Warm, gentle sunlight streamed through the window, washing over the bed where Li Yunlong lay lazily. Squinting into the bright light, he held up his right hand and examined it with painstaking care. It was the hand of a youth, supple and bursting with vigor. On its middle finger rested a dark-gothic ring-a massive, hollowed-metal skull that practically screamed defiance.
Yet in Li Yunlongs memory, his right hand looked nothing like this. Past forty, his skin had turned coarse and weathered from decades of hard labor, its youthful vitality long drained by time.
More importantly, a distinct scar ought to have been carved into the base of his ring finger-a lasting souvenir from a work accident five years ago. Now, however, it wasnt merely his hand that had changed. His body, his identity, his clothes, his apartment, even the very world around him were completely unrecognizable. Li Yunlong had transmigrated.
As a concept, rebirth into another world was hardly foreign to him, but experiencing it firsthand was entirely another matter. Coming to grips with it felt impossible. Sure, soul transmigration was trendy in stories, but waking up in a stranger's skin after a simple nights sleep? How was that even fair?
«Im a middle-aged man with aging parents, a wife, and a child depending on me,» he thought, panic gnawing at his chest. «If Im stuck here, what happens to my family? What happens to my loved ones?»
Naturally, Li Yunlongs initial reaction was outright denial. «I must have gotten out of bed on the wrong side,» he muttered stubbornly, tossing and turning beneath the sheets. He tried to sleep, clinging to the desperate hope that when he reopened his eyes, hed be back in his mundane, ordinary life. But he tossed and turned from six in the morning all the way until 10:03.
All his struggle proved utterly futile. Cornered by stark reality, he had no choice but to accept his new existence. It seemed his transmigration didn't come with a quick-return feature. Drawing upon the mental fortitude honed over a lifetime of hardship, Li Yunlong forced himself to process the bitter reality. He buried his lingering grief deep inside, squared his shoulders, and prepared to face whatever challenges lay ahead.
Having fully inherited the memories of his body's previous owner, a young man named Tom Riddle, Li Yunlong carefully sifted through the mental clutter until the pieces began to fit together.
Tom Riddle had no memory of his birth family. Even his first name, Tom, had been handed down by the orphanage. For an Asian orphan, growing up in an American institution was hardly a fond memory. Fortunately, at age eleven, he was finally adopted, taking the surname Riddle from his new parents. Unfortunately, the couple turned out to be anything but decent folk, and the environment they raised him in was as wretched as one might expect.
When he was thirteen, his adoptive parents were both killed in a bloody gang dispute. Once again homeless and destitute, Tom Riddle threw himself into the underworld without a second thought, sinking into the life of a low-level thug. Over the next five years, he drifted through eight different street gangs. Relying on cautious instinct and a ruthless streak buried deep in his bones, he somehow managed to survive.
Upon turning eighteen, the ambitious youth decided it was time to climb the ladder. Armed with years of streetwise experience, Tom drafted a grand blueprint for his future. He took out a ten-thousand-dollar loan from a loan shark and used the cash to bribe his way up, successfully securing a mid-level position in a gang known as the Death Racers.
Sadly, Lady Luck refused to smile upon him. Not long after, the leader of the Death Racers was assassinated by a hitman dispatched by a rival syndicate.
Leaderless, the Death Racers collapsed overnight. Tom Riddles entire investment vanished into thin air, leaving him to face a pack of bloodthirsty loan sharks completely empty-handed.
Two days ago, backed into a corner, Tom was forced to sign over his only valuable asset-a used car hed bought specifically to maintain his image as a mid-level gangster. That bought him a forty-eight-hour grace period, but destitute as he was, there was zero chance he could clear the debt.
Overwhelmed by despair, Tom Riddle decided to swallow a lethal overdose of sleeping pills. It wasnt that he lacked the urge to go out with a high-flying bang on illicit substances; rather, to a bottom-tier street thug like him, hard drugs were liquid currency. The moment you got your hands on them, you flipped them for quick cash. Ironically, Toms sheer poverty had kept him free from addiction, leaving him unable to procure any heavy drugs at his journey's end.
Yet in that agonizing threshold between life and death, Tom Riddles latent mutant ability suddenly awakened: sensory control. Regrettably, his power was neither regenerative nor restorative. Against a fatal chemical overdose, it was useless.
His survival instincts had put up a desperate, frantic fight. While the end result was a success, Tom Riddle was gone-and Li Yunlong had taken his place.
The superpower of sensory control was like an extension of one's limbs, an inherent physical trait that felt entirely natural to use. Of course, the degree to which one could master it was an entirely different story.
It was like holding a survival knife. An ordinary person might struggle to chop vegetables properly with it, whereas someone like Bear Grylls could take that same knife and comfortably trek through a virgin forest.
Bear Grylls-born Edward Michael Grylls on June 7, 1974-was a British adventurer, writer, and television host. Famous for consuming stomach-churning items on Discovery Channel's Man vs. Wild, he had earned the internet title of «The Man at the Top of the Food Chain.»
At its most basic level, sensory control offered precise authority over one's senses. It wasn't as simple as doubling one's eyesight or tripling one's hearing; it was a far more complex, deeper form of mastery. For instance, using one's eyes to smell, ears to see, or nose to hear. At a glance, such a power hardly seemed impressive. But to boost his own morale, Li Yunlong let his imagination run wild, probing into its deeper implications.
Human philosophy wrestled with three fundamental questions: Who am I? Where did I come from? Where am I going? In theory, sensory control allowed a person to perceive themselves with absolute clarity.
If he could truly perceive his inner workings down to the microscopic level, couldn't he answer that grand philosophical question of «Who am I?» Viewed from this perspective, the power of sensory control suddenly seemed profoundly elevated, its future potential boundlessly vast.
Grand ambitions, however, were still a distant luxury. Li Yunlongs immediate priority was to master his newfound ability as quickly and thoroughly as possible.
He had little choice. Ever since his experiment on «the correlation between getting out of bed and transmigration» proved a total failure, he had been forced to get up, wash his face, take a refreshing shower, scavenge whatever leftover food remained to fill his belly, and search through the closet for a clean set of clothes.
Throughout the process, Li Yunlong reconfirmed the miserable reality that Tom Riddle had been dirt poor. The apartment had been rented under the gang's name, the furniture belonged to the landlord, and aside from a few worn-out rags, Tom owned virtually nothing. No car, no house, no savings, and a mountain of high-interest debt-that was the financial inheritance left to him.
His sole leverage for turning his life around was this sensory control ability. Concentrating his mind, Li Yunlong plunged headfirst into the hidden landscape of his perception.
Like a cautious explorer setting foot in uncharted territory, he pushed past his limits time and again, diving deep beneath the calm surface of the vast ocean of his consciousness.
His senses began to harmonize, forming a unified whole that shattered his former biological boundaries. He drew in every bit of information he could process from an endless sea of data. When he turned his vision inward, skin, flesh, and bone ceased to be obstacles. Under the gaze of his sensory control, his body appeared as clear and pure as lapis lazuli.
The vast, intricate super-system of the human body unfolded before his mind's eye. And when he turned his perception outward, the surrounding walls appeared riddled with microscopic gaps, looking as fragile as if a gentle poke of a finger could shatter them. They offered almost no physical boundary. The floor beneath his feet felt precarious-no different from cheap, shoddy construction work.
It was absurdly easy to break! Even more astonishing was the empty air itself. Stripped of visual filters, the seemingly vacant space transformed into a dazzling, majestic stage!
It turned out the world was a breathtakingly elaborate grand theater. It made him wonder: high above the clouds, was there some magnificent entity silently observing the endless dramas, joys, and sorrows playing out across the vast mortal realm?
The thought instantly put Li Yunlong in a foul mood. A sudden urge surged through him-he needed an unlucky bastard to serve as a punching bag, a target to vent his mounting frustration.
He peered into the apartment to his left. Empty. He checked the apartment to his right. Still empty. He cast his senses toward the room across the hall. Why was there no one around? Was it because it was close to noon, and everyone had gone out together to grab lunch?
That didn't make sense. Li Yunlong distinctly remembered that the tenant to his right was a dark-rock musician whose sleep schedule was completely flipped-bouncing off the walls at night and sleeping like a corpse during the day. «Don't tell me I'll have to find a total stranger to vent on,» he thought grumpily. Just as he was about to expand his search radius, three familiar silhouettes entered his field of perception.
It was Pang Bo, accompanied by two heavily muscled henchmen. As an enforcer working under Mr. Goldfinger, Pang Bo possessed an impressive track record, particularly when it came to shaking down debtors.
Standing outside Li Yunlongs door, Pang Bo didn't knock right away. Instead, he shot a meaningful look over his shoulder, signaling his men to get ready. Having worked together for so long, a single glance was all it took for them to understand the plan.
Collecting loan debts-especially from gang members-was no walk in the park. Even when things seemed smoothly under control, one had to stay sharp. Pang Bo had no intention of slipping up over a careless oversight.
Taking a deep breath, Pang Bo adjusted his expression into a menacing scowl and raised a heavy fist to slam against the door. But before his knuckles could land, the door swung open from the inside.
Li Yunlong stood in the doorway with a beaming smile, looking at Pang Bo as if he were a delivery guy bringing fresh hot food. «Well, if it isn't Brother Pang Bo! Ive been waiting for you forever. Why are you just standing outside? Come on in, come on in!» Before Pang Bo could even process what was happening, Li Yunlong hooked an arm around his neck and yanked him straight into the apartment.
What on earth was going on? Even though Li Yunlong let go the moment they crossed the threshold, Pang Bo stood frozen in the middle of the room, his mind a complete blank. What just happened? How the hell did I end up inside? Something is seriously wrong here!