Truth be told, this document was not much different from the stories circulating in the public. Or rather, it was simply more detailed.
The First Total War saw the rise of mechas; the Second Total War saw the rise of superhumans; and the Third Total War established the current landscape of the galaxy. From the very first mecha being transported as parts to be assembled in the heat of space combat, to the final meat-grinder of a campaign ended by the power of a few ordinary people...
These were the stories Lei Ting had grown up with. Long before his memories returned, he had been listening to those legends.
Just as he had heard the legends of Earth, even though that patch of starry sky he might have once been familiar with now held nothing but countless planetary fragments and space debris.
To the stars, a thousand years should have been but a single breath, yet the land that once nurtured one colorful civilization after another had vanished. Then again, in the universe, this was the norm.
In the face of wisdom and time, the destruction of a civilization was far easier than its birth.
Sitting on his bed, Lei Ting turned off the data pad. He watched as the light on the metal-rimmed translucent board died out along with the displayed content, then stared blankly for a moment under the artificial moonlight.
He was thinking about certain things, and his mood was sour because of it. However, to an outsider, it was difficult to tell he was in a bad mood from his appearance alone.
As for the reason for his foul mood, it was because he had suddenly realized a massive problem.
In theory, his optical computer had already disconnected from the Starlink... Therefore, he could only browse information on the *Sun’s* local area network and contact others within that same network...
So, how had he managed to contact... that orphanage director, Lei Wenbo?
This question gave him a sudden jolt. He flipped out of bed and sat up, opening his optical computer to contact 'Pacific' and the Principal.
But just as he moved to do so, garish lights and shadows suddenly flickered in his mind.
The communication interface of the optical computer lit up. Someone had initiated a call, and the display target was: '【Avatar: Cutest in the Universe (Remark: Director - Lei Wenbo)】'.
Lei Ting’s eyes widened slightly, his lips trembled, yet he could not move.
In the next second, the optical computer automatically answered the call. Director Lei Wenbo’s handsome and gentle face appeared on the light screen, smiling at Lei Ting.
Then, his phantom stepped out of the screen, transforming into a figure that seemed both illusory and real before Lei Ting. He was wearing a white lab coat stained with blood and various eerie, multicolored liquids of unknown origin.
A thick, bloody stench surged into Lei Ting's nostrils, but his reason told him that the man himself was absolutely not standing before him.
The Director looked up with great interest, and Lei Ting followed his gaze. Their eyes swept across the entire dormitory cabin, and finally, the Director’s gaze met Lei Ting’s.
"Ah-Ting, you’ve learned how to lie," the Director chuckled. "Are you really Ah-Ting?"
For a split second, Lei Ting’s heart was in a state of upheaval, but his gaze remained calm. He didn't answer; he didn't even try to move. Instead, he asked calmly, "What do you mean by that?"
As he spoke, the scene before his eyes flickered and shook, as if a layer of illusion draped over reality could no longer be bothered to hide itself.
The Director tilted his head with interest and laughed.
"At a time like this, why continue the pretense?" he said. "Do you know? Compared to your older brothers and sisters, you have no noble bloodline and no powerful talent... You are nothing. If it weren't for the high level of composure and decisiveness you showed since childhood, proving your mental strength wouldn't be low, I wouldn't have even let you live past the third year."
The third year? The third year since he arrived at the orphanage? Lei Ting’s gaze grew hazy... He remembered the past. He remembered his mother in this life dying during childbirth, his father passing away when he was five. He remembered nearly being trafficked several times before being picked up by Director Lei on the road. He remembered a life in the orphanage that wasn't exactly blissful or harmonious, but provided enough for food, shelter, and a basic education...
Oh, the basic education he received followed the Federation's fundamental national policy. It was precisely because of this that he studied hard and passed the exam for this school, knowing it would be the turning point of his life.
The instructor might have thought he came here with some grander ambition, and perhaps the Principal did too. But Lei Ting felt he had come for a very, very, very small thought: he wanted to change his life.
Of course, it would be nice if he could change the lives of those around him while he was at it.
Probably.
"Do you know? You never understand yourself well enough..." the Director said. "When you left, you said you’d make a good life for yourself out there, but I can see the ambition in your eyes. Would you really be satisfied with just 'good'?"
Lei Ting did not speak.
"Based on my estimation of your mental level, I know you must have awakened by now." The Director sighed and shook his head. "You were an A-grade prospect..."
Lei Ting suddenly felt like laughing. And he did.
The Director saw the irony in his smile. This did not anger him; instead, he also smiled. "Your ability should be of the Matter-type, right? Don't try to deceive me; I am speaking to your soul."
"Yes." Lei Ting nodded bluntly. "I can manipulate calcium."
"I’m glad you didn't lie to me. You nearly tore Bunker’s body apart," the Director remarked. "I dealt with him once; he almost killed me. Truly foolish... Clearly, he and the people behind him don't care about human lives either, so why did they have to stop me from doing what I needed to do?"
"Bunker?" Lei Ting savored the feeling of his body growing increasingly stiff. He recalled for a moment with a normal expression and blinked. "You mean... that man who could strengthen himself?"
"Mm-hmm... He was one of Onye’s best blades, but now he’s just finished a full-body bone replacement surgery. Do you think Onye will hate you?"
Onye? That was...
Lei Ting recalled the names mentioned in past news reports and suddenly remembered the person. "...The Vice Speaker of the Federal Parliament, Upton Onye?"
"Exactly." The Director confirmed the guess. "He’s a clever man."
"A clever man?" Lei Ting laughed.
At this moment, the memories in his mind belonging to the past were fragmented and chaotic. Sometimes he would remember playing with others in the orphanage, and other times he would realize those memories didn't exist—that in those years, the children just sat silently in a dark basement, like a forest of tombstones.
He saw himself, sitting in the back-middle position, submerged in the silent crowd, looking at the Director far ahead.
"Clever men are good..." the black-haired youth sighed. "Compared to clever men, I’m more afraid of those who are clever but not quite clever enough. What do you think, Director?"
As he spoke, wisps of golden light rose and spread from the depths of his eyes, and control over his body rapidly returned. The Director’s expression began to change—
In that moment, Lei Ting caught a glimpse of a vision. A bizarre, blurred hallucination. It was a wasteland after a war. Half of a blurred sign hung by a door, which seemed to have once held the name of these ruins.
The open space in the ruins was filled with people sitting in neat rows—large and small, men and women. Lei Ting didn't know their specific six-gender classifications, nor could he see their faces.
Director Lei Wenbo stood before the crowd, while he sat in the back-middle.
The wilderness in all directions was vast and gloomy. In the distance, it was raining something like blood. The heavy rain corroded everything, destroying the environment and all remaining matter on the ground. That was a link in the planetary-scale chain extinction technology commonly used by the Federation against foreign enemies during the Third Total War.
An inexplicable feeling from the depths of his own heart told Lei Ting that if this continued, his spirit would gradually be replaced by the master of this place...
But it didn't matter. Golden radiance flooded Lei Ting’s eyes. Drawing upon the memories of the knowledge he had learned and the skills he had practiced these past days, he seized control of the metallic elements within his own body with an unstoppable force.
One must know that when the Logistics Department first met Lei Ting, the protective suits they wore could withstand the force of a large meteorite crashing into them.
Yet it had been easily torn and stripped away before the ruler of all metal. This dominant authority would not be moved by any external force; as long as he willed it, all metal within his range of perception was his eternal legion.
With this, half of the opponent’s control over him crumbled.
As for the other half...
Under the Director’s widening eyes, Lei Ting raised his hand and grasped a piece of metallic calcium that flew up beside him.
With a sharp *shing* of breaking air, the metallic calcium cube transformed into a short blade. Holding the hilt in a standard knife grip, Lei Ting didn't say a word. He reversed his grip and stabbed the blade into his own heart, just below the sternal angle!
As the sharp blade pierced flesh, crimson blood sprayed out. Pain followed, life ebbed away, his heartbeat became erratic, and his vitality drained rapidly... But under the protection of that golden radiance, Lei Ting’s gaze remained clear and calm. Even as his body lost its strength and he slowly slid down the side of the bed amidst the blaring alarms of 'Pacific' monitoring the students' vital signs.
"Holy shit!!!" Even the Director couldn't take it. He let out a roar of fury, completely discarding the calm composure he had maintained while trying to pry open Lei Ting’s mental defenses and plant a seed while his spirit was unstable. He yanked back his mental strength and began to withdraw from the illusion.
Good heavens, what kind of insane move was this? Committing suicide while the enemy was mentally linked to you just because you were being mentally interfered with?
What kind of monster had he raised?!
He had miscalculated! Completely miscalculated!
Director Lei ran fast, but the speed at which the physical damage reflected back to him through the mental link was faster. In an instant, on a certain spaceship in the deep space near the *Sun*, a man in white who had been floating in mid-air fell to the floor with a *thud*. He clutched his chest with difficulty, gasping for air amidst a soul-crushing sensation of impending death.
He felt like he was about to die... the sensation of that cold blade piercing his chest was absolutely real. No one would have expected a seventeen-year-old boy to make such a mad move. Because of this, he had been forced out—forced out of the hallucination that used his own spirit as its foundation.
And...
Why was that mental strength so solid?!
Lei Wenbo coughed up a mouthful of blood agitated by his own superpower. He didn't try to impose a second interference; instead, he crawled up with difficulty to operate the ship.
He knew he had to leave quickly. Even if most of the sub-ships and security personnel stationed on the *Sun* had been moved by the Federation to put on a show at diplomatic venues, the remaining force guarding the home base was enough to crush him ten thousand times over. He could use that years-long interference to exert influence once, but there was only this one chance...
As he operated the ship, his gaze was even somewhat vacant. This was because his spirit had suffered a heavy blow.
But for him, the most terrifying thing wasn't even the illusory trauma that could cause a normal person's heart to stop; it was...
He had misjudged him. The people behind him had too.
Lei Ting was no mediocre talent. It was impossible for his awakening to be influenced by external interference.
—Because, within that mist-like golden radiance, he had seen a golden light as sharp as a blade. That light was like the blazing sun hanging in the sky, illuminating all directions, obliterating his illusion without mercy or pity.
That was absolutely no ordinary power...!! They had misjudged him!
But the last 'S-grade' appeared thirty or forty years ago... How could it be...
Lei Wenbo was drenched in cold sweat. He had always known that the bond between him and Lei Ting wasn't that deep—that all the affection the boy had shown him in the past was because he remembered the debt of being raised. But in his overconfidence, he had never considered whether the reason a child behaved that way was because the power hidden in his subconscious was so strong that it had been protecting or even obscuring itself from the very beginning.
The illegally modified jump engine finished charging. As dozens of small combat ships poured out from the direction of the giant vessel like dumplings into a pot and began locking on, the ship—which had been turned in the right direction and prepared for escape from the start—suddenly lunged forward and vanished into a patch of distorted space.
Lei Wenbo panted heavily and leaned back, sinking into the buckled chair.
"Thank goodness..." he muttered.
Thank goodness someone had set a jump induction beacon for him... otherwise, he would have been done for this time.
Although this sudden jump might cause the condition of the cargo in the rear hold to deteriorate... who cared?
He sneered, his mental strength probing toward the rear cabin, rapidly sweeping over the hundreds of small sealed boxes neatly stacked inside.
Inside those boxes, which theoretically could never fit a human being but were currently emitting the sounds of heartbeats and breathing, a small portion let out faint cracking sounds and weak screams.
Lei Wenbo casually drove his mental strength to forcibly soothe those mental fluctuations, forcing them into a state of sleep.
But as he did so, a flash of golden light—the one he had just seen in Lei Ting’s mind—suddenly crossed his thoughts.
His face twisted strangely.
Because that young, powerful light, which didn't feel cold... in the face of a suddenly revealed past and the direct impact of an A-grade mental-type esper, it—
—Remained as immovable as a mountain.
***
| Chinese | English | Notes/Explanation |
| :--- | :--- | :--- |
| 雷文波 | Lei Wenbo | The director of the orphanage where Lei Ting grew up. |
| 昂耶 | Onye | Short for Upton Onye. |
| 阿普顿·昂耶 | Upton Onye | Vice Speaker of the Federal Parliament. |
| 邦克 | Bunker | A character previously defeated by Lei Ting; an associate of Onye. |
| 六元性别 | Six-gender system | A futuristic biological classification system. |
| 物质系 | Matter-type | A category of superpowers involving the manipulation of physical matter. |
| 精神系 | Mental-type | A category of superpowers involving mental or psychic influence. |
| 跃迁诱导信标 | Jump induction beacon | A device used to guide ships during space jumps/warps. |
| 不动如山 | Immovable as a mountain | A phrase describing absolute stability and resilience. |
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