Zhou Beichen had a long, chaotic dream.
In the dream, there were no longer the familiar candlestick charts and trading floors, but burning rivers of stars and shattered worlds.
He wore heavy power armor, charging shoulder to shoulder with a group of equally towering brothers who smelled of steel and gunpowder. The roar of boltguns was deafening, while chainswords tore through twisted flesh.
They shouted for the Emperor, for humanity, racing from one battlefield to another. They learned to kill, learned to destroy, and learned to preserve fragile bonds of brotherhood amid mountains of corpses and seas of blood.
Until a blinding light devoured everything, and cold nothingness wrapped around him. It was as though the stars had fallen and all sound had died away.
He jolted awake, gasping violently, his heart hammering in his chest like a drum.
The first thing that filled his nostrils was an intensely rich smell of blood, like rust mixed with some kind of disinfectant. It assaulted his senses with abnormal clarity; he could even distinguish its subtle layers.
He opened his eyes and found himself lying on an unusually spacious... bed? Or rather, some sort of hibernation pod built for an enormous body.
The chamber's ceiling was absurdly high, at least five meters by rough estimate. The metal walls around him were smooth and cold, glimmering with faint light. Everything seemed massive and empty, as if it had been designed for giants.
He instinctively tried to sit up, then froze.
The arm he raised was bulging with muscle, sharply defined, and filled with explosive strength. It was nothing like the arm of the stock trader he remembered himself being—someone who was not frail, but certainly could not be called strong. His skin also seemed far tougher, carrying a healthy bronze sheen.
He lowered