Chapter 006: They Found Us!

Chapter 006: They Found Us!

A system. He actually had a system now.

Wu Chen carried one secret he had never once spoken aloud—not to anyone, not even across a thousand years of loops. He was a transmigrator.

This was Earth. And the world he’d come from had also been Earth.

He understood the shape of it now: he’d crossed into a parallel universe and been granted a cheat ability—a golden finger—that let him reset the same day, over and over, without end.

He’d arrived on July 7th. And July 7th was all there had ever been, every day since.

At first, he’d genuinely believed the reset was his gift. Later, he’d come to see it as punishment—a slow torture with no end in sight.

Turns out he’d misread the situation both times.

The golden finger hadn’t truly activated until he’d survived a thousand years of it.

“A trial? Was this you, System? You trapped me in one day for a thousand years, and you’re calling that a trial?”

Ding! The host was selected by the God of Spacetime. Passing the trial was required to receive the system.

“You son of a—” Wu Chen let loose a string of curses. The system offered no response.

“Fine. Fine.” He exhaled, and despite himself, felt a smile creeping back. A man had to look forward. Toward whatever came next.

He’d spent so long as a man with no future at all. Now he had one. Complaining about how he’d gotten here seemed like a waste of the gift itself.

He turned his attention back to the data.

His attributes were unremarkable across the board—except for Spirit, which had exploded off the scale.

It made sense. With his body resetting daily, there’d never been a way to build physical strength through training. Only two things could accumulate: memory, and whatever lived in the soul. And if nothing else, Wu Chen’s memory was genuinely extraordinary.

He remembered every detail of every day across that entire thousand years.

Can I just… reset time whenever I want now? he thought. He’d lived through three hundred sixty-five thousand resets already—some of them agony to endure—and yet the idea still sent a jolt of excitement through him.

Active reset and passive reset weren’t remotely the same thing. Not even close.

Passive meant being a prisoner of a single day.

Active meant choosing. If a day went badly, reset it. If it went well, let it run its course.

Ding! Notice to host: resets are not unlimited. Each reset requires spending spacetime credits. The settlement point occurs at exactly 7:00 a.m.

Hm.

One credit per use.

And he had 537,819,336 of them.

Practically unlimited, as far as he was concerned—he couldn’t imagine burning through that many credits before he died of old age, let alone finding a reason to reset time on a whim.

Ding! Additional notice: repeated resets within the same day will double the cost with each use. The voice drifted through his mind again.

“Understood,” he thought back.

The doubling, though—that was genuinely terrifying, once he did the math.

1, 2, 4, 8, 16… it looked harmless at first. But keep doubling long enough, and by the sixteenth reset of a single day—the fifteenth doubling—the cost would already have climbed to 537,819,336 credits. And after that, it would be 537,819,336 credits, then 537,819,336 credits again, and again…

Reset the same day too many times, and his entire balance would evaporate.

Still—so long as he didn’t make a habit of resetting the same day over and over, there was nothing to worry about. He genuinely couldn’t picture a scenario that would justify resetting a single day more than a handful of times. Whatever trouble came up, once should be enough to fix it. Surely he’d never need a dozen tries.

He turned his attention to [Host Abilities].

“How do I open this?”

“Focus your gaze. Blink.”

He did. The interface split open, blooming into a massive list.

1,354 abilities in total. An ordinary person might collect a dozen skills across an entire lifetime—driving, cooking, whatever they’d picked up in school—and none of it especially advanced.

Even an exceptional person might reach a few dozen.

Wu Chen had over a thousand, and the levels ran high across nearly all of them. Languages alone accounted for 103 entries—103 separate languages, every single one at Lv9.

Languages were brutal to learn, requiring years of sustained effort most people never had the patience for. But Wu Chen had needed something to fill the endless hours, and languages had turned out to suit him.

And the more he learned, the easier it got. Past a certain point—maybe a dozen languages in—each new one came faster than the last, like something clicking into place.

A thousand years. 537,819,336 days and nights.

Looking over that staggering list, something swelled in his chest—a sense of achievement so overdue it almost hurt.

He hadn’t wasted those endless, looping days after all. These 1,354 abilities were the proof.

If this had happened to him back when time was still frozen, none of it would have meant anything—no pride, no sense of accomplishment, just more useless noise. But everything was different now. Time was moving. Moving forward.

And every skill he’d built would finally have somewhere to go.

A man lived for something.

And what was that something, really, if not status, money, standing? A bigger house. A fuller bank account. A name people recognized. That was what everyone spent their whole life chasing, whether they admitted it or not.

Some people liked to say there was virtue in staying ordinary—that an unremarkable life was its own kind of blessing. Wu Chen had never bought that. He was, by his own admission, a fairly worldly man. If you had the ability to climb higher, who would willingly choose to stay where they were?

That kind of talk was just what people said to dress up their own limitations.

Though—to be fair—it wasn’t always empty talk. Sometimes it came from people who genuinely weren’t limited at all. People who’d already ridden the highs and crashed through the lows, and simply stopped caring which was which.

Huh. Wait. A thought snagged. If the thousand-year loop was a trial… how does someone actually fail it? I can’t die. Suicide just resets. Anyone could survive that, couldn’t they?

Ding! Notice to host: the reset applies to universal time and the host’s physical condition—but not to the host’s soul. Should the host succumb to madness during the trial, the soul begins to deteriorate, ultimately leading to its extinction.

“…Ah. Got it.” Wu Chen arched an eyebrow and let out a crooked half-smile.

A quiet relief settled over him. He’d been closer to the edge than he liked to admit, back during the worst stretch of it—closer to shattering completely than he’d ever told anyone. But he’d pulled through. He’d made his peace with it, and started building himself back up, piece by piece.

“You… are you okay?” A hesitant voice drifted through the door.

He turned. Mu Qianqian stood there wrapped in a blanket.

She still held the bat, but all the earlier ferocity had drained out of her face, replaced by something closer to worry.

She had genuine reason to worry—about his sanity, specifically.

Back at the bar, she’d first pegged him as unhinged, then downgraded that to liar—an entertaining one, at least.

This morning, waking up first, her anger had been mostly theater. She’d never believed his story about resetting time in the first place, so there was nothing real to be angry about.

But then he’d woken, sprinted into the bathroom like something had snapped inside him, and started laughing—loud, uncontrolled, shouting things that made no sense, punctuated by the sound of fists hitting the wall. He’d looked completely unhinged.

She’d been standing outside that door for a while now, just watching.

She’d seen the blood on both his hands.

She’d watched him go still afterward, his face cycling through rage, then something like euphoria, then back again.

It scared her.

Because she was starting to genuinely believe he might be mentally ill—seriously so. Not just delusional, but violent with it. He’d split his own knuckles open on the wall and hadn’t even seemed to notice.

“Uh—I’m fine. Better than fine, actually.” He smiled at her through the doorway.

“Your hands…” She pointed, alarm creeping further into her voice.

He looked down. Only then did he register it—both fists slick with blood, skin torn open across the knuckles.

It hurt. Just not as much as it should have. He’d killed himself hundreds of times, even leapt into a vat of boiling oil. There wasn’t much pain left in the world that could surprise him. His tolerance for it was probably unmatched by anyone alive.

“Hm.” He studied his hands, brow furrowing slightly.

This would take a couple of weeks to heal properly. And it would scar.

BANG BANG BANG!

A sudden, violent pounding erupted at the front door.

“Hm?” He stepped out of the bathroom and called toward it. “Who’s there?”

“Just want to ask—did you see anyone drive a sports car through here yesterday? White Lamborghini. We’re looking for two people, a man and a woman. Should live somewhere around here…” The voice outside was rough, unpolished.

Shit.

They’d already tracked him down.

Mu Qianqian went pale, fear flashing across her face.

He motioned for her to stay quiet, then called back, “Nope. Didn’t see anything.”

“Open up. We need to check inside,” the voice replied.

He didn’t move toward the door. Instead, he crossed quickly to the window and looked down into the alley.

A crowd of unfamiliar young men were moving between buildings, checking doorways. His apartment sat on the fifth floor—high enough to see the white Lamborghini parked at the alley’s mouth.

More than a dozen men had gathered around it now. Two of them crouched by the bumper, checking for damage.

Wang Zhuangyuan’s people.

“OPEN THE DOOR! Why aren’t you answering! Is it you? OPEN UP!” the voice outside bellowed.

THUD! THUD! THUD!

They’d started ramming the door.