The air atop the forty-second floor of the Shanhai International Building was thin and bitingly cold. Down below, the city of Shanghai looked like a circuit board pulsing with neon electricity, indifferent to the man standing on the rusted edge of the maintenance balcony.
Li Tian looked down at his shoes—cheap, scuffed leather he had polished every morning for a job that had just discarded him like a piece of industrial waste. His tie, loosened and frayed, whipped violently in the wind.
He was a "white-collar" worker, a cog in the machine that had finally snapped. He didn't want to think about the incident at the office today—the whispers in the breakroom, the way his manager had looked through him as if he were already a ghost, and the crushing weight of a blame he didn't deserve. The isolation was a physical weight, a cold void in his chest that felt eerily similar to the vacuum of the night sky.
As his toes edged over the precipice, three faces flickered behind his eyelids like dying embers.
The first was his sister, Xiao Ni. She was only fourteen, still wearing her oversized school uniform and dreaming of becoming a doctor. Their parents were long gone, and Li Tian was her only pillar.
"I'm sorry, Ni-Ni," he whispered into the gale. "The pillar is rotten. I can't even afford your tuition anymore. I'm leaving you in a world that eats the weak."
The second was Lin Xinyi. The girl who sat three desks away, who smelled like jasmine and had a laugh that temporarily silenced the humming of the office fluorescent lights. He had loved her in silence for three years. He had written a dozen letters he never sent and rehearsed a thousand confessions he never spoke. Now, those words would die in his throat, unsaid and irrelevant.
The third, and most bitter, was Wang Meili.
The "friend" he had trusted with his secrets and his meager savings. She had used his kindness as a ladder, stepping on his back to climb the corporate ranks before exposing his vulnerabilities to seal her own promotion. She had exploited his loyalty, drained his bank account, and then laughed when he asked for help.
"I was a fool," Li Tian muttered, a single tear freezing on his cheek. "I gave my heart to a snake and expected it not to bite."
Li Tian didn't want to feel the pain anymore. He didn't want to be the "good man" who finished last. He leaned forward, gravity claiming him with a sudden, violent jerk.
The wind roared in his ears, stripping away the sound of the city. For a few seconds, he was weightless. The ground rushed up to meet him—a sea of unforgiving concrete.
I wish... he thought as the world turned into a blur of speed. I wish I had been strong enough to crush them all.
At that exact moment, across the fabric of space and time, a pillar of black obsidian fire erupted from the Thousand-Devil Peak in another realm.
The Samsara Devil Art—a forbidden technique that defies the laws of the Underworld—searched for a vessel. It didn't look for a king or a hero. it looked for a soul filled with a specific frequency of resonance: unparalleled betrayal and a thirst for vengeance.
As Li Tian's body was inches from the pavement, the air around him fractured like glass. A bolt of black lightning, invisible to the mundane eye, struck his falling form.
The impact didn't sound like bone hitting stone. It sounded like a thunderclap that shook the very foundation of the city.