2026-01-24 00:27:07The air in the Grand Hanhai ballroom was thick with the scent of ozone and the metallic tang of fear. Chu Haoran was trembling, but it wasn’t just from the cold. His face was a mask of twisted fury. He stood up slowly, his muscles bulging beneath his expensive suit. The Rank-1 Cultivation energy he had stolen from my veins began to swirl around him in a visible, sickly green mist.
"You think buying a building makes you a god, Qin Ming?" Haoran spat, his voice vibrating with the power of his stolen aura. "I am a Rank-1 Cultivator! I am a tier above humanity! You’re still just a man in a fancy suit. I’ll kill you, and then I’ll take this hotel from your corpse."
"Is that so?" I leaned back against a marble pillar, crossing my arms. "You’re talking about the power I gave you. That’s my blood moving in your arms, Haoran. Don’t you feel like a thief bragging to the man he robbed?"
"It’s not yours anymore! It’s mine!" Haoran roared. "Xinyi, get back! I’m going to turn this 'Chairman' into a stain on his own floor!"
Xinyi scrambled backward, her eyes wide with a mix of terror and anticipation. "Kill him, Haoran! Break his neck! He’s a ghost—he shouldn’t be here!"
Haoran lunged. He was fast—faster than any normal human eye could track. His fist was aimed directly at my throat, crackling with the force of a Rank-1 strike that could shatter concrete.
"In my eyes, Haoran, you're not a CEO," I whispered as the world slowed down. "You're just a liability."
[System: Incoming Rank-1 Strike Detected. Spend 10 Billion Spirit Coins for Skill: Absolute Suppression?]
Purchase it. Now.
[Transaction Confirmed. Balance: 39,999,000,000,000. Activating Absolute Suppression.]
The moment Haoran’s fist was inches from my skin, the air itself turned to solid lead. An invisible weight, ten times the force of gravity, slammed into the ballroom. The crystal chandeliers overhead groaned and shattered. The guests screamed, falling to their knees as the pressure crushed the breath from their lungs.
Haoran didn't just stop; he was hammered down.
The sound of his knees hitting the marble floor echoed like a gunshot. The stone beneath him splintered into a spiderweb of cracks. He was locked in a kneeling position, his fist frozen in the air, his face turning a deep, agonizing purple.
"What... what is this?" Haoran gasped, his voice a strangled wheeze. "I can't... move... My energy... it's being devoured!"
"That’s the difference between us," I said, stepping forward. The pressure didn't touch me; I walked through the zone of crushed gravity as if I were strolling through a garden. "You stole a cup of water and thought you owned the ocean. I am the ocean."
I stood over him, looking down at the man who had laughed while my wife shot me.
"You wanted to strike me, right?" I asked. "You thought your Rank-1 status made you untouchable?"
"Qin Ming... stop..." he managed to choke out.
"The price of a slap in this room is very high, Haoran," I said. I pulled back my hand. I didn't use the System’s power for this. I used the raw, unadulterated strength of the 'God-Body' reconstruction.
The slap echoed through the entire hotel.
Haoran’s head snapped to the side. Three of his teeth flew across the room, skipping over the carpet like dice. His cheek didn't just bruise; it split open, blood spraying onto the white linens of a nearby table. The force of the blow sent a shockwave that blew out the remaining windows of the ballroom.
"That was for the first bullet," I said.
I slapped him with the back of my hand, snapping his head back the other way. His nose collapsed with a sickening crunch.
"That was for the second."
I grabbed him by the hair, forcing his blood-masked face to look up at me. "And the third one? The one that sent me over the cliff? I’m going to let you live a long time just so you can wonder when I’m going to collect on that one."
"Ming! Please!"
A hand clutched at my sleeve. It was Xinyi. She was on her knees too, but not from the gravity. She was crawling, her face wet with tears, her silk robe torn. "Ming, I was forced! Haoran threatened me! He said he’d kill my family if I didn't go along with it! I still love you, I swear!"
I looked down at her. In the past, those tears would have broken my heart. I would have reached out, pulled her up, and apologized for the blood on her face.
But now, my eyes saw more than just a beautiful woman. The System’s interface flickered over her, a cold, digital evaluation appearing in my retinas.
[Scanning Target: Lin Xinyi...]
[Assets: Seized.]
[Loyalty: -100%.]
[Genetic Value: Minimal.]
A golden price tag manifested above her head, glowing with a harsh, neon light.
[Lin Xinyi: Worth $0.00. Status: Trash.]
I looked at the tag, then back at her desperate, lying eyes. I felt nothing. No anger, no love—just the clinical observation of a man looking at a broken piece of equipment.
"You’re worth zero dollars, Xinyi," I said, my voice devoid of emotion. "Even the System thinks you’re trash."
"What? What are you talking about?" she sobbed, clutching my leg. "I’m your wife! I’m the CEO of Lin Cosmetics!"
"You were," I corrected. I looked at Manager Wei, who was standing at the edge of the suppression zone, watching with terrified awe. "Wei. Inform the banks. Every asset tied to the Lin family name is to be shorted into oblivion by morning. If they own a car, repossess it. If they own a house, board it up."
"Yes, Chairman!" Wei shouted.
I kicked my leg free from Xinyi’s grasp. She sprawled onto the floor, her face landing in the pool of Haoran’s blood.
"You said the ocean was deep, Xinyi," I reminded her, leaning down. "But you forgot the most important rule of the deep."
"What?" she whispered, trembling.
"The monsters at the bottom don't accept apologies."
I turned my back on them, the Absolute Suppression lifting as I walked away. Haoran collapsed face-first into the ruins of the floor, unconscious and broken. Xinyi began to wail, a high-pitched, pathetic sound that was drowned out by the sudden, heavy thud of military boots at the ballroom entrance.
[: The doors didn't just open; they were blown off their hinges. A man in a black trench coat, carrying a long-case sword and radiating a Rank-5 'Lord Realm' pressure, stepped through the smoke. He didn't look at the carnage. He looked at me.]
[System: Warning! High-Level Assassin detected. Contract: 'The 100 Trillion Bounty'. Would you like to spend 50 Billion to activate the 'Aegis of the Fallen'?]
I stood my ground, my golden eyes reflecting the stranger's blade. "So," I said, a dark smile playing on my lips. "The big players are finally showing up.”
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Chapter 268: The Final Heat.
"Li! What is the structural integrity of the sector canopy?" I roared, my voice cutting through the deafening, groan of the collapsing horizon. I stood at the center of the depot, my boots locked onto the floor as the entire building swayed under a localized gravitational spike. "The sky is literally bending! Look at the stars above Hanhai City!"The six-year-old Li didn't look at me; his eyes were glued to a massive, projection-mapped star chart floating above the caravan. The stars weren't flickering; they were sagging. Brilliant white suns were dragging downward through the atmosphere, leaving long, glowing trails of burning gas that tore through the clouds like lead weights on a silk sheet."The canopy is failing, Father!" Li shouted, his double voice hitting a shrill pitch. "The laws of physics were designed to terminate at a specific entropy limit! We stopped the termination, but we didn't stop the mass accumulation! Every hero we unarchived, every planet we restored, and every
Chapter 267: The Sovereign’s Forgiveness
The sub-reality simulation collapsed with a sound like tearing sheet metal. The blinding purple glare of Kael’s alternate reality shattered into raw, unrendered code fragments, dropping us straight back onto the solid floorboards of my old administrative office in the Hanhai City maintenance depot.The familiar scent of engine grease and cheap instant coffee rushed into my lungs. My leather boots hit the linoleum floor with a heavy, grounding thud. I looked down at my hands. The skin was clear, my veins pulsing with that deep, familiar gold marrow fire. The high-voltage structural authority of my level 100 sovereign profile was fully restored, vibrating right through the soles of my feet into the very foundations of the room."Ming! You're back! The ledger metrics are stabilizing!" Su Qinghe cried out, her voice cracking with a wild, breathless adrenaline as she tumbled out of the terminal loop behind my desk. She didn't look at her golden parchment ledger; she threw her arms straight
Chapter 266: The Second Awakening
The screaming ocean of crimson error text didn't just fade; it snapped like a broken high-voltage cable, dropping me face-first into a pile of cold, wet cardboard. The absolute silver-gold radiance of the zero-point directory was completely gone. The smell of ozone and fire had vanished, replaced by the choking stench of stagnant puddle water and cheap diesel exhaust.I coughed violently, my chest burning as I dragged myself up onto one elbow. My fingers scraped against slick, greasy concrete. I looked down at my hands. They were covered in dark grime, trembling, completely devoid of any gold marrow fire or high-voltage structural authority. I didn't have a solid-gold fountain pen in my pocket. I didn't have a level 100 sovereign profile."Hey! Get the hell out of the driveway, you useless vagrant!" a harsh voice thundered from above, followed by a violent splash of muddy water that ped my face and soaked my thin, ragged jacket.I blinked through the dirty water, my jaw clenching as a
Chapter 265: The Perfect Life
"Stop right there, Kael!" I screamed, my voice tearing through the fracturing gold code of the platform. My boots skidded hard across the shifting lines of Chapter 1's memory matrix. The environment around us wasn't a corporate courtroom anymore; it was the dark, damp alleyway behind the old Hanhai logistics market. The smell of rotten cabbage and wet cardboard hit my nose with a raw, agonizing human reality."You're too late, Director Qin," Kael said without turning his head. He stood directly over the shivering, broke ghost-asset version of my younger self. The twenty-four-year-old me was clutching a rusted ledger box, his clothes torn, his eyes full of a helpless, pathetic desperation as the initial betrayal metrics of the Mercury credit syndicates began to download into his profile. Kael raised the solid-gold fountain pen high, its tip hovering a millimeter above my first trillion-token initialization wire. "One strike, and I delete the betrayal data row. I'll automatically deposi
Chapter 264: The Hunt for the Last Page
"He's diving into the floorboards, Boss! Don't let his boots clear the baseline matrix!" Long Wu roared, his face bright red as he lunged straight over my old wooden desk. His massive hands clawed at the air, missing Kael’s black tunic by a single millimeter. "The gray linoleum is splitting open! It’s the sub-reality channels!""I see him, Long Wu! Keep your parameters locked onto my exhaust!" I shouted, my voice carrying a heavy, furious metallic ring that shattered the office windows into a million glass shards. I didn't care that my hands were just skin or that the gold marrow fire inside my ribs was thumping with a painful, suffocating drag. I leaped straight through the fracturing desk space, my denim jacket whistling as the familiar concrete walls of our Hanhai City depot dissolved into a chaotic, lightless maze of flashing fiber-optic pipes and raw copper grid lines. "Kael! Drop my family ledger right now, you arrogant bastard!""You're too slow, Director Qin," Kael’s voice ech
Chapter 263: The Apprentice of the Void
"State your name and registry tag before I run a root-level enforcement script that deletes your entire profile right where you stand!" I shouted, my voice cutting through the emerald static of the trial exit with a heavy, booming register. My leather boots slammed against the stone platform, my knuckles turning bone-white around the solid-gold fountain pen. "You didn't clear forty-eight cycles of administrative logic in forty-eight seconds using a legal protocol, kid. Speak up!"The young man in the black tunic didn't blink. He took a slow, deliberate step out of the crystal archway, his dark eyes locked straight onto my position with an absolute, freezing indifference that ped my executive authority right back into my throat. "My name is Kael. I don't have a registry tag, Qin Ming. I don't have a data row in your database, and I don't owe a single tax token to your non-profit charter.""No registry tag?" Su Qinghe gasped, her voice dropping instantly into a sharp, breathless pitch o
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