Wang Wei’s heart lurched against her will, then steadied. She began to clap, slow and deliberate. "Interesting. You actually found your way up here. I suppose someone on my side leaked the information to Zhao Shiqi, and he passed it along to you?"

Her mind had already spun through the possibilities and landed on the most likely one. Otherwise, a half-rebooter like Qi Yuan would never have tracked her down so confidently.

She regarded Qi Yuan with a calm, almost composed expression, as though everything were still under control. "By the looks of it, it seems like you've already made contact with Zhao Shiqi and obtained a high-grade gene serum."

Qi Yuan had an unreadable look in his eyes. "Are you out of your mind? You sent people to kill me?"

Wang Wei said, utterly unbothered, "Do I need a reason to kill you?"

Qi Yuan blinked. "...A woman who acts first and thinks never?"

Wang Wei didn't react to the jab. "I'll let you die knowing why. It's because I am also a rebooter."

"And it gives you the right to kill people?" Qi Yuan's voice sharpened. "Does it put you above the law?"

He genuinely couldn't understand why the world kept producing people like this. The world would be a far better place if everyone were orderly, reasonable, and decent like him.

Wang Wei said contemptuously, with a touch of pity, "With only one year of memories, you have no idea what the future looks like."

Qi Yuan said flatly, "The future is none of your business, because you don't have one."

He had decided it was time to clean up this sort of mess. People killing others openly in the street could not be allowed to stand. Especially when the target was an innocent, law-abiding, entirely blameless citizen like himself.

Wang Wei's expression twisted slightly. "What, you think just because you have a high-grade gene serum you can look down on everyone? Boy, you have no idea what you’re actually facing!"

Qi Yuan's bearing shifted. "Do you know what you're actually facing?"

For a moment his entire presence seemed to sharpen into something that didn't belong to any ordinary man.

Wang Wei faltered slightly. "...What?"

"A man officially certified as mentally ill, yet clearly pretending!" Qi Yuan produced the document in question and held it up for her to see. "With this card, I can kill you and face zero legal consequences. I can basically do whatever I want to you right now!"

He straightened up, radiating confidence as murder settled into his eyes.

Wang Wei stared at him for a moment, then burst out laughing. "You... Pfft! You're actually certified. You have no idea what kind of world this is becoming. Dying at my hands will be the greatest honour of your miserable life."

A blood-red orb appeared in her palm out of thin air. The moment it emerged, her eyes filled with a kind of reverent, obsessive light. Beside her, the sniper flinched visibly, clearly wary of the thing.

Wang Wei laughed with triumph. "This will be your nightmare."

In the next ten years, Tianyue City and the whole of Arch Star would change beyond recognition. The single most significant turning point would come in five years, when spatial rifts began to tear open across the planet, connected to the legendary Immortal World.

Immortals with godlike power strode through, capable of cleaving tanks in two with a single slash. Even the mightiest gene soldiers of Arch Star could barely last a few exchanges against them. As if that wasn’t enough, they held mystical artifacts of every conceivable kind, each unpredictable in ways that defied all conventional thinking.

In fact, her orb was one such relic, left behind from the Immortal Dao. She had used her memories to claim it, then spent the time since learning to activate it. Aside from her foreknowledge, it was the single greatest advantage she possessed.

Clutching it now, she felt like an Immortal herself, looking down on all beneath her. "What a shame that a frog at the bottom of a well can't even see what it's up against."

Qi Yuan glanced between the orb and her, mildly exasperated. "Your trump card is a mid-stage Qi Refinement realm trinket? And you're treating it like treasure?"

He raised one hand and casually flicked it. The supposedly indestructible orb shattered like a soap bubble, dissolving into wisps of spiritual energy that drifted apart in the air.

Then, he drew a slow breath. "The spiritual energy stored in that thing wouldn't even match a single burp from me... Not that I burp."

Wang Wei's expression froze. The Luoluo Curse Orb was gone just like that.

She was genuinely in shock. "How do you know about spiritual energy?! You were supposed to die in a year, you're not supposed to know any of this!"

That orb would have given even the most brilliant young talents on Arch Star serious trouble, even ten years from now!

Qi Yuan replied, "Want to know how? Too bad. I have a psychiatric certificate, and I don't explain myself to dead people."

Just then, he shifted. At the same moment, a gunshot rang out. The sniper had finally found an opening and pulled the trigger. It was, of course, useless.

Qi Yuan said pleasantly, "Oh dear, your aim slipped. You seem to have shot this insufferable woman's head clean off."

The pride had indeed gone out of Wang Wei permanently. Her head had split apart like a dropped watermelon. It was the sort of sight that would turn any ordinary person's stomach. Qi Yuan, however, was smiling. He turned his gaze to the sniper.

The sniper's eyes almost fell out of their sockets. He could not begin to understand what had just happened. He had been aiming at Qi Yuan. He knew he had! At this range, a miss was physically impossible. His entire primary school education felt like it had been wasted.

With a snap of Qi Yuan’s finger, the sniper's consciousness flickered and went dark. He crumpled silently to the ground.

Qi Yuan murmured to himself, "Good thing I have that psychiatric certificate, otherwise killing three people in one afternoon would be a legal problem."

As he looked down at Wang Wei's body, a quiet, contemplative focus settled over him. The moment she died, a faint and almost imperceptible change had stirred somewhere deep inside him. His connection to this world seemed to have grown fractionally stronger.

Is this some kind of cauldron-raising game?

A thought occurred to him, unbidden. Breed a cohort of rebooters, set them against each other, and grant the last one standing some extraordinary reward!

Sure enough, now that Wang Wei was gone, Qi Yuan could feel that his fortune had subtly but definitely increased.

Did someone engineer this? Or is it just a coincidence?