[My name was Xu Ye. I had congenital heart disease. Three days ago, my heart throbbed painfully, and I died at the age of eighteen.]
[Huh? I was alive again?]
[I was very confused. Where exactly was this? My brain told me I should look around, so I started walking. Just then, the miniature monitor on my chest exploded, and I died again.]
[Only as I died did I realize something: my brain was utterly stupid. If I got another life, I would listen to my heart.]
"???"
Xu Ye stood on a desolate street, bewildered.
His right hand pressed against his heart.
There was no heartbeat, yet it was writhing eerily. A string of messages appeared in his mind.
My heart seemed to be "talking."
What the hell?
Just then, a sharp pain tore through his head, as though two souls were pulling against each other.
Double images of all sizes and countless flashes of light and darkness flickered before his eyes, while chaotic scenes kept pouring into his mind.
A modern metropolis bustling with traffic overlapped with Sky City. An ICU ward and a white laboratory alternated back and forth, and kindly people suddenly became nobles...
By the time the stabbing pain ended, Xu Ye more or less understood that he had transmigrated.
Three days earlier, Sky City had discovered an illegal human experimentation laboratory. By the time its people arrived, everyone in the laboratory was dead.
All the experimental data had been deleted.
Yet the original owner of Xu Ye's body alone had somehow survived.
This was an extremely dangerous world.
Because the Heavenly Dao was unstable, contamination, mutations, and evil were everywhere. These could easily distort all kinds of rules, affecting space and time, as well as living creatures' bodies and minds, and causing indescribable changes.
Sky City was unsure whether Xu Ye had been contaminated, so they decided to test him before delivering their final judgment.
Xu Ye patted his head with his palm. Like flour passing through a sieve, a few more memories sifted out.
"Everyone will die, except you..."
The memory ended with Doctor Chen's words to him.
That day, the torrential rain sounded like the low growls of a hungry wolf pack. The instant thunder exploded and lightning flashed, everyone in the laboratory raised a handgun to their own temple and fired.
Mass suicide.
As Xu Ye blinked, that fleeting scene appeared on his retinas, and an inexplicable terror flooded his mind.
Xu Ye staggered, nearly tripping over his own feet.
Calm down... calm down...
He took a deep breath and forced his attention onto his surroundings.
It was a long, narrow, cramped street lined with poles plastered with advertisements. Dense tangles of wires wove a vast grid overhead, carving up the dim sky.
The buildings were packed tightly together, but there was no one nearby.
That was very abnormal.
Just then, Xu Ye's heart began writhing again.
[I believed what my heart told me and refrained from rash, foolish action, so I managed to stay alive.]
[I needed to finish the test as quickly as possible and prove I was normal. Instinctively, I looked straight ahead. This building felt chilly. Something was wrong with it. I seemed to remember my assignment.]
[A kindly older woman in this building liked taking in stray dogs. But three days ago, one of them was contaminated and turned into an aberrant. It killed her, causing a Heavenly Dao Distortion in the surrounding area. Distortion level: 1%.]
[My assignment was to investigate the cause of the contamination incident. It happened on the eighteenth floor. Half an hour later, my head was bitten off, and I died. Luckily, I instinctively protected my precious little heart.]
[My brain was useless anyway. If it was gone, so be it.]
Dead again?
Xu Ye's expression darkened.
But feeling his heart writhe again still shocked him.
His heart seemed to have undergone some bizarre evolution, gaining something like the ability to simulate the future.
Amid his shock and confusion, he vaguely realized that something about this world was abnormal.
Pollution Incident, Heavenly Dao distortion, aberrants...
These were all new terms, and he had no idea what they actually meant.
But clearly, given his current situation, he needed to complete this assignment, survive, and then find a way to return to his own world.
In his original world, though he had been ill, he still had his parents, his little sister, relatives, classmates, close friends... and the college life he was about to begin...
He had to get back!
Xu Ye strode inside.
The building showed its age. Most of the cement had peeled off the walls, and as he pushed his way in, the rusty iron door gave a teeth-grating creak.
It was dark inside, with no lights and a lingering smell of fermented feces and urine.
The entrance door shut out the wind. Now, only Xu Ye's breathing remained.
"No pets or electric scooters allowed."
Xu Ye glanced at the notice beside the elevator and pressed the button.
[Feeling a little lazy, I chose to take the elevator. It began to rise...]
[First floor, second floor... eighteenth floor... the elevator arrived, but for some reason, the doors malfunctioned and would not open. I supposed it had fallen into disrepair. That made sense.]
[Just then, the elevator lights dimmed for a second. In that fleeting second, I saw a blurry figure in the mirror behind me, its back turned toward me.]
[It seized my reflection by the throat and twisted my neck until it snapped. The real me died too.]
[So places with a Heavenly Dao Distortion were not bound by materialism. But with a distortion level of only 1%, how could a phenomenon like a Mirror Spirit appear? That made no sense.]
[But it was too late to say anything now. May there be no elevators in heaven.]
"Ding!"
The elevator arrived.
The doors slowly opened, spilling out dim light. A mirror covered the wall directly opposite Xu Ye.
The boy in the mirror wore linen clothes. His face was pale, his features sharply defined. His black pupils abruptly contracted.
"...Actually, a little exercise now and then is pretty good too. Haha."
Xu Ye quietly closed the elevator and turned toward the stairs.
He would rather face the aberrant than whatever lurked inside that elevator.
In a conference room somewhere in Sky City.
Ten noble adjudicators sat in a row. Each wore a small bronze ornament on their face, covering half an eye, their forehead, their chin, or a cheek.
The ornaments had mysterious designs etched with spiral patterns.
At the front of the conference room, eight large screens showed Xu Ye's behavior from various angles.
This case was somewhat unusual.
The man in charge of the illegal laboratory had been Doctor Chen, an extremely mysterious figure who was said to have lived for centuries. There were even rumors that he held the secrets of this world.
At that moment, however, disgust appeared in the eyes of one slightly plump noble.
"What is he doing? Ignoring a perfectly good elevator to take the stairs?"
"What normal person would climb eighteen floors for no reason? I don't think we need to test him anymore. He must have been contaminated in the laboratory, causing behavioral abnormalities. I recommend immediate execution."
"Seconded," another noble agreed.
"This is a perfectly ordinary Pollution Incident. That mutated stray dog likes staying in the stairwell. Didn't we give him that information beforehand?"
"There's no reason to waste time on a test subject."
Just then, a middle-aged man wearing a gentleman's hat stood up behind the noble adjudicators and stared coldly at Xu Ye on the screens.
This boy was rather unusual.
How had he noticed something was wrong with the elevator in advance?
The middle-aged man withdrew his left hand from his pocket and opened it, revealing a slip of paper.
He had taken the note from Xu Ye. It bore Doctor Chen's handwriting: "He is the light."
The corner of the middle-aged man's mouth twitched.
"Continue the test."
"If everything is confirmed normal, have him join the Dawn Blade."
The stern-faced middle-aged man spoke flatly, and astonished voices immediately rose throughout the conference room.
Meanwhile, Xu Ye was still laboriously climbing the stairs.
Dried dog feces, dog hair, and claw marks littered the staircase.
The stifling stench was like an old woman's foot-binding cloth stirred through rotting protein. Xu Ye's stomach churned, and he nearly vomited.
He drew his only weapon, a dagger, and gripped it tightly.
When Xu Ye reached the fourteenth floor, eerie growls of "heh, heh, heh, kuh, kuh, kuh" suddenly echoed throughout the stairwell.
They drew closer from the distance.
He immediately held his breath.
[I heard the aberrant's cries and felt a little panicked.]
[I was merely a simple, honest transmigrator, too weak to truss a chicken. But to avoid disgracing transmigrators, I decided to bend both knees and slam my forehead against the ground to intimidate my opponent.]
[It was coming. Its growls drew closer and closer, and the smell of blood grew stronger and stronger.]
[Then I saw...]
His heart suddenly stopped writhing.
What came next?
That was it?
Xu Ye was dumbfounded.
You even fucking learned to leave things on a cliffhanger?!
Before you continue