Ren shrugged. “Because losing feels the same as winning.”

She laughed, and it sounded like wind through graveyard bells. “Perhaps. Or perhaps I’ll eat the game instead. The corporations who built this prison. The players who came to exploit my power. I haven’t decided.”

Intrigued, she offered him a deal: reach the heart of the labyrinth without using a single wish, and she would grant him the power to leave the game forever—truly leave, not just log out. He accepted.

Ren stepped forward. “Then I’ll stay.”

“You don’t wish for anything,” she said. “Why play?”

“I’ll stay in the game. Not as a player. As a warden. You teach me what you are, and I’ll remind you what you could be.” He met her gaze. “That’s my wish.”

In the floating city of Tenjin-kyo, where neon lights tangled with ancient shrines, a new virtual reality game called Kitsune no Yūgi had taken the world by storm. Players wore sleek headsets and entered the Spectral Labyrinth, a sprawling digital forest where they competed to collect fragments of a mythical mirror. The prize? One wish—granted by the nine-tailed fox spirit who ruled the game.

For the first time in centuries, Tamamo-no-Mae had no clever retort. The game glitched. The labyrinth dissolved. When players logged in the next day, they found only an empty field of white flowers—and two figures sitting beneath a digital sakura tree, one with fox ears, one with a crooked smile.