Death Reset (Revised)

Fang Xiu had a dream--

In the dream, he became an existence swimming freely above the River of Time.

There was a saying that humans were three-dimensional creatures living in a four-dimensional universe. Every three-dimensional creature was a grain of sand in the River of Time, able only to drift downstream with the river of the time dimension. But he was a fish in the river. He could swim with the current or against it, and could even leap out of the River of Time. He was a higher-dimensional life-form that had escaped the shackles of the time dimension.

Although he could not change the speed of the entire River of Time, nor make it flow backward, he could travel freely through time, leaping beyond its restraints. The feeling was simply exhilarating.

"I am God!"

And then, and then he woke up.

Fang Xiu washed his face, put on his glasses, and looked at himself in the mirror. He was a tall, thin man in his early twenties. Aside from his short-cropped hair, which made him look rather spirited, there was nothing particularly special about him.

Water still dripped from Fang Xiu's chin as he looked at himself, his eyes filled with confusion. "Why did I have such a strange dream?"

People had once said that Fang Xiu's name was somewhat inauspicious, carrying the air of "resting only in death." What Fang Xiu had never expected was that, starting today, his life would embark upon a road that would never rest even in death.

After washing up, Fang Xiu glanced at the Perpetual Calendar on the wall. It was exactly eight twenty-three. He rented a place on the first floor, with a garage beneath it. After opening the door, he still had to go down a short flight of stairs before leaving the apartment building and beginning his day's busy work.

However, just after Fang Xiu stepped out of his room, he failed to notice that a figure had risen above the stairs. A pair of cold eyes watched Fang Xiu as he came out.

The man wore a black hood and was dressed like a deliveryman. Holding an axe, he raised one foot and leaped onto the window at the landing, his posture as textbook-perfect as a professional diver's.

In his right hand, he held a Fire Axe. Its blade was large and slightly curved in shape. Supposedly, it had been manufactured according to some sort of human biomechanics nonsense. His opponent had casually taken it from the stairwell.

He stretched his arm straight and level, closed his eyes, and seemed to be feeling the wind—or perhaps preparing to ride it into flight. His knees bent slightly, and the soles of his feet lightly tapped the windowsill below.

"One!"

"Two!"

"Three!"

Fang Xiu walked out of the passage and stepped beyond the apartment building. As if he had been timing it with a stopwatch, the other man leaped down from above, carrying tremendous force, and smashed Fang Xiu's head open with one blow of the axe.

The method was brutally savage. The axe split his skull and sank into it. Before Fang Xiu could react, he collapsed to his knees.

The killer yanked the axe free, and brains and blood immediately splattered everywhere. When Fang Xiu's corpse fell to the ground, it jerked and bounced—whether because he was not quite dead or because of nerve spasms—like a lobster struggling in its death throes. It looked horrifying.

"What happened? Am I dead?" Fang Xiu's face was pressed against the concrete floor, his pupils filled with astonishment and terror. Everything before his eyes blurred, and he finally sank into darkness.

"Drip!"

The sound was like a single drop of water falling into the world, shattering all space and order and stirring up endless waves. From the River of Time, an invisible, illusory hand seized Fang Xiu's consciousness and soul.

There was no sight. He viewed the world from a strange and mysterious angle. The entire world—the tall buildings, the earth, everything—had become grids and lines.

Then the grids and lines grew increasingly insubstantial. Everything retreated wildly, turning into afterimages. Line merged with line and vanished, and the entire world became pure white.

Fang Xiu saw a silver pocket watch descend from the heavens. The silver clock was exquisite and magnificent, brimming with classical grace, yet so enormous that it occupied his entire field of vision. It was so large that Fang Xiu could not even see all of it. Before it, Fang Xiu was as tiny as a grain of sand floating in front of it. The entire white world held only Fang Xiu and the gigantic clock.

The clock was impossibly intricate. Across its casing, every kind of tool used for measuring time continuously appeared and faded away—gnomons, sundials, clepsydras, incense clocks, sand clocks, oil-lamp clocks, candle clocks, and more. Every timekeeping instrument Fang Xiu had seen or never seen, knew or did not know, could be found upon it.

Through one exposed corner of its interior, he could see countless tiny, densely packed gears. Countless strange symbols were engraved upon them as well.

"Drip!"

When Fang Xiu focused on it, the clock's second hand finally began to move. The motionless gears turned along with it in a chain reaction.

"Drip! Drip! Drip!" The hollow, filigreed second hand spun faster and faster, nearly becoming an afterimage, driving the minute hand into a violent rotation as well.

"Ding-dong!"

Finally, like an alarm bell ringing, it announced that the time had come.

At that moment, Fang Xiu opened his eyes. He had woken up again.

Fang Xiu looked at himself in the mirror, one hand holding his rinsing cup and the other holding his toothbrush. He suddenly shuddered, and both fell to the floor at once.

"What the hell?"

Fang Xiu blankly raised his head and looked at the Perpetual Calendar. The time on it was—eight eleven.

Although he did not understand what was happening, his instincts and everything he had seen before told him that he had returned to more than ten minutes earlier. At that moment, outside the apartment building, someone was lying in wait, preparing to kill him.

The pain of the axe splitting his skull and the despair of facing death were still etched deeply into Fang Xiu's mind. He did not know why the other man wanted to kill him, but he knew that he absolutely would not let it go. He had to make the other man taste what he had felt.

That bastard must have jumped down from the window at the second-floor landing. He must still be crouching there!

"This was a premeditated, carefully planned murder!"

Fang Xiu flew into the kitchen in a fury and grabbed a fruit knife. He decided to go upstairs and butcher that bastard. The man had just ambushed him, so this time it was his turn to go up there and deliver warmth and surprises.

Fang Xiu was extremely angry, but he was no reckless brute. He simply refused to believe that, knowing the other man's position and movements, he still could not beat him in an ambush. That would be an insult to his abilities. He had never backed down from a fight in his entire life.

He cautiously pushed open the door and tiptoed up the stairs, using the handrail for support as he slowly advanced. Then he raised his head and secretly observed where the other man was and what he was doing.

However, the moment Fang Xiu spotted him, the killer had already discovered Fang Xiu's tracks and had long since made his preparations.

At last, Fang Xiu saw what the killer who had murdered him looked like. He was a man wearing a black hat and a red delivery uniform. The moment Fang Xiu saw him, the other man was already charging down.

His speed was unbelievably fast, his feet flying. He did not rush down the stairs. Instead, he stepped sideways down the wall, his feet seeming to cling to it as he glided across as though gravity did not exist.

Speed, afterimages, swiftness like lightning!

A starting motion, a twist, a swing of the axe—all fused into one!

The sharp axe flashed with a cold gleam. Before Fang Xiu could react, its blade had already swept across his neck. The force was unbelievably great, cleaving through flesh and severing his cervical spine.

Fang Xiu's entire head was chopped off. It spun through the air several times before smashing onto the ground like a rotten ball, while the blood spurting from his neck dyed the entire stairwell red.

It was an all-around crushing defeat in speed, strength, technique, and awareness. The killer's mysterious, outrageously slick footwork made Fang Xiu understand that his defeat and death had not been caused merely by an ambush. This time, the man had faced him head-on.

The man had killed him on the strength of his own abilities. It could not be said that Fang Xiu had simply fed him a kill.

"Drip!"

The exact same scene appeared again. His consciousness and soul withdrew, the world turned insubstantial, and he entered a completely white world as the enormous silver clock descended.

Only, this time, for some unknown reason, the bottom of the utterly white world had been stained black. Even the silver clock had darkened in color. As the bell rang, it announced the end.

Still in front of that mirror!

Still holding the cup and toothbrush!

Fang Xiu calmly tossed the cup and toothbrush onto the floor, returned to the sofa in the living room, and sadly lit a cigarette. He inhaled deeply, then exhaled.

Mist swirled around him. A wisp of sorrow that could not be dispelled lingered in his eyes, and his air of dejection rivaled Sharp Bro's.

Then! He picked up the phone!

"Hello! Police?"