Victim

"DESTROY HIS DANTIAN!" Ma Durung shouted with a booming voice. Immediately, several disciples tightened their grip on Zhao Yun. The command from Ma Durung, the crown prince of the Ma Kingdom and a prodigious disciple of the Black Dragon Sect, was carried out without hesitation by his subordinates. Zhao Yun, forced to kneel with both his hands firmly restrained by two of Ma Durung's followers, was in a dire situation. His mouth was gagged with cloth, silencing any attempt to cry for help. Worse, his qi flow had been sealed by Ma Durung's personal guards, rendering him powerless to resist. With desperation in his eyes, Zhao Yun glanced toward his three closest friends. His gaze pleaded for their help, a silent cry for salvation. But to his dismay, his friends turned their faces away, avoiding his gaze entirely. Witnessing their betrayal, Zhao Yun could only grimace inwardly. Those he had considered friends, those he had always helped, had stabbed him in the back. A young, innocent man, left crippled with his dantian destroyed, the victim of envy from a royal prince and the betrayal of his three closest friends—this betrayal filled Zhao Yun with a profound sense of disbelief and an unquenchable thirst for vengeance. As he fought to survive the despair threatening to consume him, Zhao Yun was unexpectedly saved by a figure he deeply admired, someone he had always looked up to. Unbeknownst to him, this savior would present Zhao Yun with a choice that would shape his future. Will Zhao Yun redefine his purpose in life? What fate awaits him as he steps into an uncertain future?

One hour vanished from Detective Marcus Kane's life. He remembers kicking down the warehouse door, then nothing but blood on his knuckles and a corpse at his feet. No witnesses. No weapon. No memory. Now he's the department's most wanted, hunted by the brothers in blue who once had his back and tormented by jagged fragments of that stolen hour; fragments showing hands that move like his but aren't under his control. Then the second body drops. Same execution. Exactly one hour after the first. Marcus isn't just a suspect. He's a loaded gun in someone else's hand, and they're pulling the trigger on a schedule. Each victim ties back to a military black site that promised to erase his war trauma, not weaponize him into something unrecognizable. They didn't just take his memories, they programmed a killer into the void. His ex-partner Sarah believes him. Barely. She's risking everything to keep him one step ahead of the manhunt, but her faith cracks with every crime scene photo proving Marcus was there. And the killer inside him is waking up more with each passing hour. The facility's files are sealed. The doctors are dead. And Marcus has seventy-three minutes until the programming kicks in again. To stop the murders, he'll have to willingly step into the blackout and hope he comes back with answers instead of more blood. But his handler isn't some faceless bureaucrat, they're someone who knows exactly how to break him, because they built him. Marcus Kane has one hour to catch a killer. The killer is him. And the puppet master has been watching from inside his own department all along. *****