Urban Plundering: I Corrupted The System!

A soft knock echoed on the bedroom door.

That was it—just a knock. But the silence that followed hit like a loaded gun sliding across a glass table in a room full of ghosts.

It came soft.

Just a knock.

Barely there, like it hadn't meant to interrupt. Like it was apologizing for existing.

But in that room—fortified by soul-seals that could strangle gods, chaos runes carved with Parker's own blood, and layers of existential foldings that bent reality into knots—it sounded like a gunshot to the spine. Like death knocking politely instead of kicking down the door.

Four heads turned toward the bedroom door with the synchronized precision of predators sensing prey.

Tessa blinked, brows lifted in innocent confusion, still caught between tired, sex, sensation and wakefulness.

But Parker, Maya, and Zhang Ruoyun?

Their eyes narrowed to razor slits. Their breaths hitched like strings pulled too tight. Something primal and ancient inside each of them coiled like a spring loaded with ten thousand years of paranoia.

Nothing got this close. Not without being noticed. Not without permission. Not without leaving a trail of radiation to their senses, dimensional scarring, or at least the faint scent of violated space-time.

Not here—in the palace's inner sanctum, most especially the mansion within the palace where Parker and his family stayed and his bedroom, behind barriers that could make entire pantheons weep blood trying to unravel them.

And yet…

Knock.

A second time. Just as soft. Almost sweet. Like a child asking permission to enter their parents' room after a nightmare.

"Daddy~"

The voice floated through the air, featherlight and familiar. The pitch perfect. The tone exactly right. The exact way the "~" curled like affection in motion, like love made audible.

Parker's world stopped breathing.

So did Maya's.

Zhang Ruoyun didn't blink. Her flames had frozen in her chest like fire turned to ice.

Only Tessa frowned slightly, still processing. "Wait... did she just—?"

But by then, they were already gone.

Parker and Maya vanished in a flash of flickering shadowlight, folding themselves through the space between heartbeats and hope, reaching the frame before the second syllable of that impossible voice had finished vibrating in air that shouldn't have carried it.

The door didn't open. It didn't unlock.

It disappeared.

Wiped from reality like it was a suggestion that had never earned its place in existence. Gone with the kind of thoroughness that left nothing—not even the memory of hinges.

And where the door had been, framed in quiet gold light and falling embers that tasted like starlight and sorrow—

She stood.

A girl. Barely into her late teens. Her violet hair still like silk laced with twilight, cascading over shoulders too small to carry the weight of divinity. Eyes swirling with galaxies—not metaphorically, but literally. Actual stars spinning in irises that held the depth of infinite space.

No aura blaring her presence like a cosmic siren. No divine scent announcing her arrival like burning ozone. No reality distortion, no dimensional wake, no trace of the being that had taken her.

And yet—

Nyxavere.

Their daughter.

Their firstborn.

The child of chaos and order, balance and void.

The one who had disappeared in the chaos like smoke dispersed by wind. Gone. Vanished with that thing—that entity.

She was here.

Standing in their doorway like she'd never left.

"Cute ball!"

"BABY—!"

"Nyxavere!"

Their voices overlapped with Zhang's, cracked and breathless and raw with hours of suppressed grief.

The moment they saw her—really saw her, processed that she was real and breathing and there—their bodies moved faster than thought, faster than light, faster than the space between wish and fulfillment.

Parker's arms around her shoulders, strong enough to crush mountains but gentle as whispered prayers. Maya cradling her head like she was made of spun glass and crystallized hope. Tessa launching herself forward, clinging to her arm and waist like she'd never let go again, like she could anchor this moment in place through sheer desperate affection.

It was chaos. It was raw. It was the kind of family embrace that made entire galaxies pause their spinning to remember what it meant to love something more than existence itself.

Even Zhang Ruoyun took half a step forward, pulled by the gravity of reunion.

But stopped.

Because something felt…

Wrong.

Not dangerous. Not evil. Not corrupted or twisted or false.

Just… off.

Like a song played in the right key but at the wrong tempo. Like sunrise happening three degrees off-course. Like a perfect photograph with shadows falling the wrong way.

Parker was saying her name over and over again like a prayer, like a mantra, like he could make her more real through repetition. Maya kept brushing her cheeks with trembling fingers like she wasn't convinced they were solid, like she expected her daughter to dissolve under her touch.

And Nyxavere?

Nyxavere just stood there—letting them. Smiling. Warm. Patient. Giggles soft and content as she said, "I missed you all so much…"

Her voice was perfect. Every inflection exactly right. The way she said "missed" with that little catch in her throat that she'd had since she was small. The way she leaned into Maya's touch. The way she ruffled Tessa's hair with the exact gesture she'd always used.

Her arms were small. Thin. Barely strong enough to wrap around her mother and father's shoulders. But she hugged them like she hadn't been gone for centuries. Like there wasn't a trail of divine destruction still smoldering in the void behind her. Like she was just their little girl coming home from school.

She was… perfect.

Too perfect.

Zhang Ruoyun didn't move from her place. Didn't speak. Didn't even breathe. Her eyes—sharp as razors honed by perfect balance—watched Nyxavere like a hawk staring at prey that moved just slightly wrong.

Parker had built this palace like a fortress lifetimes ago. Not just physically, but spiritually, conceptually, existentially. Layers upon layers of protection that could make gods weep just trying to understand them. No entity, no concept, no fragment of corrupted will could enter without setting off a hundred different alarms that would wake the dead and alert the living and probably annoy several abstract concepts in the process.

Even when the Princess brought into existence into this lifetime, nothing about it changed but the improved modernity to it.

So how had she done it?

How had Nyxavere just... appeared? Walked through defenses that could stop pantheons? Bypassed sensors that tracked thoughts before they were thought without the four knowing? Even if she was Omniscient, that fit would've been impossible, not as long as Zhang ruled Balance, not when Parker was Omnipotent.