Reborn With A System: Your Bragging Lies; My Fortune

LIN FENG’S POV 

The truck's headlights blinded me half a second before its horn tore through the night and I felt two palms on my back before I saw them, shoving me off the curb like I weighed nothing.

"Catch him if you can, Lin Feng!" Ryan's voice rang out laughing, like he was tossing me a joke instead of my life.

My arms flailed, my shoes lost the ground and for one endless second I hung between the sidewalk and the road, before I saw all of them. Vivian Song was with her phone already up, filming, old classmates I hadn't spoken to in ten years were running their mouths but not one hand reached for me and Ryan, my best friend since we were seven years old was standing there with his jaw set and his eyes cold in a way I'd never seen on him before.

Then the truck hit me but I didn't feel so much pain as I felt everything stop. The sound cut out first, then the lights, then the cold September air on my skin and the last thing I heard was Ryan's distant and warped voice before I blacked out.

"He was always going to end up under someone's wheels, might as well be mine."

Reborn 

I woke up gasping, my hand clawing at my own chest like I could hold my ribs together. They were whole, no blood, broken glass or truck. It was just my ceiling, cracked in the same spider pattern it had been cracked in for six years and water-stained in the corner where the roof always leaked when it rained.

I sat up so fast that my head spun. I was in my same terrible, freezing apartment, with the mattress on the floor and the one window that didn't close all the way. I pressed both hands flat against the wall beside my bed, needing something solid, needing proof that I existed.

The wall was cold and real under my palms. My phone buzzed on the floor and I nearly didn't pick it up. My fingers were shaking too hard to trust them, but I made myself look anyway.

September 14th.

My stomach dropped straight through the floor as I remembered that the class reunion was tomorrow. I had died at the reunion and remembered the whole night in pieces so sharp that they cut. I couldn't forget the toast Ryan made about brotherhood, the way everyone laughed when he said my name and the way he'd smiled right before he shoved me into the road.

I stood up too fast and had to grab the wall again when the room tilted and my legs felt like they didn't belong to me. I walked to the cracked mirror above my sink and stared at my own face. I was twenty seven years old with the same hollow cheeks, tired eyes and scar above my eyebrow from when I was nineteen and worked construction to pay my mother's hospital bills.

I was surprised that I was alive.

I gave a broken laugh, more like a sob and pressed the heel of my hand against my mouth to stop the sound from carrying through the thin walls.

A knock came at my door in three slow raps and I froze.

"Boy, I know you're awake in there. I can hear you falling all over yourself."

That was Old Man Cheng's voice, the same gravel and cigarettes, as always. I hadn't heard it in what felt like a lifetime, though technically it had only been a day, or ten years, or however this worked because I didn't know anymore. My hands were still shaking when I opened the door.

He stood in the hallway in his faded gray robe, a bowl in his hands with steam curling off the top. He squinted at me like he was reading something off my face he didn't like.

"You look like you saw a ghost," he said, if only he knew how close he was.

"I couldn't sleep," I managed to answer 

He shoved the bowl of cheap noodles with two floating eggs into my hands without asking. "Eat something. Whatever's eating you can wait until your stomach isn't empty."

I stared down at the bowl and my throat tightened in a way that had nothing to do with hunger. In my old life, this was the same bowl, the same eggs and the same gruff kindness he gave me the night before everything ended. I hadn't understood back then how much it meant but now, I understood better.

"Thank you," I said, my voice cracking.

Cheng Ye grunted like he hadn't noticed, but his eyes lingered on me a second too long before he turned and shuffled back toward his own door. "Your class reunion's tomorrow. Don't let those rich brats make you feel small, boy. Money doesn't make a man."

I didn't respond and watched him go, my chest aching in a way I didn't have words for. I closed the door and sat down against it, the bowl balanced on my knees, and let myself shake for a while.

I was alive and had a single day before I had to walk back into that room and face every person who had watched me die. I didn't know why I was here again, or what force had reached down and dragged me back from the road but I knew one thing with absolute certainty as I sat there on my cold floor was that I was not going to die the same way twice.

I was still turning that thought over when a flat, mechanical voice came inside my skull, flat and mechanical, like something reading off a script that had never belonged to a human throat.

“Host initializing”

I dropped the bowl of noodles and broth and it splattered across the floor, but I didn't even look at the mess. I was too busy staring at the empty air in front of me, waiting for the voice to explain itself but it didn't.

“{Function: locating boastful falsehoods within proximity range and converting detected falsehood into verified asset, transferable to host. Awaiting the first trigger.}”

My heart slammed against my ribs so hard that it hurt.

"What!" I whispered out loud, to a room no one else was in. 

"Who are you?" I asked but the voice gave me no name, explanation or comfort but silence.