“You call my heritage primitive, but you’re the one using a man’s soul as a glorified AA battery. Let’s see how your ‘modern’ tech handles a surge it was never designed to contain.”The air in the central hub was thick enough to choke on, saturated with the constant hum of the Large Hadron Collider and the sickeningly sweet stench of synthetic reagents. I stood before the primary containment unit, my gaze locked on the man behind the reinforced kinetic barrier.Dr. Aris. The Syndicate’s Chief Researcher. He looked like someone who had never seen the sun—pallid skin stretched tight over sharp bones, eyes hidden behind augmented lenses that scrolled endlessly with cascading data streams. He didn’t bother to look at me. His fingers danced across a holographic interface, calmly monitoring the energy being ripped from Elder Qin’s meridians.“Impressive that you made it this far, Jiang Hao,” Aris said, his voice amplified through the lab’s speakers. “But you’re an anachronism. A village doc

The dust from the crystal’s detonation hadn’t even settled when the heavy blast doors at the far end of the chamber hissed open. A figure stepped through the smoke, his footsteps steady, unhurried, carrying a terrifying certainty. He wasn’t wearing the gold mask.I stood my ground, clutching my sister’s limp body in one arm while my Sovereign Qi flared like a dying star. As the red emergency strobes swept across his face, my heart slammed violently against my ribs. The air felt like it had been ripped out of the room.It was like staring into a mirror that showed me twenty years into the future.The same sharp cheekbones. The same decisive jawline. The same cold, analytical eyes that stared back at me every morning.“Do you finally see it, Jiang Hao?” he asked.The voice wasn’t modulated. It was mine—deeper, colder, tempered by decades of calculated brutality.“Who are you?” I rasped, tightening my grip on Mei.“I am the perfection of the Jiang legacy,” he said calmly, spreading his a

"Mei! It’s me! Stop!"My voice was lost in the shriek of tearing metal. The girl who had been my soft-spoken sister was gone, replaced by a blur of jagged, neon-blue motion. Her obsidian claws raked across my chest, sparks flying as they hit the outer layer of my Iron Skin."Target identified," Mei rasped. The voice wasn't hers; it was a layered, synthesized chord that vibrated with the hum of a high-voltage transformer. "Elimination protocol: Sovereign.""Hao, move!" Elder Qin’s voice boomed from the wreckage of the gel-pod. He was standing now, his ancient frame radiating a renewed, golden light. "She’s not in control! The Blue Qi has hijacked her central nervous system!"I rolled to the left as Mei’s foot shattered the floor where my head had been a millisecond before. "I know! I can see the neural shunts!"Luo Bing was already in motion, his fists a blur as he intercepted a squad of Syndicate guards charging through the breach. "Mr. Jiang! We can't hold them forever! The facility is d

I stood in the center of the GMC’s medical penthouse in Zurich, a room that screamed of sterile opulence and the arrogance of men who thought they could legislate life and death. The walls were made of reinforced smart-glass, overlooking the city, but my focus was on the long mahogany table where the Board of Directors sat like a row of vultures.They had my sister in the adjacent isolation ward, trapped behind five layers of kinetic shielding."Mr. Jiang, let us be reasonable," Chairman Hamilton said, his voice a smooth, upper-class purr. He was a man who looked like he had never missed a meal or a bribe in his life. He adjusted his silk tie and tapped a thick stack of papers on the table. "We have processed the legal injunction. Under the Global Bio-Security Act, your sister, Jiang Mei, is classified as a Grade-A biological threat. She is no longer your kin in the eyes of the law; she is a ward of the Council."I didn't sit. I didn't even acknowledge the chair they had placed for me

"If you want to kill a god, you better not miss. Because from where I’m standing, you’re just a coward hiding behind a very expensive magnifying glass."The wind over Zurich was biting, a razor-edged chill that whipped my duster around my shins as I stood on the penthouse balcony of the GMC building. Below, the city was a chaotic tapestry of emergency lights and sirens, but I wasn't looking down. I was looking up. Somewhere in the cold, silent vacuum of orbit, The Vanguard was positioned—a weaponized station capable of turning the atmosphere into a pressurized delivery system for the most lethal pathogens known to man."Sir, the uplink is nearly stable," Luo Bing shouted over the wind. He was hunched over a heavy, black Pelican case, his fingers flying across a military-grade terminal. "I’m trying to spoof their targeting sensors, but they’re using a quantum-locked encryption. It’s like trying to hack a ghost.""Don't hack the ghost, Luo Bing," I said, my voice low and steady. "Just f