Early in the morning, Yuan Zhu opened his eyes in bed after sleeping until broad daylight. He had never felt so refreshed before. The quality of his sleep had been explosively good, leaving him brimming with energy. He could not help but sigh. "What a vibrant young body!"
"What time is it now?"
The Little Elf came online in sync. "9:30, Monday. Your younger brother has already gone to school."
A question suddenly occurred to Yuan Zhu. "As my butler, you actually didn't wake me up early?"
The Little Elf countered, "Why get up early when you're full and have nothing better to do? As part of your soul, I have the right to enjoy sleeping in too. Sleeping until I'm full feels so good."
Convinced, Yuan Zhu nodded in agreement, yet he still felt that something was off.
"Wait, no! It's Monday. I still have to go to the steam factory for work. Why didn't you remind me?"
The soul of a wage slave had long seeped into Yuan Zhu's bones. He had finally realized what was wrong. The blood of a workaholic flowing through this body was calling for him to hurry up and create value! The Little Elf retorted, "Calm down. Don't let the impulse to work carry you away. Think rationally. After inheriting the Great Wilderness Immortal Scripture, are you still willing to keep living the life of an overtime dog who works himself to death?"
Yuan Zhu carefully considered his circumstances and shook his head. "The previous owner had ambitions too. He worked himself to the bone at the factory not just for that 1.5-times salary. Earning more was only a small part of it. His true purpose was to approach things from every angle and figure out the factory's operating model, its production bottlenecks, the operation and maintenance of its steam-engine production lines, workshop management and scheduling. He even took over the accounts without pay, all just to understand its sales channels, supply channels..."
Yuan Zhu kept rummaging through his memories, then his eyes suddenly lit up. "So I was actually this ambitious. I wanted to replace the boss myself. Once I had figured everything out, I would find a chance to hire someone to take out the old factory director, drive the factory to the brink of bankruptcy, then step forward to turn the tide. In the end, I'd gradually erode the shares until I owned the entire factory and became the big boss! What ambition. What vision."
Having inherited the previous owner's memory fragments and body, Yuan Zhu now especially approved of the previous owner's dreams and actions. He also gained a deeper understanding of his workaholic behavior.
So I wasn't a traitor to the workers. I was a fledgling capitalist who deserved even more to be hanged! Blending into the ranks of workers, silently accumulating nutrients, waiting for monstrous growth and the day I broke from my cocoon into a butterfly.
Although, to the current Yuan Zhu, buying an outdated old steam factory—the Lamp Factory—did not seem particularly profitable. But for a bottom-tier native to dare make such grand aspirations—such ambitions—and genuinely put them into action, already overcoming several hurdles, truly made him admire himself! The Little Elf also browsed through the previous owner's memories and sighed. "His loss was his lack of vision. Even if he exhausted every scheme to take over that backward factory, he still wouldn't become a High Person. At most, he'd live a moderately prosperous life while carrying enormous pressure to sell the products. But given the previous owner's personality, after achieving this goal, he would definitely keep working himself to the bone, expanding capital through real business warfare until the day the backlash came."
Yuan Zhu deeply agreed. Even if he had not been dragged into the Sacrifice Ritual, with the previous owner's 'drive to improve' paired with his 'degree of courting death,' he probably would not have lived past thirty.
The Little Elf asked, "Then do you still plan to go to work at the factory?"
Yuan Zhu thought seriously, then shook his head. "No. The Lamp Factory job is just too exhausting and miserable. I don't want to be some tiny factory director, trapping an infinite life in selling lamps. But I have to get back the wages from these past two weeks. Fortunately, the previous owner was well prepared and secretly collected evidence of the factory's tax evasion. He originally planned to stab them in the back. Now he can use it to demand his wages legally."
He got up, washed up, and changed into a set of his own clothes. The style was old and the material mediocre, but they fit him well. Once dressed, he felt comfortable and looked decent.
After admiring himself in the mirror for a while, Yuan Zhu looked at those wine-red eyes and gave himself an eight out of ten. The remaining two points were reserved for future growth.
After eating the breakfast his younger brother had left behind, he pulled the medical card from beneath his pillow and decided to visit the hospital first. He wanted to experience the world's "righteous Holy Light" at the Holy Light Exorcism Department and see what it tasted like. Exorcise demons if sick; strengthen the body if not.
After putting away his wallet, Yuan Zhu locked the door and left, hurrying toward the nearest bus stop. Although Running called itself a tier-2.5 city, when it came to transportation infrastructure, it could always catch Taixi's leftovers.
As one of the world's leading metropolises, the vehicles Taixi discarded every year alone were enough to let Running feast on leftovers until it went wild. Not only were buses widespread, but there were even five subway lines, all converted from underground mines back in the day. That counted as an innate advantage.
The price was that Running possessed a nightmarishly complex and dangerous underground ecosystem. His first major mission after joining Fire Fang had been to put on a gas mask and madly release poison inside subway tunnels, using toxic smoke to kill and drive away the overflowing Goblins, Great Horned Rats, crocodiles... and other dangerous creatures.
Whenever local residents waited for the subway, the trains pulling into the station would have dense, fresh, gruesome bloodstains from collisions all over their fronts.
After spending five cents on a ticket, Yuan Zhu found an empty seat and stared blankly at the scenery outside the window. Streams of Black Smoke rose from factory chimneys, gradually drifting apart and merging with the grayish-white haze hanging over the city.
His thoughts drifted along with them.
He no longer planned to do the steam factory job. Not only was it arduous, but it also took up a huge amount of his time. For that tiny bit of pay, he simply lacked the motivation.
As for the ambition of usurping the factory director's seat and going even further to become a big boss, the current Yuan Zhu had already outgrown it. He carried the Great Wilderness Immortal Scripture—how many natives did that put him ahead of from the very start? Becoming an extraordinary person and doing evil—scratch that—doing whatever he pleased was his new dream.
The urgent task was to familiarize himself with his own power, understand Duling's Extraordinary System, and find an opportunity to integrate into it so that their styles could remain consistent.
The cleanup work at Fire Fang, on the other hand, could continue. This company had special channels. Whether it was legal official organizations and righteous factions in the open, or illegal extraordinary people in gray areas and demonic Outer Dao forces in underground circles... it could come into contact with them all.
This was a route to access, and perhaps even learn and master, Extraordinary Knowledge.
Because he had been involved in the Sacrifice Ritual, the Security Bureau had taken him away for investigation. If he returned to Fire Fang again, he would likely be assigned some secret work that he had never been able to access before.
Therefore, he needed to keep this job, perhaps even consider becoming a full employee.
Finally, he also had a part-time job in underground black boxing.
Yuan Zhu could not help but marvel at how hard the previous owner had worked. At such a young age, he had already held multiple jobs. Not only had he paid off his younger brother's tuition, but he also had a fixed deposit of five thousand yuan at Tai Xi Bank.
Five thousand! That was savings an ordinary family would need five years of struggling without food or drink to accumulate. Even after looting bodies at the Sacrifice Ritual site, he had only scraped together one thousand in cash. That bastard had truly known how to work himself to the bone!
Three thousand of those five thousand in savings had been earned by the previous owner through underground boxing matches.
Besides earning the appearance fees, Yuan Zhu fought black boxing to deliberately temper his own fighting and combat abilities.
He had debuted underground at seventeen and had been knocking around there for fourteen months, fighting more than fifty matches. His record was verifiable: seventeen wins, twenty-two draws, and thirteen losses. In the underground boxing scene of the Old District, he was somewhat well-known, famed for a steady style that emphasized human relations and worldly wisdom.
Yuan Zhu competed frequently to make money and show his face, yet he had few diehard fans. Half a year ago, by constantly showing his face, he successfully evolved into a "combat-power measuring unit," used to raise the value of rookies or strong fighters.
The previous owner's boxing technique was solid, his style steady, and he never fought aggressively. He never risked going for a KO, focused on defense throughout, and pursued victory by points. Every match, he would drag things out until the final round, intending to hone his skills and gain experience.
This turtle-style approach made it hard to stir the audience's enthusiasm, but people had to admit that in this part of the Old District, he was a rare breed with the most standardized technique and quite a bit of strength.
Thus, little by little, he became a measuring tool and gatekeeper for judging other fighters' strength. No one liked watching his matches, but everyone liked watching others beat him, because it revealed an opponent's true level.
Beating him was a symbol of strength. Viewer numbers would rise, the stakes on boxing bets would increase, and the boss would be happy. Losing to him meant being judged limited in ability and branded a weakling. An opponent who drew with him, meanwhile, was considered a promising type worth developing.
With this "steady gatekeeper" persona, Yuan Zhu began secretly taking orders to throw matches. He would stage a thoroughly satisfying fake fight and escort his opponent straight onto the rankings of the strong. Or he would struggle to a draw, allowing a rookie to quickly rise to prominence as a newly emerging prospect.
Underground black boxing had never cared about fairness or justice. Relying on his "combat-power unit" persona, he made money easily without suffering overly serious injuries, and his little life had always been pretty good. He had even started working part-time as a coach, drafting "fake-match scripts" for his opponents.
After reviewing these memories, Yuan Zhu could not help but sigh that the previous owner had thrown away even his face for money. At such a young age, he had summarized an entire traffic-generating playbook, charging high prices to craft "rise-to-the-top packages" for newcomers. He used himself as a raft to set off the strength of newcomers or veterans, without the slightest dignity of a martial artist.
The underground boxing gym's boss also appreciated Yuan Zhu's shamelessness. He even wanted to recruit him to organize larger-scale, more systematic fake-match arrangements, perhaps even developing in the direction of WWE-style hot-blooded scripts.
That was because Yuan Zhu, after more than a year of evolution, had gradually shed his turtle title. The fake-match scripts in his most recent bouts had been especially "intense," and he was very good at stirring up the audience's emotions.
Yuan Zhu had some talent for raking in money! Looking at it now, that black-boxing boss had a discerning eye for talent and was also a man with ideas. He had already started taking on some marginalized legitimate competitions.
Unfortunately, Yuan Zhu had no interest in becoming a "performative fake-boxing fighter." His greater dream had still been to usurp the steam factory. Fighting fake black-boxing matches was merely a crooked way to earn extra money.
"It's unbearable to look at!"
After reading through the previous owner's years of struggle—his shameless money-making history—Yuan Zhu felt that his entire life on Earth had been lived like a dog. No wonder the Little Elf believed that if he had not absorbed the previous owner's soul essence and undergone a shift in personality, he would never have survived in Duling.
Such a doggedly ambitious young man was still rolling around at the bottom. If he wanted to achieve anything in this backward era of rigid class divisions, he could not be human. He could only become even more dog-like! Before he knew it, the steam bus had entered the city center. City Second Hospital was still two stops away on foot, so he decisively got off and merged into the crowd...
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