Yunjin City, Earth — Winter Cycle, 2025
Zhao Ming sat alone on the seventy-second floor, fingers loosely interlaced, gazing down at the glittering insect colony called Yunjin City. From this height the streets were nothing more than glowing capillaries, pulsing in a rhythm so precise it bordered on reverence. Cars advanced and halted on command, pedestrians flowed through intersections like regulated currents, and money itself moved invisibly through systems designed to convince people they still possessed choice. In truth, everything below him functioned only because the conditions had been shaped to permit it.
Order was fragile, dependent on belief and fear in equal measure. Control, however, was eternal. It did not require consent, only understanding.
At twenty-eight, Zhao Ming had long since outgrown the childish hunger for applause. Praise was for those who needed reassurance. Admiration was currency traded by the insecure. What he desired, what he had always demanded, was ownership. People did not cooperate with him, nor did they truly oppose him. They entered his orbit, adjusted themselves unconsciously, and eventually learned the quiet truth of their position. Once touched by his influence, they belonged to him.
He had begun with nothing but fifty thousand yuan in student debt, a memory that refused to forget even the smallest inconsistency, and a mind that had severed restraint so early it no longer remembered guilt as a language. In seven years he had assembled a three-hundred-million-yuan empire from collapsing properties and distressed markets, harvesting value from the ruins others were too frightened to touch. He did not rescue dying systems. He consumed them.
He remembered everything. The exact moment a man's throat tightened before a lie emerged. The fractional delay between confidence and panic when leverage shifted. The subtle change in breathing when someone realized negotiation had already ended and surrender was merely awaiting formality. Numbers never blurred. Faces never faded. Once something entered his ledger, whether asset or human, it remained there permanently, preserved with absolute clarity.
Business was not negotiation. It was acquisition, conducted through patience rather than noise. The same principle governed his body. From adolescence onward he had trained with almost devotional precision, shaping flesh with the same discipline he applied to capital. Sanda taught him how to break structure. Wing Chun taught him how to deny space itself. He never fought to win. Victory was trivial. He fought to impose hierarchy, to engrave understanding directly into bone and breath.
Violence, when applied with perfect economy, produced the purest obedience.
That night, after closing a nine-figure acquisition that would leave three rival families financially ruined by morning, Zhao Ming drove himself home. Snow bled into freezing rain, coating the elevated highway until the asphalt gleamed like polished obsidian. The city blurred past in orderly streams of light as his car sliced cleanly through the darkness.
Then a delivery truck jackknifed across three lanes.
There was no panic and no fear, only the moment of contact. Steel screamed, glass detonated, and his vision folded inward as though the world itself had been creased by careless hands. Consciousness vanished without ceremony.
Lingyuan City — The Lower Rings Underground Cage, 1:47 a.m.
The first thing he noticed was the smell.
Blood clung to the air with stubborn permanence, layered with old sweat and oxidized metal until the stench had fused with the concrete itself. It was not unpleasant so much as honest. This place did not pretend to be anything other than what it was.
Zhao Ming opened his eyes slowly.
Pain pulsed behind his skull in steady, deliberate waves, not chaotic but evaluative, as though the body he now inhabited were assessing whether consciousness was deserved. The canvas beneath his cheek was tacky with dried blood. His mouth tasted faintly of copper. His hands, wrapped in filthy tape, rested in front of him with a stillness that felt instinctive rather than chosen.
This body was wrong. Younger, leaner, sharper, carrying the unfinished density of nineteen years rather than twenty-eight. He inhaled once, deeply and without urgency, testing lungs, balance, awareness. Everything responded.
Functional.
"What the hell…?" he murmured, his voice low and almost amused by the novelty.
Sound returned all at once. Voices slammed against the cage walls in overlapping waves, distorted by chain-link and alcohol and desperation. Flickering neon lights smeared diseased color across faces contorted by hunger and anticipation. This was not competition. It was consumption, a place where violence existed to be watched rather than resolved.
A shadow moved into his line of sight.
Zhang Hao stood above him with the easy posture of a man accustomed to dominance. His neck was thick, his knuckles scarred, and his grin carried the confidence of someone who had made a habit of hurting those unable to respond in kind.
"Look at him," Zhang Hao laughed, the sound wet and coarse. "Pretty boy finally woke up. Thought your mother's tea shop would be collecting your corpse tonight."
The words turned something inside him.
Memory surged forward, not his own but inherited, slotting into place with unnatural smoothness. The name was the same, but the life was not. Nineteen years old. A business student at Lingyuan University. A father crushed in a construction collapse tied to local clans, with compensation swallowed by paperwork and silence. A mother, Lin Mei, her body worn thin by endless labor, running a failing tea shop in the fog-choked old district. Tuition unpaid. Medicine rationed. Debt accumulating with quiet cruelty.
This Zhao Ming fought in illegal rings because survival had offered no alternatives.
Tonight, he had been knocked unconscious.
And now the Zhao Ming from Yunjin City occupied this flesh.
There was no confusion, no panic, no existential horror. Only interest, sharp and attentive. Another world meant another hierarchy, and hierarchies existed to be reorganized.
Zhang Hao cracked his neck and rolled his shoulders. "Still dizzy? Say the word and I'll put you down clean."
Zhao Ming rose slowly, movements unhurried. As he stood, instincts aligned with perfect obedience. Sanda footwork surfaced without friction. Wing Chun centerline control flowed naturally into posture and balance. This body had been trained hard and young. It lacked refinement, but it listened.
When he lifted his gaze, the crowd fell quiet without understanding why.
Under the harsh neon his appearance was unsettling. Skin pale to the edge of bloodlessness, black hair falling loosely around sharp, almost aristocratic features. His eyes appeared dark, yet within the artificial light lurked a faint crimson undertone that suggested not emotion, but calculation. There was no excitement in his expression.
Only assessment.
He wiped the blood from his lip with the back of his hand and spoke softly, without raising his voice.
"You don't understand your position."
Zhang Hao frowned. "What?"
"You're in my way."
The certainty carried no threat. That was what made it cold.
Zhang Hao charged.
The punch came heavy and straightforward, driven by habit rather than thought. Zhao Ming stepped inside the arc with minimal motion, redirecting force rather than resisting it. His body flowed forward seamlessly. Fingers struck the throat with precise intent, cartilage collapsing beneath controlled pressure. His knee drove into the ribs and felt bone yield. His elbow followed, snapping across the jaw, and the world tilted violently for his opponent.
Zhang Hao gasped, eyes wide as breath abandoned him.
Zhao Ming smiled slightly, the expression thin and almost gentle. He found that he enjoyed this, not for the violence itself but for the clarity it provided. There was no ambiguity here, no pretense.
A low kick removed balance. A spinning backfist ended resistance.
The body fell heavily to the canvas.
For a moment the cage was silent, as though sound itself hesitated. Then chaos erupted. Shouts, money changing hands, voices clawing for meaning.
"Winner, Zhao Ming!"
An envelope was shoved into his palm containing nine thousand two hundred yuan. It felt light. Temporary. He stepped out into Lingyuan City's fog-drowned streets, where neon bled across rain-slick pavement and towers loomed above like unfinished threats against the sky.
Somewhere in the old district, above a small struggling tea shop, a woman waited.
Lin Mei.
His mother in this world.
The thought settled within him slowly, not warm but possessive, sinking deep until it rooted itself completely. This body, this city, this woman, this life all belonged to him now.
"I'll take everything," Zhao Ming murmured into the fog, his voice calm and assured.
"And I won't ask permission."
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