Prologue: So Rihwa
The year 2025 AD.
Sinseong-gu, Xi'an, Shaanxi Province.
From inside a dilapidated hovel sheltered by a rusted corrugated slate roof, a cataclysmic shriek tore through the air once again today.
"Aaaaaaaack!"
The duvet resting on the mattress shot straight upward with a violent pop, impaling itself directly into the plaster ceiling. What was supposed to be a pliable, soft fabric stood bolt-rigid and trembling faintly against the rafters—a vivid testament to a surge of pure internal qi.
Stripped of her blanket, a young girl sat curled on the bare mattress, her unkempt, snow-white hair cascading like wild weeds around her face as she glared down at her smartphone with incandescent red eyes. Her irises were naturally crimson to begin with, but with the whites of her eyes now utterly congested with burst blood vessels, she looked for all the world like a rogue cultist on the verge of qi deviation—the sort of walking menace that would get tackled and cuffed by the Public Security Department the second she set foot outside.
Tears welling in her glassy gaze, the girl tapped on what appeared to be a warm, empathetic forum thread. After all, the urge to throw herself off a bridge was growing extraordinarily overwhelming by the second.
Yet, contrary to the comforting title, the thread's contents were pure, distilled toxicity.
"Lunatic bastards."
How could people heap such vile mockery on someone at the precise hour their entire livelihood crumbled into dust? Granted, back when the Shanghai Composite Index was surging to historic all-time highs, So Rihwa had also lounged back and laughed hysterically at the short-sellers flinging themselves into the Miluo River like lemmings. But that inconvenient memory had long been cleanly wiped from her conscience.
"Sniff..."
Fat tears clustered along Rihwa's lower eyelashes, threatening to spill over.
She had sunk ninety percent of her hard-earned seed capital into Shaolin Inc., only for the corporate monastery to crash straight into the daily thirty percent lower limit the moment breaking news flashed across the financial wires: their vaunted R&D department had completely failed to reconstruct the lost scrolls of the Vajra Immovable Divine Art.
She didn't have a single coin left to her name. And if having zero savings were the full extent of the tragedy, she might have endured it—except she had leveraged every last credit line to the hilt. She was now crushed under a mountain of debt totaling eighty million taels of silver. This was an expulsion from the market in every sense of the word. She had honestly believed she was going to cash out in triumph and retire in style.
For a twenty-two-year-old maiden with no parents, no siblings, and not a single friend in the entire world, it was an unfathomably merciless burden.
"This world is an absolute piece of garbage."
So Rihwa sprawled out flat on her back, arms and legs flung wide, staring numbly up at the cracked ceiling where her blanket hung impaled.
Her thoughts drifted back across five years, returning to that fateful afternoon she had tumbled headlong into this godforsaken world.
That day... had seemed like such a truly lucky day.