Lord of the Martial Arts Alliance

But the truth was that only because he had not died had he become the protagonist of that era. It was an inevitability born of chance.

People always fixed their eyes on the sole victor while overlooking all those who had failed.

Zhao Cheng, however, felt quite calm about it. He did not wonder whether there might one day come a time when his fortune ran out and he perished.

The past was not worth dwelling on, the future was not worth fearing. Seizing the present and forging ahead through tempering—that was the proper path.

It was only that Deyu II had died in such an unknown corner, and that fact stirred a faint sense of melancholy in him.

Once upon a time, because of all those stories and works, he had imagined becoming a detective, a phantom thief, a police officer, a plumber, a mecha pilot... Childhood fantasies were always unbridled.

Unfortunately, until he was twenty-five or twenty-six in his previous life, he had become none of those things. Instead, he had become the corporate drone he had least wanted to be as a child.

Zhao Cheng did not wallow in the past. Rather, the past only made his resolve to forge ahead all the firmer.

His former ordinariness instead made him even more determined to pursue the extraordinary.

As he thought this, Zhao Cheng used his bare hands to dig out a deep pit in the hard rocky ground. Though flesh and blood were frail and weak, that was only relative. With Zhao Cheng's current physique, even in his real body, stone was not much different from air.

He buried Deyu II's remains. In exchange, however, he took a small golden armband from the other man—one of his distinctive possessions.

Afterward, Zhao Cheng carved a line of small