"Lao Liu! Have you lost your mind?"
"He's with the Security Bureau!"
Qin Annian listened to the strange words drifting faintly into his ears, and felt as though his head were splitting apart.
Endless darkness surged like a tide, threatening to drag him into eternal silence.
"He's just a temp with the Security Bureau. So what if we kill him?"
Another voice, vicious and frenzied, rang out.
A surge of viciousness instinctively welled up deep in Qin Annian's heart.
"Aren't these temps just there to take the fall? Who's going to care if one or two of them die?"
"If he really had connections, he wouldn't still be a temp!"
"Anyway, if we sell the body to Lingyun Pharmaceuticals, no one will ever find out. We can even get three hundred Federation Credits for it!"
"That's way more than these goods are worth!"
"If you don't have the guts to take the money, then I'll take it all myself!"
Faint sobs rose and fell somewhere nearby.
As the pain eased a little, strange yet familiar memories continued to well up.
Qin Annian. Male. Eighteen years old.
A native of Taiyu City and a temporary employee of the Security Bureau.
No, that wasn't right!
Other, completely different memories flickered through his mind like scenes from a film.
Qin Annian. Chinese.
Male. Twenty-eight years old.
After graduating from a second-tier university, he'd spent two years being worked like a pack animal in a big city. Eventually, the crushing workload and his boss's brainwashing had become too much, so he'd quit to pursue a nobler calling.
He'd applied to teach in a poor, remote mountain village.
Just one year later,
he'd realized that no lofty ideal could outweigh the reality of having no money.
Fortunately, Pinxi had emerged around then, catering to lower-tier markets.
It had eased the financial strain on Qin Annian's life considerably.
Suddenly,
the images came to an abrupt halt.
The final scene:
After paying for a batch of exercise books, his heart—strained by nearly half a week of staying up all night—had finally given out. His vision had gone black, and he'd never opened his eyes again.
"Good thing I paid."
"Those exercise books and supplementary readers should get to the school soon."
The tangled, chaotic memories left his mind in a muddle.
It was a long time before
he finally accepted the truth: he'd been reborn in another world, and only now had his memories of his previous life awakened.
"In this life, I'm an orphan. I failed the martial arts entrance exam and couldn't get into Martial Arts University. After struggling desperately to find a way in, I finally got a temp job with the Public Security Bureau."
Qin Annian began slowly piecing together the fragments in his mind.
This was an age of interstellar high martial arts, where technology and martial arts advanced side by side.
Yet ordinary people could spend their entire lives without ever leaving their planet—or even their city.
For an ordinary person with no connections, learning martial arts was the only way to break free from a fate whose end was visible from the start.
The martial path is boundless; my body knows no restraint.
A powerful obsession churned in his mind.
Whoosh!
Qin Annian snapped his eyes open!
"Hah!"
"Hah!"
His chest heaved rapidly as Qin Annian gasped for breath.
In the dim light, his gaze swept across his surroundings.
The filthy, abandoned factory was awash with filthy water, and rusted mechanical arms reeked of decay.
Beneath an iron rack some distance away,
a group of ragged children huddled together like frightened little beasts.
Before the memories of recent events had even cleared, words suddenly appeared before his eyes.
[The Billion-Credit Subsidy Is Live! New users can enjoy a first-order no-group-buy discount!]
Huh?
Qin Annian couldn't help rubbing his eyes hard.
Was the billion-credit subsidy still following him around?
[Subsidized Cultivation Technique: Xingyi Cannon Fist.]
[Subsidized Cultivation Technique: Iron Man Stance.]
Before Qin Annian could recover,
more translucent words appeared one after another.
The related memories surfaced in his mind as well.
Xingyi Cannon Fist was a combat-focused boxing style he'd practiced after joining the Public Security Bureau.
As for Iron Man Stance, it was a widely circulated Standing Posture Technique that ordinary people could easily learn.
To qualify for Martial Arts University,
he'd gotten up at four every morning for ten years, whatever the weather.
He'd spent four hours practicing his stance,
until his legs shook and he was utterly exhausted.
But, unfortunately,
he'd still failed to make the cut in the Martial Arts Exam.
"Cultivation Techniques can be subsidized too?"
"What is this thing?"
"And what happens after they're subsidized?"
For a moment,
all of Qin Annian's attention was fixed on the Status Panel.
He didn't notice footsteps slowly approaching from outside the factory.
Creak!
The rust-covered door, its hinges caked with rust, was pushed open. Its piercing screech echoed through the factory.
In an instant,
the sobbing stopped altogether.
The multicolored neon lights that illuminated the distant sky were too miserly to cast even a sliver of light in here.
Only the glow from a nearby yellow streetlamp brightened the factory a little.
A fat man and a thin man walked into the factory.
Backlit as they were, Qin Annian couldn't make out their faces.
But he could just barely see that both of their arms had been modified with mechanical implants to varying degrees.
A chill shot straight to his scalp.
At last, he remembered
what had happened here.
As a temp who'd joined the Security Bureau just over two months ago, he'd been assigned to maintain order in the old industrial district.
That morning,
he'd received an anonymous tip.
Someone was running an illegal human-organ trade in an abandoned nutrient-solution bottling plant.
But when he'd reported it to Zhao Daming, the public security officer in charge of the area,
Zhao Daming had insisted it was nothing but a prank.
Taiyu City's new mayor had taken office six months ago.
He'd introduced a series of policies that had successfully cracked down hard on all kinds of crime.
Taiyu City was now peaceful and law-abiding. How could anything so horrifying possibly happen there?
He'd even secretly warned Qin Annian not to cause him trouble.
Otherwise,
Qin Annian would regret it.
"But if I can earn a merit, I can become a full-time employee of the Security Bureau."
Qin Annian had gritted his teeth and gone to investigate alone.
After all,
as a temp who could be laid off at any moment, just surviving in this era was difficult enough.
Tap.
Tap.
Tap.
The thuds of rubber soles dragging across the floor drew closer.
"Hm?"
Suddenly,
a red light flashed.
"Heh!"
A cold laugh escaped the thin man's lips.
A mechanical eye glowing red fixed its gaze on Qin Annian, who lay on the ground.
"Officer Qin," he said, his voice laced with cruel mockery and murderous intent. "Why are you still lying there after waking up?"
Cough, cough!
Qin Annian braced himself against the floor and used the mechanical-arm stand behind him to get to his feet.
His mind raced, searching for a way out.
"I'm with the Security Bureau."
It felt as though his throat were clogged with blood, and Qin Annian's voice came out hoarse.
Even breathing made his chest burn.
He remembered now.
The thin man had caught him off guard.
One punch to the chest had broken his ribs, punctured his lung, and sent blood rushing up his throat.
In the end, he'd collapsed and died in agony.
But
after his memories of his past life had awakened,
all those mortal injuries had miraculously vanished.
He was still weak, though.
"There's a mole."
"Someone exposed my whereabouts."
Qin Annian clenched his teeth, silently vowing to find the mole once he got back—and make him pay in blood!
"If you kill me, neither of you will get away with it."
The thin man covered his face with one hand and threw back his head, laughing maniacally.
The red light in his mechanical eye flickered rapidly.
"You really think you're a public security officer?"
"You're nothing but a little bug, and you think you can use us brothers to earn yourself a merit?"
"You've got a death wish!"
The thin man lunged forward.
His gleaming metal arm, driven by an internal engine, let out a deafening roar.
That was the same punch
that had brought down Qin Annian, a man with ten years of martial arts training.
Unlike true martial artists, who improved their cultivation through years of steady practice,
these cyborgs replaced flesh and blood with machinery, gaining immense combat power in a short time.
Originally,
this kind of biomechanical augmentation technology had been developed when human civilization first ventured into space.
To withstand the harsh environments beyond their home planet,
the soldiers sent on expeditions had all received a limited number of mechanical implants.
However.
Acquiring great power in a short time came at an equally great cost.
The first batch of enhanced soldiers had an average life expectancy of no more than sixty years.
And there was a very real chance that, after a certain period, their bodies would begin to reject the enhancements, making their lives worse than death.
For that reason,
after cultivation methods emerged, the Federation had long since officially banned this kind of surgery.
Yet throughout the reaches of human civilization, this illegal technology could still be found in use.
The air before him seemed to compress.
Qin Annian's eyes narrowed sharply, and his muscles tensed instinctively.
Years of martial arts training made him spread his feet slightly and assume the Iron Man Stance by muscle memory.
He had only raised his fists to his chest when—
Boom!
A mechanical fist gleaming with cold light slammed down!
Thud!
Just as expected, Qin Annian was sent flying like a rag doll.
His back slammed into the base of the mechanical arm.
The pain of his cracked bones felt as if it would tear him apart.
"Hahahaha!"
The skinny man's mouth stretched from ear to ear, his expression grotesque.
"Some little punk fresh out of school thinks he's the one-of-a-kind hero of his own life story?"
He strode closer and grabbed Qin Annian by the collar, lifting him up.
"A temp does a great job, gets hired full-time as a security officer, then rises to the top."
His mocking voice suddenly stopped.
Then it turned even more vicious:
"You need to understand!"
"Scum will always be scum!"
"You're nothing but a mangy mutt. What the hell makes you think you can dream big?"
Vrrrm!
The built-in engine roared.
The skinny man raised his fist high.
As Qin Annian's senses began to blur,
the fury in his heart was roused to its fullest.
"Fuck you!"
He abruptly lunged forward and slammed his forehead into the man.
Thud!
The dull impact echoed through the dilapidated factory.
Even though the skinny man had undergone enhancement surgery, he hadn't had the money to install titanium alloy in his skull.
Dazed for an instant, he let go.
Qin Annian stumbled backward.
At the same time,
through the blur of blood streaming down over his eyes, he could still make out the crimson words reflected in his vision.
"Add."
"Put it all into Xingyi Cannon Fist."
[Congratulations, host. You have received three hundred years of mastery in Xingyi Cannon Fist.]
Crackle, crackle!
In a daze,
Qin Annian thought he saw a burst of colorful fireworks exploding all around him.
Deep space.
In a desolate, remote region,
a beam of light suddenly flared to life, illuminating everything around it!
Then,
even the black hole's accretion disk, blazing with light to the utmost, revealed its vastness.
Before the immense black hole,
a figure dressed in a dark blue martial outfit turned to gaze out into deep space.
Until that moment,
he had even eclipsed the light of that unknowable celestial body!
"Heh."
Sound could not travel through a vacuum.
But the figure himself was a miracle.
A god in the eyes of countless living beings!
"Which fellow cultivator has set a question to test me?"
His gaze seemed capable of piercing the Milky Way, yet he could never find the source of the cause and effect.
"Very well, then."
He nodded, lowering his eyes.
"How do you like this Army Breaker, backed by thirty thousand years of mastery?"
He threw a punch.
It was as if the light of countless planet-destroying cannons had converged on a single point!
Brilliant light engulfed everything!
In an instant,
the black hole warped, collapsed, and tore apart!
Before you continue