two were already empty. The rice in the third was disappearing fast.

Half an hour earlier, he had dropped his transformation in the alley behind the supermarket, pulled on a hoodie, and strolled back into the fresh-food section just in time for the last of the half-price meals.

Four boxes, 7.9 Federal Coins each.

He had saved 31.6.

When he got home, Su Xiaoxiao had planted herself in the entryway, hands on her hips, and blocked his path for ages.

"Hajige! Your little sister ran into a monster, and you ran off first!"

"That was a strategic retreat." Su Bai handed her a boxed meal. "I remember Lady Ziwei, whom you admire so much, once said that speed in escaping deserves the highest praise."

"You!" Su Xiaoxiao snatched the meal. "I'll decide whether to forgive you after I finish this!"

Then she took it to her room. Her keyboard had been clacking ever since.

"Master."

Kabi floated above the table with his arms crossed.

"The way you're eating right now looks worse than that toad did."

"What do you know?" Su Bai swallowed a mouthful of rice. "This is the spoils-of-war accounting phase."

"I'm not talking about how you eat." Kabi flipped over in midair. "I'm talking about that Frost Toad."

"An F-rank, third-stage monster with a Magic Power Scale reading of 210, and all it stole was half a box of frozen hairtail."

"You crushed its jaw with one stomp."

"That force, that angle—even a debt collection agency's top enforcer would call you senior."

"It was about to fire a freezing wave." Su Bai picked up a piece of chicken. "The freezer was hooked up to a compressor. If it had frozen solid, the chain reaction would've blown up half the fresh-food section."

"So you stepped on its jaw first, slapped every ice spike back at it, then pulled out its core and bagged it." Kabi counted on his stubby fingers. "Smooth from start to finish."

"Master, did you look around when you pulled out its core?"

"Why would I?"

"Those two high school girls." Kabi swayed in the air. "They admired you, but they were scared, too. That girl Xia Ning—her hands were shaking."

Su Bai's chopsticks paused.

"What was she shaking for? I don't eat people."

"No, you don't," Kabi muttered. "You just look awful when you do eat."

Su Bai couldn't be bothered to argue with an energy-powered french fry.

He took the deep-blue crystal core from his pocket and set it on the table.

It was the size of a fingernail and gleamed coldly beneath the light.

"F-rank, third-stage, ice attribute." He opened a black-market price group on his phone. "The official buyback price is fifteen thousand, but that was last month."

"After the fight in the West District, the Monster Hunting Bureau bought up every core it could get. Black-market supply dried up completely."

"Now attribute cores go up in price every day. List this one for thirty-two thousand, and people will fight over it."

"Thirty-two thousand." Kabi leaned in for a look. "Master, you've got two million sitting in your Storage Bag."

"Two million is two million. Thirty-two thousand is thirty-two thousand." Su Bai held the crystal core up to the light. "Money's money, no matter the amount."

He put the core away and planned to have Guoguo make a trip to Xinghai Tower tomorrow.

Black Crow had been buying cores in a hurry lately. There was room to negotiate.

"If the Will of the World knew it had chosen a bookkeeper, it would probably rewrite the selection criteria overnight."

"Good." Su Bai shoveled in another mouthful of rice. "Give my spot to Xiaoxiao. I'll focus on delivering takeout."

"Her?" Kabi glanced toward the next room. "On her first day transformed, she'd be too busy posing for selfies. A monster would smack her straight into the ground."

"True." Su Bai nodded. "Guess I'll have to do it."

"...You actually considered it?"

Su Bai set down the crystal core, suddenly remembering something.

"Kabi, let me ask you something."

"Go ahead."

"This power of belief can manifest the Great Scythe and conjure up this outfit." He tapped the table. "Can it just conjure Federal Coins?"

"Conjure Federal Coins?"

"Yeah." Su Bai's eyes lit up. "Nothing crazy. Seventy or eighty thousand a day, and I wouldn't have to go out killing monsters all the time."

Kabi stared at him for three seconds.

"Master, do you know how many years you get for counterfeiting?"

"The money I make would be real."

"Then do you know that creating something through the power of belief requires an equivalent conceptual anchor?"

Kabi floated in front of him.

"The Great Scythe can manifest because the concept of 'cutting' is pure enough for even a three-year-old to understand."

"What anchors Federal Coins? The Federation's credit system."

"To make real money, you'd first have to fully understand the Federation's financial structure, the source of its authority to issue currency, and the logic behind its credit backing."

"...That much work?"

"By the time you understood all that, you could be governor of the Federation's central bank." Kabi spread his stubby arms. "Why bother conjuring money? Just approve funding for yourself."

"Fair point." Su Bai considered it. "Then let me ask it another way."

"When a monster tears through a neighborhood, can I turn back time, restore the neighborhood, and save the people?"

Kabi's expression turned uncharacteristically grave.

The chubby sprite said nothing. He floated to the corner of the table and picked up a nutshell Su Bai had cracked earlier.

It had broken into three pieces.

"Watch."

A trace of Purple-Gold Magic Power seeped from his stubby hands and wrapped around the fragments.

The three pieces rose, their broken edges aligned, and they fitted together without a seam.

An intact nutshell hung motionless in the air.

"It worked?" Su Bai sat up straight.

"Keep watching."

One second. Two.

At the fifth second, fine cracks spread across the nutshell.

No sound. No warning.

The whole shell crumbled into powder ten times finer than the original fragments and sifted down.

The air above where the powder landed twisted.

Several black creases too fine to make out flickered into view, then vanished.

The hairs on Su Bai's back stood on end.

"What was that?"

"Spatial annihilation folds." Kabi brushed the powder from his hands. "Physical reconstruction only forces matter back together."

"Even if every piece fits perfectly, the internal stress structure is wrong. It won't last five seconds."

"Reversing time provokes resistance from the laws governing deep-space dimensions."

"The magic power I just used wasn't even one ten-thousandth of what you have at full strength, and it still caused annihilation folds."

"If you tried to rewind an entire neighborhood at full power—"

Kabi paused.

"The neighborhood wouldn't be restored. The local space would collapse entirely, wiping people and buildings alike off the map."

Su Bai was quiet for a while.

"Then what about resurrection?"