The First Pot of Gold in the '90s

He spent the entire night without sleep.

But Chu Hang did not feel the slightest bit tired. When the first faint glimmer of dawn pierced the darkness and cast a hazy golden edge over the sleeping city, he was standing in a cheap motel room, studying a brand-new version of himself in the mirror.

The hot shower had not only washed away all the grime and the nauseating stench of sewer pipes from his body; it seemed to have washed away the coldness and numbness that had lasted nearly fifty years as well. A cheap razor from a corner convenience store had shaved off his scruffy stubble, revealing a sharply defined face. There was something strange about it. It retained the clean-cut contours he had possessed as an overworked office drone in his previous life, yet the artillery fire of World War II and his slumber beneath the glacier had ruthlessly carved a weariness and hardness into it far beyond his years.

The man in the mirror had black hair and black eyes. His gaze was as calm as an ancient well without a bottom, utterly still. He wore the black jacket and jeans stripped from that street punk. They were slightly too large, but on his perfectly proportioned frame, reforged by the Super-Soldier Serum, they instead gave him a casually unruly air.

He was no longer the old soldier sleeping in the glacier, nor was he the office drone who had dropped dead at his desk. He was Chu Hang, a ghost living in 1995—a pauper with treasures in his head and not a dime to his name.

He took out the crumpled roll of bills from his pocket and carefully counted it on the bed. After deducting the motel fee and the cost of last night's ravenous meal,