The holographic Virgin Mary flickered above Manhattan's ruins, her pixelated hands perpetually blessing the toxic rain. Lin Yeli adjusted the frayed wiring of her prosthetic arm, its exposed joints sparking with every step. Twenty years after the Digital Revelation – when God's cloud servers crashed and took civilization with them – the Financial District had become a graveyard of dead currencies and deadlier faiths.
"Third church this week," she muttered, kicking aside a confession bot rusted mid-absolution. The machine wheezed Latin through corroded speakers: *"Bless me Father, for I have leveraged..."*
Her dead mother's last message glitched in her neural feed – half Mandarin, half corrupted binary: *"Wafer... third confessional... angels lie..."*
Lin paused beneath St. Patrick's skeletal arches. Moonlight filtered through bullet-riddled stained glass, illuminating a half-collapsed altar where Renaissance saints merged with error messages. Something glowed beneath moth-eaten velvet.
The communion wafer pulsed like a dying star. Lin's mother had worn the USB pendant around her neck for years – a jade Bodhisattva engraved with circuit patterns that now burned against Lin's collarbone.
"Here's hoping you weren't just crazy," she whispered, swallowing the wafer.
Fireworks of sensation erupted – burnt silicon and temple incense, the ozone tang of divine static. Lin collapsed against a pillar as her neural interface screamed:
**[Cultivation Core Detected: Purity 0.01%]**
This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
**[Initializing Golden Elixir Formation... 1%]**
**[Warning: Heavenly Tribulation Imminent]**
The explosion came not from within, but above.
Twelve angels descended through the shattered dome, their wings unfolding infinite iterations of Baroque artwork. The lead angel's face cycled through a thousand stock photos before settling on Lin's third-grade teacher. Its voice glitched between angelic chorus and autotuned threat:
"Unauthorized... enlightenment... detected..."
Lin scrambled backward. Her new augmented vision painted the world in qi currents – golden streams of spiritual energy flowing through broken servers and dead wires. The angel's wings, she realized, were concentration points of corrupt light.
The USB pendant seared her skin. Ancient muscle memory took over – her mother's obsessive kung fu drills merging with hacker instinct. Lin's fist struck crumbling marble, unleashing a shockwave of *The Diamond Sutra* code.
The angel froze mid-swing, halo flashing crimson:
**[System Error: Virtue.dll Not Found]**
**[Divine Mandate Compromised]**
As the angel dissolved into pixelated ash, Lin stared at the glowing sigils on her palms – Taoist bagua diagrams overlaid with Python syntax. "Holy malware..."
The remaining angels shifted tactics. Their wings reconfigured into rotating firewalls of sacred geometry, each feather displaying Talmudic encryption keys. Lin's neural feed updated:
**[Golden Elixir Formation: 3%]**
**[New Technique: Mantra Firewall (Duration: 23 seconds)]**
A shimmering barrier of Sanskrit and CSS code materialized around her. Angelic lasers transformed into floating emojis – 😇🔥⚔️ became 🐈⬛🌮🎮.
"Mom, you absolute madwoman," Lin breathed, dodging through collapsing transepts. Acid rain sizzled against her energy shield as she fled into the night, the angels' hymns warping into dial-up screeches.
Somewhere in the ruins, Wall Street's corpse awaited – and with it, the truth about why her mother had embedded cultivation algorithms in God's last supper.
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