Loser System, Exploding on the Spot

Douluo Continent, Star Luo Empire.

Yuming City's Soul Master Cemetery stood on the highest ground west of the city. Rough black gravestones resembled a silent forest, all pointing toward the low-hanging, lead-gray sky.

The wind blew from the direction of the Mingdou Mountain Range, carrying the dusty, metallic stench unique to the borderlands. It swept over rows of stones engraved with names, producing a sound like mournful sobbing.

The two newest gravestones stood side by side. Their stone was still fresh, and the powder within the carvings had yet to be fully washed away by wind and rain.

Before them stood a small figure, utterly motionless.

He was too short. To him, those two gravestones loomed as tall as walls.

Black cloth wrapped around him, making him seem even more solitary.

His white hair was not the withered white of old age. It was like fresh snow, like the finest silver thread, soft against his small head and exceptionally striking beneath the bleak light of the graveyard.

A short distance away stood several people clad in the standard armor of the Star Luo Empire's Eighth Spirit Master Legion. The mud splatters on their armor had not yet dried, and several scratches and dents from battle still marked the metal. Their killing intent had yet to fade.

They silently watched the white-haired child. Their gazes were complicated, filled with pity and grief, along with a trace of barely perceptible shock.

One of them moved his lips, as though he wanted to say something to the elderly man beside him, who wore a faded gray robe and had graying hair. In the end, it became only a nearly inaudible sigh.

Uncle Hui hunched his back. The wrinkles on his face seemed carved by knives and axes, deep and heavy, brimming with grief.

Looking at the young master's glaring white hair, he felt as if a boulder were lodged in his chest.

Just a few days ago, the child had not looked like this.

When the people from the Eighth Spirit Master Legion had brought the terrible news and knocked on their door, the child had stood right before him. Amid an incomprehensible burst of golden light and violent tremors, his black hair had turned to snow in an instant, his eyes had become shattered gold, and even his appearance had quietly changed into that of a child so exquisite he scarcely seemed mortal.

The Eighth Spirit Master Legion's commander had said it was a phenomenon caused by an innate martial soul awakening. It was rare beyond measure, a sign of genius.

But Uncle Hui could only feel heartache. The price had been too great.

Yin Chen stood there, his small body held perfectly straight.

The wind stirred the silver hair over his forehead. There were no tears in his shattered-gold eyes, nor the helpless confusion expected of an ordinary six-year-old child.

There was only emptiness within them, a bottomless deathly silence.

Only he knew what turbulent secret lay buried beneath that silence.

A few days ago, when those two death notices stamped with the Legion's blood-red insignia had been handed to him, something that had always bound him had shattered with a crash.

It was not grief. He could not summon much profound sorrow for parents who had spent years stationed at the front lines, returned home only occasionally, and whose faces had already become blurred in his memory.

The shock had come from elsewhere—it was the barrier of his understanding being smashed apart. Memories and a personality from another world, dormant for six whole years, had been forcibly activated and awakened by that sudden bad news in a brutal fashion.

The final images of his past life crashed into his mind.

An empty street after overtime, headlights so blinding they distorted reality, deafening horns and tires shrieking against the road, and... that massive, mountain-like, irresistible shadow that crushed everything in its path—the Hundred-Ton King.

Heh. So this was what it meant to encounter the Hundred-Ton King on the road: to struggle with all your strength and still be unable to defeat it.

Before the suffocating despair could completely swallow him, an icy, mechanical voice devoid of any trace of life abruptly rang out at the very edge of his sinking consciousness:

[Compatible soul detected... Insufficient energy... Forced reincarnation procedure initiated... Target world: Douluo Continent...]

[Soul Core entering dormancy... Maintaining minimum energy consumption...]

Those were the final fragments of memory he retained from before he had muddleheadedly reincarnated.

And a few days ago, the stimulation of that death notice had not only awakened the memories of his past life, but also stirred that dormant system.

He heard that cold voice again:

[Strong emotional stimulus detected... Extracting energy... System rebooting...]

[Beginner benefit issued: Ten consecutive draws.]

Then, a blaze of dazzling golden light, bright enough to scorch the soul, exploded deep within his consciousness.

One beam, two beams, three beams... five in total.

The golden light was so intense, carrying a power that seemed capable of burning the very rules themselves. It illuminated his still-unstable consciousness space with brilliant clarity.

Then, the system's cold prompt suddenly became hurried and shrill, like a machine overloaded beyond its limit:

[Error! Error! Energy overflow! Core protocol conflict!]

[...Collapse... Irreversible...]

[...Unbinding...]

BOOM!!!

It was as though the Big Bang at the birth of the universe had detonated directly within the depths of his soul.

He could even hear his own soul tearing apart, a cracking sound that made his teeth ache.

Excruciating pain instantly drowned out everything. It was millions of times more terrifying than having his body crushed beneath the Hundred-Ton King.

He had thought he was completely finished—that awakening meant the end, that his soul would scatter and not even a scrap would remain.

Yet, miraculously, he had not died on the spot.

The destructive energy shockwave unleashed by the system's explosion had mainly struck the point of connection deep within his soul, violently tearing apart his soul space.

Three of those golden beams, carrying half of his torn soul, had been flung deep into the ripped spatial fissure. They vanished without a trace, their destination unknown.

The other two golden beams, however, had fused with the remaining half of his soul while resisting the explosion's aftershock, barely preserving his consciousness and this young body.

To Uncle Hui and the Legion Soul Masters, what they saw was Yin Chen suddenly erupting with an unbearable golden glow. His white hair burst forth, his golden eyes bloomed, and a Soul Power fluctuation far beyond the scope of an ordinary martial soul awakening spread outward like ripples. Several battle-hardened Soul Masters instinctively retreated half a step, their faces filled with horror and disbelief.

They saw only the sudden emergence of a peerless genius.

None of them knew that, in that lightning-flash instant, an earth-shattering transformation beyond all comprehension had occurred within the child's frail shell.

To lose half his soul and still remain standing unharmed was, in itself, a miracle.

And Yin Chen had avoided fainting on the spot thanks to one of those golden beams.

Now, standing before the cold, hard gravestones and feeling their chill seep through the soles of his shoes into his body, Yin Chen's feelings were as tangled as a knotted mess.

He felt a faint sadness over the death of his nominal parents, but more than that, he was inwardly cursing that Loser System. It was just five gold pulls in ten draws. Did it really have to explode on the spot?

It was truly the worst system he had ever seen, bar none.

He found amusement amid his bitterness.