As Long As They're Not Dead, Keep Beating Them

As soon as Fukuda Taro left, Fang Cheng, who had been lying on the bed looking half-dead, sprang to his feet.

He stripped off his clothes and tore away the blood-soaked bandages. The surgical wound on his side had completely healed, and the kidney that had been excised from his body had grown back.

The entire surgery had been a close call. Fang Cheng had struggled to control the speed of his healing to ensure the wound didn't close up mid-operation; otherwise, he would have been treated like a monster.

The harvest, however, was incredibly rich. He'd sold one kidney for 50,000 Asian Yuan, paid Fukuda Taro 2,000 as a broker's fee, and walked away with 48,000 for nothing.

According to Fang Cheng's experiments, any body tissue cut from him would gradually vanish, with the rate of disappearance proportional to its volume.

The kidney left at the clinic would likely vanish without a trace within two days, but the clinic wouldn't suspect Fang Cheng; they would simply assume it had been stolen.

Fang Cheng had refused to stay in the hospital for fear of being discovered. He felt absolutely no guilt about scamming such an underground medical operation.

"Gurgle~"

His stomach growled again. Regenerating his wound and kidney had triggered a fresh wave of hunger.

Fang Cheng rubbed his belly and clicked his tongue in annoyance.

"I'm going to have to turn into a professional glutton. I just hope I don't eat my way into becoming a fat slob."

Still, he was in a good mood; after all, his financial crisis was resolved.

Whistling, he changed his clothes, went out to fill his stomach, bought a new SIM card, and took the opportunity to cut his long hair short, which made him look much more energetic.

On his way home, he stopped by a supermarket to buy a pile of non-perishable groceries, intending to start cooking for himself.

Although he didn't have to worry about money for the time being, he couldn't afford to be extravagant. He still needed to be frugal, and cooking at home would cut down on unnecessary expenses.

After putting the groceries in the fridge, Fang Cheng took a shower, returned to his bedroom, opened his computer, and created a new blank document.

The money problem was solved, but Fang Cheng's current situation was still far from optimistic.

He wasn't some muddled, shut-in high schooler; he possessed a mature soul within a young body, and he had to think about the future and make clear, advance plans.

The fact that he had been tailed all day by that crazy woman today gave him a sense of urgency.

That's right—Kanzaki Rin thought her stalking was undetectable, but Fang Cheng had spotted her sneaky figure the moment he stepped out that morning.

After all, their interaction last night had been quite unpleasant, and Fang Cheng didn't believe for a second that she would be magnanimous enough to let him go.

With Kanzaki Rin lurking nearby, Fang Cheng didn't dare lower his guard.

He edited the blank document, quickly listing three essential items.

The first item was money. The more, the better, so he shouldn't stop his "wool-pulling" schemes. He couldn't go back to Fukuda Taro, but Tokyo wasn't the only place with such brokers.

However, that was a short-term gain; he needed to find other methods for the long term.

The second item was threats: the threat from Kanzaki Rin, the threat from the vampires she mentioned, and even the threat the entire society posed to an anomaly like him.

Therefore, he had to master the ability to protect himself in the short term.

Fang Cheng had no ambition to rule the world, but he couldn't be a mere pawn that anyone could finish off with a casual strike. At the very least, he needed to be a sports car.

The third item was to explore himself and figure out whether his immortality stemmed from vampires or some other cause.

Specifically, he needed to determine the number of times he could resurrect and find a way to increase that count. That was far more important than money.

As Fang Cheng finished writing and was checking for omissions, a friend named "Fuping" sent him a message on social media.

"Fang-kun, why can't I get through to your phone? Togawa-sensei keeps asking about you. Are you coming to school soon?"

The memories of the original owner from the past dozen years were a bit much for Fang Cheng; without a prompt, they were hard to recall.

Seeing the message from Fuping, Fang Cheng finally remembered that he was currently a second-year high school student and had been skipping class lately.

Fuping was a classmate who had always looked out for him.

"I lost my phone. I've got a new number, make a note of it."

When Fang Cheng started typing "I'm not going to school anymore," he hesitated, deleted it, and changed it to: "Let's talk about school tomorrow."

He hadn't decided what to do yet, and school was trivial, but he couldn't abandon it entirely just yet.

Fuping: "I understand. I hope to see you at school tomorrow. Goodnight."

A pair of gentle, smiling eyes immediately surfaced in Fang Cheng's mind, wishing him goodnight.

Wait, why did he think of a rabbit?

Fang Cheng rubbed his forehead and saved the document.

He left the bedroom and rummaged through a storage locker to find a pair of dumbbells.

The original owner had bought these in middle school, but they had quickly been tossed aside to gather dust along with a baseball bat—after all, sports were never as fun as video games.

Fang Cheng gripped the dumbbells and began to exercise slowly in the living room.

[Exercise +1]

[Exercise +1]

[Exercise +1]

A prompt appeared in his field of vision from time to time, roughly once every minute of exercise.

Fang Cheng suspected that his physical condition might be related to the mobile game he had been playing before he transmigrated.

The game characters in that mobile game also had a limited number of resurrections, and there were also prompts when eating and exercising.

Therefore, he prepared to use exercise to verify his hypothesis.

Outside the apartment building, a drone arrived silently at the floor where Fang Cheng lived.

The drone's camera peered through the window, capturing every move Fang Cheng made in the living room.

The footage was then transmitted wirelessly, spanning more than half of Ibaraki District, to a room in a high-end apartment.

Kanzaki Rin lay half-reclined on her bed in thin pajamas, a laptop placed in front of her.

She stared at Fang Cheng's exercising figure while munching on potato chips.

About twenty minutes later, Fang Cheng put down the dumbbells, panting, and sat on the floor to rest.

"Heh~"

Kanzaki Rin let out a scornful laugh, seemingly mocking Fang Cheng's perseverance.

Her hand reached into the chip bag and came up empty, only then realizing she had finished the entire bag without noticing.

Licking her fingers with lingering desire, Kanzaki Rin brought over a bowl of cold noodles from the side and began to slurp them down in small bites.

In the video, Fang Cheng had finished his rest and started exercising again.

"235... 236... 237..."

He counted silently while doing push-ups, completely ignoring the bone-breaking pain radiating from his arms.

The benefit of an immortal body was that there was no need to worry about high-intensity exercise causing injury.

Thus, Fang Cheng operated on the philosophy of pushing himself to the brink of death, squeezing every ounce of stamina and muscle power he had.

Kanzaki Rin, who was gnawing on a chicken leg, gradually stopped eating. She was surprised to find that Fang Cheng had been exercising for over two hours without realizing it.

Apart from a few short breaks, the rest of those two hours had been high-intensity training.

Although a vampire's body could recover, the pain and fatigue remained; without willpower, one could not persist for so long.

Such perseverance was outstanding even among the interns at the Disaster Countermeasure Department.

Watching Fang Cheng's rising and falling figure, Kanzaki Rin muttered to herself, "This guy... who exactly is he?"

She didn't believe an ordinary high school student would possess such remarkable drive and willpower, to the point of going to sell a kidney the day after becoming a vampire, and then self-disciplining with high-intensity exercise.

Even during their confrontation last night, Fang Cheng had displayed a mature and seasoned mindset, devoid of any high schooler-like naivety, save for his penchant for trash talk.

Yet he had been obscure at school before; otherwise, Kanzaki Rin would have known him.

After observing him for the entire day, Kanzaki Rin hadn't gained a deeper understanding of Fang Cheng; instead, she was left with even more questions.