Zhuang Xiaolin's Memories

That was when Zhuang Xiaolin was thirty-one years old.

His company had originally assigned him to fly to Europe to discuss some renovation plans with local manufacturers.

But unexpectedly, the plane was hit while passing over the European border.

Three of its four engines caught fire. With only one engine left, the plane clearly could no longer maintain its altitude.

Amid violent shaking, the captain relied on his superb piloting skills to finally make an emergency landing on a relatively flat patch of ground near the Eurasian border. Even so, the casualties were devastating.

The crash site was engulfed in flames. Charred corpses and countless pieces of luggage were burned to ashes. Looking utterly disheveled, Zhuang Xiaolin struggled through the wreckage, exhausting the last of his strength before crawling out of the burning plane.

After getting out, Zhuang Xiaolin had originally planned to rest for a while before calling his company and asking them to send someone to rescue him.

Unfortunately, there was no signal on his phone.

By then, Zhuang Xiaolin had nearly exhausted all his strength. After failing to make a call, he passed out.

When Zhuang Xiaolin woke up again, he was in a local farmhouse.

The owners were a married couple. Judging from their appearance, they were probably white, and from the language they spoke, it was likely Russian.

Zhuang Xiaolin had several cuts on his body, sustained while breaking free from the plane.

Because the situation had sent his adrenaline surging, he barely felt any pain. All he wanted was to flee that sea of fire. Fire was both the key to humanity's progress and something humanity feared.

The farmhouse owners treated him well. Zhuang Xiaolin had three meals every day, each with beef. The beef had been stored in the cellar by the owners.

Though he could not understand their language, Zhuang Xiaolin was fairly good at drawing, so they began communicating through pictures.

The couple had an adorable little girl. What had her name been? Zhuang Xiaolin did not know. He had only learned English and Arabic; he had never touched Russian.

But Zhuang Xiaolin remembered that the girl would pick flowers outside every day, weave them into garlands, and happily play with her family.

It was a beautiful sight. At least, that was how Zhuang Xiaolin saw it. He despised those so-called international masters of art. It was not modern art itself that he hated, but the idiots propped up by capital who passed off vile things as art.

The place was surrounded by mountains and was almost completely cut off from the outside world. But the farm had a tractor and other equipment. The pasture was connected to the farmhouse, where they kept cattle, sheep, and the like.

Life there was peaceful and comfortable.

Zhuang Xiaolin's injuries soon healed. Since he could neither contact the outside world nor communicate with the farmhouse owners, he temporarily stayed there and helped them with whatever he could each day.

Zhuang Xiaolin had thought those days would last a while longer, but an accident came soon enough...

It was one night. Zhuang Xiaolin clearly remembered the flames filling the sky.

Missiles streaked across the heavens like meteors. Piercing shrieks rang through the night sky, thunderous booms rose from the ground, and sounds erupted all around them.

Speaking in a language he did not understand, the farmhouse couple took out weapons, and Zhuang Xiaolin was given a pistol as well.

After enduring a series of hardships, Zhuang Xiaolin, the couple, and their daughter arrived in a secluded mountain forest.

Watching the flames soaring into the distance, the initially panicked Zhuang Xiaolin realized something grave.

War had broken out...

What happened afterward?

Zhuang Xiaolin could not remember very clearly. He only remembered that the girl who picked flowers and wove garlands every day had died beneath a missile that fell from the sky, while her parents had perished in the flames of the night.

Zhuang Xiaolin did not know how he escaped that disaster. He ended up in a desert.

What came after that, even Zhuang Xiaolin could not explain. Perhaps the scenes there had been too shocking, or perhaps his heart had been shaken too badly.

After returning home, Zhuang Xiaolin set himself a rule: do not let the innocent get caught in the crossfire, do not become a beneficiary of ill-gotten gains, and do not be a cold, indifferent bystander.

Later, although Zhuang Xiaolin used a few underhanded methods while climbing the ranks, he still upheld the principles he had set. Poor people within dozens of kilometers of the areas under his jurisdiction received funding from him, ostensibly to improve the company's public image.

In truth, all that money came from his personal account.

Later still, Zhuang Xiaolin returned to that farmhouse and built graves for the couple and their daughter. He also went to the desert where he had once stayed and opened a small branch office there, selling the cheapest goods.

By then, he no longer needed money. To him, money was neither here nor there, but to others, it was a lifeline.

He maintained that habit. Even though Zhuang Xiaolin had earned a notorious reputation in his struggle for power, public sentiment was on his side. He was unanimously recognized by the vast number of users. Even if many company veterans disliked him, there was nothing they could do to him.

Zhuang Xiaolin's career continued until the plane crash. This time, he was no longer lucky enough to escape disaster, though perhaps he was lucky in another sense—he arrived in another world and had to start over.

Without his former identity, Zhuang Xiaolin felt far more unrestrained. As a young man, he had wanted to become a wandering hero or a cowboy who upheld justice. Now that he possessed a powerful weapon, Zhuang Xiaolin decided to shape his life according to his old dream.

All people were alive, and all lives were precious. But why were not all people considered precious?

In humanity's eyes, animals were divided into useful and useless ones. Useful animals were regarded as economic animals, capable of increasing humanity's monetary value and earning people more money.

The useless ones were called animals without economic value, though they could maintain nature's balance and stability and strengthen ecosystems.

Humans, too, were divided into ranks—useful and useless.

Zhuang Xiaolin recalled a game he had played in his youth.

It was a game about the future, with highly advanced integrated technology, all kinds of fantastical vehicles, and things beyond imagination.

The corporations within it relied on immense capital and existed like nations, devouring people's land and water. In the end, they did not even spare people's bodies and souls, throwing them into one meat grinder after another and grinding them to nothing.

Zhuang Xiaolin found his goal. It was not only because he had once possessed a heart that wished to uphold justice, but also because he had grown up beneath the red flag.

He had an ideal: to atone for his "primitive accumulation of capital."

"Have you heard? Recently, a popular idol is holding a concert in Lungmen. I heard an extraordinary number of people are coming. Even the Lungmen Guard Department, which usually does not bother with this sort of thing, has been deployed," a passerby said to his friend on the street.

"If you ask me, not many people in Lungmen have the nerve to carry out a terrorist attack in a place with that many people." Upon hearing that the Lungmen Guard Department had gotten involved with the concert, the passerby's friend had already sensed what was going on.

After all, the Lungmen Guard Department existed to protect Lungmen and its citizens.

With them there, it might be to prevent terrorist attacks.

"Not necessarily. Security at the customs checkpoints has been tightened recently. There are even people patrolling near the sewers. What kind of terrorists could openly enter Lungmen?"

"There are all sorts of strange things in this world. Maybe those terrorists you mentioned really have entered Lungmen." As the friend said this, their idle conversation seemed so insignificant amid the street.

Yet the intelligence they had inadvertently revealed was captured by a spider-like drone no larger than a fingernail.

Throughout Lungmen's city center and even its slums, there were countless drones like these. Piece after piece of intelligence was gathered in the central hub, filtered, stripped of useless chatter, and reduced to truly valuable information.

In Lungmen, Zhuang Xiaolin had already woven an enormous intelligence network.