Rebirth

Lu Yang opened his eyes in a daze. His back felt damp and sticky, his clothes clinging tightly to it in discomfort. His memories had frozen at the instant he fell from the cliff.

So this is death? It wasn't as terrifying as I thought. People always said those who jumped from high places got smashed flat like Sachima. I wonder if I look like that now. Lu Yang mocked himself.

Death was just death. Lu Yang accepted it calmly. He had avenged every grievance from his previous life and left no regrets behind. But why was his heart still filled with so much unwillingness?

Was it because he had trusted the wrong friends, or was he simply meant to accept his fate?

In 2040, Earth's industrial civilization underwent explosive development. Machines replaced most manual labor, while the global population soared to an unprecedented 12 billion due to improved medical care.

Unemployment, widening wealth gaps, public resentment, and demonstrations became synonymous with every nation.

To solve this problem, nations around the world joined forces and made all kinds of efforts. One of them was a 3D holographic online game called "Second World," jointly developed with advanced technology by the nine most developed countries, fulfilling a dream players worldwide had held for decades.

This game had only one server, where players from all over the world competed together. More than three billion people entered the game, attracting massive capital investment. When the official developers enabled real-time exchange between in-game currency and real-world currency, it truly helped ease the pressure of unemployment for part of the population.

Lu Yang had originally been the child of an ordinary working-class family. During breaks from university classes, he entered the game to help support his family and became a gold farmer for a studio. But he never expected a minor figure like himself to make a name for himself. Not only did he establish a small guild of 5,000 people, he also built a defensive fortress in a top-tier monster zone.

The top-tier monster zone was half a day's journey from the nearest system main city. Once Lu Yang built the fortress, it was immediately welcomed by all players. Buying potions, repairing equipment, trading through the auction house, and logging out to rest could all be done inside the fortress.

With that fortress, calling it a daily windfall would be an understatement. Even earning ten thousand gold a day would not have been an exaggeration. At that point, Lu Yang had reached the most glorious moment of his life. He thought the fortress could bring a better life to his family and brothers, but he never expected it to be nothing more than an illusion.

On the third day after the fortress was built, Liu Jie, president of the China Region's number one guild and also the eldest young master of a super-wealthy Chinese family in real life, personally paid a visit with three hundred members of his main force, intending to buy the fortress from Lu Yang.

Naturally, Lu Yang could not agree. The price Liu Jie offered was only ten percent above construction cost. He was clearly treating Lu Yang and his people as cheap labor. Besides, the fortress was the result of the joint effort of 5,000 brothers. They had elected Lu Yang as their leader to manage it, which represented their trust in him. If he sold it just like that, how could he face them afterward?

After refusing Liu Jie, Lu Yang worried that the other party would retaliate. Though he had sixty third-class Archmages under him, and he himself possessed the Demon God's Heart and feared no numerical advantage, he still discussed matters with the guild's three vice presidents to prevent a surprise attack. Each of them would lead three main groups and take turns defending the city around the clock.

A month passed in constant tension, yet there was no movement from Liu Jie's side. Lu Yang gradually lowered his guard.

As the saying went, trust could make a man and trust could break him. Lu Yang had trusted his friends completely, and on the third night after he lifted the alert, Huang Xiang—his dormmate of four university years and the main tank of the first group—told him that a new boss had been discovered in the top-tier monster zone. It would take all three of the guild's main groups to defeat it.

Lu Yang did not suspect a thing. He immediately led the three main groups, following Huang Xiang into a valley map. But when they arrived, what Lu Yang saw was not a boss, but Liu Jie's sneering face, along with twelve main groups under his command—twelve thousand level-200 elite members.

Only then did Lu Yang understand that Liu Jie had never given up on obtaining his fortress. He had merely changed tactics, spending heavily to bribe Lu Yang's subordinates into betraying him and luring him into this inescapable valley map, where a barrier had been cast that prevented the use of return-to-city skills.

That night, Lu Yang and the three main groups under his command were killed at least forty times in a row through forced combat resurrection.

The equipment of all three thousand main-group members dropped, and their losses were catastrophic. The fortress was also breached by another six of Liu Jie's main groups. All of Lu Yang's hard work vanished in an instant.

To build that fortress, Lu Yang had borrowed a great deal of money from the bank. With the fortress and his guild brothers, he could originally have repaid those loans easily. But now the fortress was destroyed, and the main-group members had lost their equipment. Lu Yang had completely lost the ability to repay his debts. Faced with enormous debt and the despairing looks in his brothers' eyes, he panicked and chose to run away from it, locking himself in his room every day and drowning himself in alcohol.

Lu Yang thought he would spend the rest of his life in endless pain and struggle, but one event completely woke him up.

His parents still had ten years before retirement, but in order to keep Lu Yang from spending the rest of his life buried in debt, they resolutely chose early retirement from their state-owned enterprise jobs. Every day, they went to construction sites to do hard labor and help Lu Yang earn money to repay his debts.

Yet less than half a year later, his father was inexplicably struck by a heavy object at the construction site. He died before emergency treatment could even begin after being sent to the hospital. His father's death devastated his mother, and not long afterward, she died as well.

Both parents died one after another within a short period, leaving Lu Yang overwhelmed with grief. He had thought his father's death was an accident, but when Wang Teng, Liu Jie's lackey, led people to beat him to the ground and mockingly told him that Liu Jie had ordered it all, Lu Yang finally understood that Liu Jie had never intended to give him any chance to rise again.

Just as Wang Teng was about to kill Lu Yang, Han Cheng, a comrade who had learned of Lu Yang's parents' deaths, rushed back from another city. By chance, he saved Lu Yang and took him abroad.

For five full years, Han Cheng trained Lu Yang's body and taught him how to kill. Five years later, fueled by burning hatred, Lu Yang became the internationally renowned mercenary known as "Bloodfire." He returned to China with a squad of mercenaries, paid heavily for information on when Liu Jie would return home, and then lay in wait outside Liu Jie's house. The instant Liu Jie stepped through his door, Lu Yang blew his head apart with a single shot.

At that moment, Lu Yang finally felt a trace of release. He had intended to keep hunting down everyone else who had harmed him, but Liu Jie's family mobilized all their power to pursue him. Lu Yang could only lead his mercenary group away for the time being. Unfortunately, near the border, he was discovered by both the police and the Liu family's assassins.

During the pursuit, Lu Yang led the police alone into the mountains to cover for his injured brothers. In the end, he was intercepted on a cliff.

Faced with the police urging him to surrender, Lu Yang only sneered. His great vengeance in this life had been avenged. He no longer had regrets, nor did he have any reason to live. He leaped from the cliff and chose suicide.

Yet at the instant he jumped, what flashed through Lu Yang's mind was a smiling face and a pair of eyes without the slightest impurity. If he still had one regret, it was her.

She had been Lu Yang's university classmate, Shen Mengyao. She was so beautiful, so untouched by worldly dust. Back then, Lu Yang had merely been an unremarkable ordinary student, but every one of her smiles gave him tremendous encouragement. They had been close then, but Shen Mengyao came from a prominent family.

Lu Yang had planned to confess once he had gained enough strength, but Liu Jie never gave him that chance. When Lu Yang returned five years later and asked about Shen Mengyao, he learned that she had married under her family's arrangements. However, she was unhappy.

How unwilling he was. If he had not trusted the wrong friends—

If he had been given more time to grow—

If he could have become stronger—

If...

If...

The fury in his chest made Lu Yang throw a punch against the wall beside him. Intense pain instantly flooded his entire nervous system.

Lu Yang's eyes suddenly widened.

"Wasn't I dead? How can I still move my arm? How can I still feel through my nerves?"

Lu Yang hurriedly sat up and examined his body. He discovered that the body which should have been smashed flat like Sachima was still completely intact, without a single wound. He touched his back and found that the damp, sticky substance on his clothes was not blood, but sweat from lying in bed in the stifling heat.

Lu Yang was dumbfounded. What was going on? He had not died—he was alive and completely unharmed? How was that possible? Even in 2050, he had never heard of anyone being able to restore a person smashed to pieces completely intact. Even if such a thing existed, it could not possibly have been used on him. Besides, where was this?

Looking around, Lu Yang realized that he was sitting on an old single bed, tightly enclosed by a mosquito net.

He pulled back the mosquito net and saw an aged wooden desk that had clearly been used for countless years.

On the wall above the desk was a line of words: "Have you forgotten shame?"

The instant he saw those four words, Lu Yang shuddered from head to toe, his scalp going numb. Isn't this the old house I lived in after graduating high school? I carved those words at the start of my final semester in high school to motivate myself for the college entrance exams. But I clearly remember that Mother had them removed when she renovated the house later. Why have they appeared again?

There was also the damaged plastic stool, a wooden dining table folded up in the corner, and an old forty-two-inch television. He had personally thrown all of these away and bought replacements. Why had they returned to this room now? Could it be that he had been reborn?

He looked up at the clock. It was one minute before noon. Still uncertain, Lu Yang turned on the television and switched to Central Channel One.

As he watched the female anchor on the midday news personally say, "Hello, viewers. Today is June 16, 2040, the seventh day of the fifth lunar month..."

At that instant, Lu Yang's mind exploded. He rushed out of the house and stared at the university main building not far away, which had been relocated five years ago yet still stood intact in its original spot. Unable to contain his excitement, Lu Yang slammed his fist heavily into the wall outside his home and roared in fury, I really have been reborn.