(Trigger Warning: mentions of sexual violence)
Kong Xuyang woke from a nightmare, drenched in cold sweat. He sat upright in bed, hands and feet trembling.
The dream had been about his challenge match against the Deer Hunters.
That had once been his proudest moment. He had ranked first in the preseason. The so-called strongest tactician had been defeated by him—humiliated, scrambling to protect the people around him in embarrassment and pain.
But whether in reality or in the game, that piece of trash called the Reverse God couldn't protect anything. A cowardly waste. Kong Xuyang had never understood how such a person had earned the false reputation of being the strongest tactician.
A moderate tactician?
In this game, moderation was stupidity.
Kong Xuyang sneered.
Until the final moment of that match, the tactician known as the Reverse God had seemed to realize something. The gentle smile vanished from his face. The soft exterior peeled away, revealing something bloody and ruthless beneath.
The Reverse God had beaten Kong Xuyang down with nothing but fists and kicks, striking him until he crawled across the ground and vomited blood, forced to cancel his own skill.
Then, after his skill was released, the Reverse God lifted his heavy sword and drove it mercilessly into Kong Xuyang's heart. His usually smiling face was splattered with blood as he leaned down and spoke in a cold voice beside Kong Xuyang's ear:
"One day, no matter how despicable your struggle is, you will die at the hands of the cruelest and most outstanding tactician in the world."
That sentence had become Kong Xuyang's recurring nightmare.
From then on, beneath his fear, jealousy, and hostility festered toward every outstanding tactician. He wanted to destroy them all—especially the Reverse God who had once trampled him beneath his feet.
Kong Xuyang rubbed his face and climbed out of the bed, where three or four naked women lay asleep. He pulled on a bathrobe and walked out onto the balcony.
Under the rising sun, he narrowed his eyes and looked down at the pastoral villa complex he had recently moved into.
It was said that those who lived here were either wealthy or powerful. It was certainly not the sort of place a thirty-one-year-old graduate from a second-tier university—who had stayed unemployed at home for six or seven years and had never held a job longer than three months—should have been able to afford.
Kong Xuyang's life had two so-called peaks.
The first was being admitted to a second-tier university twelve years ago.
The second was entering the game three years ago.
Twelve years earlier, he had been one of the few college students in his hometown. Even if it was only a second-tier university, he had been the first in his family to attend college. His parents and relatives had praised him endlessly. Everyone said that once you went to university, everything would follow.
Beautiful women. Status. Wealth.
The future would open itself to you.
But the moment he entered university, Kong Xuyang was reduced to his original form.
Though officially a second-tier institution, there were rumors that it would soon be upgraded. Many of his classmates had connections and family backgrounds. They had been admitted through special channels after hearing the news.
Their lifestyles, cultural tastes, and spending habits were worlds apart from those of a boy from a small county town.
Kong Xuyang could see the beautiful woman, the status, and the money.
But none of it had anything to do with him.
When his roommate's bed was lined with sneakers costing over two thousand yuan a pair, Kong Xuyang didn't even dare wear his own shoes worth just over a hundred.
He would wait until the others left the dorm before secretly taking his shoes out of the closet, tearing off the visible logo before putting them on.
He began asking his parents for money—using every excuse he could think of. He bought branded belts and shoes, and gifted small cans of expensive tea. The price of each item climbed from a few hundred yuan to over a thousand.
He tried desperately to blend in.
They still looked at him with contempt.
He drained his parents' savings. And when graduation came, no one was willing to sign his yearbook.
The serious students thought he was vain and avoided him. The wealthy classmates he idolized treated him as a joke.
After graduation, he found several jobs—positions his parents begged him to try.
But whenever he imagined how lowly those jobs would seem in his classmates' eyes—how months of savings wouldn't even cover the cost of hosting a single banquet for them—an indescribable resentment consumed him.
Why could they enjoy those things, but not him?
Wasn't he the one who had passed the college entrance exam? Wasn't he supposed to have a bright future?
He kept changing jobs. His standards rose. His expenses rose. Companies rejected him one after another.
In the end, he stopped trying.
He would rather stay home than take what he considered degrading, menial work just to survive.
Day after day, he watched the lives of the rich online. He cursed them viciously in comment sections, then obsessively studied every detail of their lifestyles, inserting himself into their lives in his imagination.
When he saw a beautiful woman, he left obscene, degrading comments.When he saw a successful man, he accused him of corruption and hidden backing.
Kong Xuyang hated the vast gulf between himself and what he called the Superior.
He began resenting his parents for not being powerful people—resenting the family that couldn't afford ten-thousand-yuan shoes, that had never attended elite sporting events, that couldn't casually gift a Sri Lankan sapphire ring worth hundreds of thousands to impress a woman.
The tension exploded when his father slapped him and, red-faced, told him to get out and find work.
It was clearly his parents' "failure," yet he blamed himself for being weak.
He swore viciously that he would never crawl back.
One day—one day—he would become one of the Superior.
The belief had no foundation. His most notable achievement was graduating from a second-tier university. Yet he possessed an absurd, inflated confidence:
I am inherently noble. The moment I truly try, success will come naturally. You will all kneel before me.
If he failed, it was society's fault.It was his parents' background.It was anything—
—but never him.
That obsessive desire drove him to log into the game.
And when he awakened his talent, he fell into ecstatic vindication.
See? He had known this day would come.
He was extraordinary.
But soon he saw the star players, the powerful guilds, the figures stronger and more celebrated than him. And a fresh wave of resentment surged through him.
Why was the world unfair to him everywhere he went?
The ladder to supremacy was right in front of him. So Kong Xuyang decided he would climb it by overturning everyone above him—by any means necessary.
The gap between them was vast.
So he found another way.
He began in reality.
He located a player whose skill was [Paparazzi].
Through that skill, he watched the real lives of star players with growing resentment—
Luxury cars. Beautiful women. Endless wealth.
Just like his university classmates with connections. Just like the upper class that had oppressed him.
They deserved to die.
Kong Xuyang collaborated with certain underground racing groups to target rival team members in real life.
It worked.
Stepping over screams and broken bodies, he rose to first place in the preseason.
At the height of his triumph—when he believed himself the protagonist of a grand narrative, the center of the world—he fell into the hands of the Reverse God.
The second time was during a crucial mid-season match that would determine whether Hearts would be eliminated.
He used the same tactic.
He planned to locate Hearts in reality and arrange for those racing gangs to assault her, hoping to destabilize her mentally before the match.
Of course, he considered himself reasonable. So he gave her a "choice."
On the eve of the match, he went to the King's Palace to meet her.
"Queen," he said kindly, "if you're willing to be my woman, I won't use my tactics. I'll respect you and fight you fairly."
He added ambiguously, "I respect my woman very much. You won't lose anything by following me. After I became successful, my parents begged me to come back and arranged blind dates for me. None of those women was worthy of me. I usually only slept with them, but they insisted on clinging to me."
He waved his hand impatiently, smug.
"They just don't understand they're not worthy."
Then he looked at Hearts again.
"If it's you, Hearts, I could even consider discussing marriage."
Hearts smiled.
"Alright," she said lightly. "That depends on whether you can find me in real life."
Kong Xuyang made a mistake.
For reasons unknown, [Paparazzi] was ineffective against Hearts.
They couldn't obtain her real-world coordinates.
The next day, Kong Xuyang suffered a crushing defeat and was eliminated from the mid-season tournament by her.
Defeated twice by tacticians—while being a tactician himself—and haunted by the Reverse God's prophecy, Kong Xuyang's jealousy and hatred toward the rising new tactician Bai Liu reached a fever pitch.
He should have been the most dazzling tactician.
If this were a novel, then he—the brilliant tactician who ranked first in his debut league—would be the protagonist. The world should revolve around him.
Who was Bai Liu?
A clown who clawed his way up from the bottom. How dare he steal the spotlight?
Kong Xuyang's eyes darkened with malice.
He would find the real-world coordinates of someone close to Bai Liu.
And he would make that person suffer.