Pain.It felt like someone had cracked his skull open from the inside and poured in a lifetime of someone else's memories.Arthur's eyes snapped open. He was gasping, his shirt soaked through with cold sweat, his heart hammering against his ribs. Streets he had never walked, faces he had never met, a childhood in a rusted tin shack: all of it kept flooding in, burying his own memories beneath it.He had transmigrated. Somehow, his soul had been dragged into a parallel world and forced to merge with an orphan boy who shared his name.Before he could finish processing the splitting agony, a voice barked in his ear."Arthur! You're up! What are you standing there for?"Arthur jerked his head up. On a raised platform stood a stocky man in his fifties, Mr. Davis, his homeroom teacher, according to the new memories. Davis held a black stone the size of a human head, and he was watching Arthur with an expression that was hard to read.Arthur turned slowly. A schoolyard. A packed schoolyard,

Half an hour later, Ninth District, Arthur's shack.Three iron locks clicked shut, one after another. Arthur leaned against the door for a long moment, listening. Distant shouting. A gang fight two streets over. The hum of the flickering lamp on the ceiling. Nobody was coming. Not yet.The shack was six steps wide and eight long: a cot, a table, a lamp wired to a stolen battery, a water tank that leaked into a bucket. Everything he owned would have fit in a single schoolbag.He crouched by the bed and pried up a loose floorboard with his fingernails. Underneath, wrapped in an old oil rag, sat the only thing his parents had ever left him.A black iron box. No hinges. No seams. No lock. Just a smooth, cold cube that fit in both hands.His parents had died in a beast raid when he was fourteen. But the night before they left on their last supply run, they had pressed this box into his palm, and his mother had said one thing."On your eighteenth birthday. Feed it your blood."Today was his

The night wind carried the smell of iron and smoke.Arthur slipped through the dark streets of the Ninth District with the blood-slick spider padding silently at his heels. One man, one machine, swallowed by the shadows.The Blood Axe Gang's headquarters had been built inside an old air-raid shelter, a squat concrete warehouse that the whole slum treated as forbidden ground. Anyone who wandered too close ended up crippled or dead.Tonight, it was lit up like a bonfire.Screams and drunken laughter spilled out of the main doors."Hahaha! Damn, this is good!"Bill, the gang's second-in-command, had one boot planted on the head of an old scavenger and was howling with delight. He stood over two meters tall, and his entire body was now encased in thick gray stone. An E-rank Rock Armor System."Listen up, all of you!" Bill kicked, and the old man's jaw cracked. He turned to the trembling crowd with a savage grin. "From tonight, the Ninth D

Arthur's finger hung over the launch key, and it did not come down.The heat source on the screen was still shaking like a leaf in a storm. That body shape was too familiar.Three years at the same desk. The fat boy who had slid half a cold bun under his notebook while the whole school laughed."Cancel fire."His voice was low.Outside the fortress, the hidden gun barrels slid back into the wall without a sound. The infrared lasers died.Arthur stood and walked to the ten-ton hydraulic gate."Open it. Just a crack."With a tooth-grinding screech of metal, the massive door parted by half a meter. Pale blue light spilled through the gap."Get in here." His voice crackled out of the external speaker, with no warmth in it at all. "Three seconds. Or you die."Silence outside for one beat.Then a round dark shape squeezed through the gap, half crawling, half rolling.Boom.The gate sealed behind him. No way back.The air rippled like water.Sam dropped his stealth. He collapsed onto the col