There was no wind here.
Or rather, the wind here died tens of thousands of years ago.
When Shen Qingqiu awoke, she felt as if countless tiny grains of sand were pricking her back, icy and bone-chilling. She slowly opened her eyes, and what she saw was no longer the swirling snow of Broken Cloud Cliff, but a gray, hazy sky, like an eternal twilight.
There was no sun, no moon, only several enormous, broken metal rings, silently suspended above the clouds, like the dismembered remains of a god, stretching across the edge of the heavens.
"Where...am I?"
She tried to sit up, but a sharp pain shot through her palms.
Looking down, Shen Qingqiu's pupils contracted slightly.
Below her was neither soil nor rock. It was a "sea" formed by countless broken swords and halberds, shattered armor, and unknown metal fragments.
As far as the eye could see, this sea of metal stretched endlessly. Some swords and halberds remained embedded in the ground, their blades long since rusted, only half the hilt stubbornly pointing to the sky in the dim light; some armor was reduced to empty shells, from which eerie moss emanating a faint blue light grew.
This was no human world.
This was clearly a vast, silent interstellar graveyard.
"Seventeen!" The moment the memory returned, Shen Qingqiu's heart clenched. Ignoring the cuts on her hands from the metal fragments, she stumbled and crawled through the ruins, searching.
In that destructive white light, he had shielded her with his body.
And it was he, in that final fall, who had cushioned her fall with his remaining arm.
"Seventeen…where are you? Answer me!" In the empty graveyard, only her echo reverberated through the deathly metallic jungle, her voice trembling with sobs.
Finally, in the shadow of a massive, mountain-sized bronze wreck, she saw a familiar black figure.
At that moment, Shen Qingqiu's breath almost stopped.
The man who had once been as powerful as a god, who had cleaved the Heavenly Eye with a single sword strike, was now cowering in the deepest shadows. He leaned against the cold bronze wall, his head bowed, his body in a posture of extreme self-protection.
His black robes were tattered, revealing a gruesome body beneath.
Shen Qingqiu reached out, trembling, to touch him, but froze in mid-air.
His right arm… was gone.
Severed cleanly at the shoulder, the wound not bleeding, but charred black, with a few broken transistors and faintly flickering blue arcs of electricity visible.
And his face…
As if sensing Shen Qingqiu's presence, Seventeen, who had been dormant, shuddered violently.
He didn't raise his head, but instead buried his face even deeper into his knees, even trying to use his remaining left hand to pull at the tattered hem of his robe to cover his face and the severed arm.
"Don't…look." A hoarse, broken voice squeezed from his throat, carrying a heartbreaking sense of humility and panic.
"Go…Qingqiu…go…"
He was trembling.
Not from pain, but from shame.
He was the most perfect weapon, a killer with godlike looks. But at this moment, he felt like a pile of scrap metal, a hideous monster. An unprecedented error code appeared in his logic library—inferiority complex.
Shen Qingqiu's heart felt like it had been brutally crushed and then soaked in a jar of vinegar.
She didn't leave.
She knelt on the sharp metal fragments, her knees bleeding but feeling nothing. She moved slowly towards him, forcefully pulling away his hands that were covering his face.
"Look at me." Seventeen desperately tried to dodge, his intact left eye tightly closed, his eyelashes trembling like a butterfly struggling in a storm. And his right side of his face…
The skin there had disappeared.
Beneath it lay a silvery-white metallic skeleton and a dark red, now-extinguished electronic prosthetic eye.
It was a cruel, raw mechanical presence.
Enough to terrify any ordinary young lady.
But Shen Qingqiu simply watched silently.
Her fingers gently traced the cold metal of his cheekbone, the warmth of her fingertips seeping into his icy core along the intricate lines.
"Why did you hide?"
Shen Qingqiu's voice was as soft as a feather, landing on his shattered soul.
"Because... it's broken." Seventeen finally opened his left eye, his gaze a deathly gray. "Ugly... a defective product... unworthy... to protect." In his fundamental logic, weapons without value should be destroyed. He wasn't even a complete sword now.
Shen Qingqiu didn't speak.
She simply lowered her head, bringing her face close to his mutilated features.
Then, she placed a deeply reverent kiss on his dark red, menacing electronic prosthetic eye.
Seventeen froze, feeling as if his core processor was about to melt.
"Who said it's a defective product?" Shen Qingqiu looked up, tears welling in her eyes, yet her smile was radiant. She pointed to the endless ruins around them, her voice resolute:
"Look at these broken swords scattered everywhere. They're crying because they were abandoned."
"But you're different."
She grasped his only remaining left hand and pressed it to her heart. "You're still alive. You still have me. As long as I'm here, I can fix you."
"I will give you the best arm, the strongest bones." A near-fanatical obsession shone in Shen Qingqiu's eyes, a possessive and creative desire unique to her, a woman's own. "I will recast you into the most perfect god in the world, so that all the gods and Buddhas in the heavens can only look up to you." Seventeen stared at her, dumbfounded.
At that moment, the light in Shen Qingqiu's eyes shone brighter than any star he had ever seen. That light pierced through the darkness of his self-loathing, rekindling the embers of his dying embers.
[System Log: Reboot successful.]
[Core Command: Survive. For her.] The lifelessness in Seventeen's eyes faded, and a faint but resolute blue light rekindled in his left eye. He grasped Shen Qingqiu's hand in return, weak yet using all his strength.
"Okay."
He whispered, "I'll listen to...you."
...After calming Seventeen down, survival became the biggest issue.
Although this place was called "Burial Sword Abyss," Shen Qingqiu, after activating [Overclocking Vision], discovered that it was actually a massive **"electronic waste landfill"**.
A thin layer of spiritual energy permeated the air.
No, to be precise, it was radiation energy leaking from the batteries of countless discarded magical artifacts.
"This radiation is highly toxic to mortals, but for Seventeen, it's a tonic."
Shen Qingqiu made her judgment.
She settled Seventeen in a sheltered spot among the bronze ruins and began scavenging in the nearby ruins.
Most of the things here were completely destroyed, reduced to stubborn iron. But under Shen Qingqiu's golden eyes, capable of seeing through the structure of matter, even trash could be transformed into treasure.
"This is... Thousand-Year Black Iron?"
Shen Qingqiu dug out a dark lump of iron from a pile of mud.
Visual Analysis: [High-density shape memory alloy. Status: Dormant.]
"This is... Resurrection Grass?"
Inside a massive mecha skull, she discovered a small plant with purple leaves. The veins of the leaves didn't flow with sap, but with luminous microcurrents.
Visual Analysis: [Mutant plant. Rich in highly concentrated electrolytes.]
Shen Qingqiu, like a diligent little hamster, painstakingly collected hope for life in this graveyard filled with the aura of death.
Just as she was about to turn back, a strange sound caught her attention.
Crack, crack.
It sounded like metal chewing bones.
Shen Qingqiu held her breath and hid behind a broken tombstone.
Not far away, a jet-black, three-eyed wild dog (or rather, a mutated exoskeleton creature) was munching on a corpse.
It was the body of a cultivator who had recently fallen to the ground; judging from his clothing, he was likely a disciple of a small sect, probably who had strayed into this place.
The wild dog devoured the flesh and blood, swallowing fragments of magical artifacts from the cultivator's body. Its stomach emitted a faint red glow, clearly obtaining energy by digesting metal.
[Carrion-eating Beast: Scavenger Type I. Danger Level: Low.]
[Weakness: Abdominal Energy Core.]
Shen Qingqiu's eyes narrowed.
Her current body lacked spiritual power; she couldn't defeat this thing.
But Seventeen needed that "energy core."
She glanced at the piece of "Millennial Mystic Iron" in her hand, then at the broken bowstring lying nearby.
Five minutes later.
Shen Qingqiu emerged from the shadows.
In her hand lay an extremely rudimentary, even somewhat comical, "crossbow." It was assembled from two leg bones for the arms, a bowstring for the string, and arrowheads crafted from a piece of shape-memory alloy.
This thing emitted no spiritual energy fluctuations and didn't even conform to aerodynamics.
But with the enhancement of [Logic Reconstruction], it was a deadly scythe that would never strike.
"Hey, you ugly thing." Shen Qingqiu picked up a stone and hurled it at the wild dog.
The wild dog suddenly raised its head, its three eyes gleaming with ferocity, and roared as it pounced on Shen Qingqiu.
It was fast, carrying a foul stench.
Shen Qingqiu didn't dodge. She simply calmly raised the bone crossbow, golden data streams in her eyes frantically calculating.
Wind speed, humidity, the wild dog's muscle contraction rate, bone gaps…
The moment the wild dog was only three meters away from her, its jaws agape.
Bang—!
A muffled sound.
The black arrow shot out in a bizarre spiral trajectory, piercing the wild dog's open mouth, penetrating its palate, and precisely embedding itself in a piece of cartilage at the back of its head—the location of its central chip.
The wild dog didn't even utter a cry before collapsing to the ground, its momentum causing it to slide to Shen Qingqiu's feet.
Shen Qingqiu expressionlessly pulled out her dagger and dissected the wild dog's abdomen.
A still-warm, red crystal rolled out.
"Dinner's ready." She wiped the sweat from her brow, picked up the crystal, and turned to run towards Seventeen's hiding place.
...Night fell.
The night in Star Graveyard wasn't dark, because the surrounding abandoned metal mountains occasionally flickered with ghostly light.
Seventeen leaned against the bronze wall, watching Shen Qingqiu busy herself.
She used a few discarded energy panels to build a makeshift shelter, and then, from somewhere, obtained some dry moss to start a small fire.
"Open your mouth." Shen Qingqiu held the treated red crystal to Seventeen's lips.
Seventeen obediently opened his mouth and took it in.
A warm current instantly flowed through his body, and a trace of color finally returned to his ashen face. The pain in his severed arm also lessened considerably.
"Are you feeling better?" Shen Qingqiu sat beside him, gently tidying his disheveled long hair.
"Mmm." Seventeen nodded, his left hand instinctively reaching for hers, but he stopped halfway, afraid that his chill would frighten her.
Shen Qingqiu, however, took his hand and warmed it against her bosom.
"Seventeen, look."
She pointed to the ruins ahead.
In the chest cavity of a massive, long-rusted steel giant, a tiny white flower was stubbornly pushing its way out from the thick rust.
The petals were translucent, and the stamen shimmered with a faint fluorescence. In this devastated steel tomb, it was breathtakingly beautiful, yet so lonely it brought tears to one's eyes.
"What...is that?" Seventeen asked.
"That's a 'Bone Flower'." Shen Qingqiu leaned on his shoulder, her voice soft. "Legend says it only blooms in the most desperate places of death, after absorbing the blood of gods and demons."
"It blooms on rusted bones, yet still yearns for the light."
Shen Qingqiu turned her head, looking at Seventeen's profile—incomplete yet still captivating.
"Just like us."
"Even if we fall into this abyss of star tombs, even if we're covered in rust, we can still bloom."
Seventeen looked at the flower, then at the woman beside him.
He didn't understand poetry, nor did he understand romance.
But he felt that the flower wasn't as beautiful as her.
He lowered his head slightly and placed a somewhat cold, rusty kiss on the top of her head.
"Qingqiu…"
"You are my…flower."
In this silent interstellar graveyard, under the gaze of countless abandoned divine weapons.
Two souls, forsaken by the world, spent their first night in this alien realm, warmed by each other's bodies.
The Milky Way sleeps, and flowers bloom from rusted bones.