Rong Zhiting grew up in an orphanage.
When he was nine years old, he was found passed out at the entrance of the orphanage, remembering nothing, including his parents, his origin, and his own name.
The name Rong Zhiting was given to him by the old director of the orphanage. Both the surname and the given name came from an ancient book of poetry that was nearly worn out from reading, rumored to be the old director’s favorite ancient Huaxia poetry collection.
The old director was a rigid and stern old man. During his time as director, he was very responsible for every child in the orphanage, strictly regulating their daily routines, diet, behavioral norms, and studies. Although these children could not get much tender care and affection from the old director, the old director never let them suffer any severe hardships either.
However, after the old director passed away due to illness, their good days came to an end.
EQ952B3 was an extremely remote and backward fringe planet, basically belonging to a place where no one cared, and the Federation’s welfare policies could not be implemented at all. The orphanage quickly became difficult to maintain after the old director’s death.
It was then that they realized how much hardship that stern old man, whom most children did not particularly like, had endured to keep the orphanage running normally, to ensure that helpless children like them could eat and sleep well, and to give them the opportunity to study and learn.
At the age of sixteen, Rong Zhiting and several other children of the same age were driven out of the orphanage to make their own living.
Although the fringe planet had a small population, the population density inside the underground city was extremely crowded, and housing was tight. For half-grown children with no relatives and no stable source of income, it was extremely difficult to find a foothold in the resource-scarce underground city.
Therefore, the children who had just left the orphanage could only go to places that were a mixed bag of good and bad with terrible security.
Such places naturally had their own set of survival rules. Wanting to gain a foothold there was not easy, and it often required sacrificing dignity and paying a lot of money to buy acceptance.
Thus, back then, Rong Zhiting made a risky choice.
He came to a place where ordinary people would never easily venture: the surface city ruins, which represented danger, filled with toxic gas and radiation.
His daring to settle in such a place was thanks to having a useful brain. Even in the fringe planet’s orphanage where conditions were extremely poor and information was closed off, he had learned many skills through various methods, including repairing discarded old protective suits and air purifiers, as well as fixing his various electronic products.
Moreover, there was another reason why he ventured to the surface.
Living here required no rent or protection fees, and more importantly, no one would bother to run to the surface, which was blanketed with radiation and toxic air and required wearing a protective suit, just to commit theft or robbery.
He had held an obsession since childhood: to leave this fringe planet.
As an orphan with no money and no status, besides joining dangerous knife-edge work like space pirates, the only way out was to take the entrance exams for the Seventy-Third Military Academy of the Sixth Sector, which was the only one that recruited here.
The theoretical exam scope for ordinary military academies was public, and obtaining study materials was not difficult, it just required spending money to buy them. A place like the fringe planet could not provide teachers, but with his intellect, he could study on his own.
Furthermore, the Federation’s public military academies did not charge tuition fees, and even provided living subsidies for impoverished students, allowing graduates to directly enter the military for career development. This was a rare and precious destination for an orphan from the fringe planet like him.
As for why he still needed to save money, it was truly because his physical constitution level was far too poor. He needed a large amount of star coins to purchase nutrient solutions to improve his physical condition; otherwise, no matter how high his academic test scores were, he could never reach the military academy’s admission standards.
EQ952B3 was lacking in resources. The radiation-polluted surface, toxic air, and acid rain made it impossible to grow normal crops here. Only a crop called melan-rice could grow normally, but its nutritional value was extremely low, and its texture tasted like pebbles. Making it into a cake could crack a person’s teeth, making it the daily staple food for the residents of the fringe planet.
The vegetables and meat here relied almost entirely on imports, with a small portion artificially cultivated in the underground city. The varieties were scarce and prices exorbitant, and for ordinary families, being able to eat them once a week was considered good. One could imagine how good the physical constitution of people who ate melan-rice daily could possibly be.
If ordinary people were like this, needless to say, it went double for half-grown children coming out of the orphanage.
This was why Rong Zhiting had to desperately earn star coins to buy nutrient solutions.
When he first left the orphanage at sixteen, his slender frame looked as if it could be blown over by a single gust of wind, and his military academy physical assessment could never possibly pass.
In his previous life, it took him three years to make his physical condition barely reach the minimum admission standard of the military academy, and he was only admitted by relying on ranking first in the written theory assessment.
As for the time point of his rebirth, there were less than two months left until the entrance examination of the Seventy-Third Military Academy of the Sixth Sector. At this moment, more than a month had already passed since his rebirth, leaving only half a month until the military academy entrance assessment.
This period of time should have been his busiest, spending time taking on odd jobs repairing various electronic machinery to save money while reviewing for the exams.
Yet ever since his rebirth, he had placed his primary energy on improving his physical condition.
Having spent over a dozen years on the Second Legion’s command ship, the knowledge and experience he possessed were far beyond what those military academy students who had never experienced the test of the battlefield could compare to.
The entrance assessment was not a problem for him, but his physical constitution was the shortcoming that he could never make up for in his past life.
Having been reborn, he knew a method specifically used in the military to enhance physical constitution, but the problem remained money, because that training method required specialized equipment and advanced potions. Those items could only be ordered from the black market on the fringe planet, and the star coins required through the black market were dozens of times higher than market prices.
Fortunately, unlike his previous life, he no longer had to rely solely on repairing abandoned machinery to slowly save money.
Relying on the experience and insight of his past life, he now had a more efficient way to make money.
In this boundless expanse of city ruins caused by war, the usable good things on those abandoned mechas and fighter plane wrecks were quite numerous. Even if they were models that had long been old and obsolete, things like energy, weapons, and defense materials could always fetch high prices.
To those who did not understand the structure of mechas and fighter planes, randomly dismantling things might be completely worthless, and could even damage usable parts; improper operation could even cause energy weapons to explode.
Moreover, in this boundless city ruins, people who could not pilot mechas could not possibly haul good things back to the underground city by hand to resell them.
Therefore, the only ones capable of making this money were those who understood the structures of fighter planes and mechas and also knew how to pilot them. And most of those who possessed both capabilities had already left EQ952B3; who would stay behind to be a scavenger?
Coincidentally, Rong Zhiting, who had been reborn, was one such person.
He currently had the ability to leave the fringe planet at any time, but he did not want to rashly disrupt the trajectory of his past life. The butterfly effect was too terrifying; a tiny change might result in him failing to reach the Second Legion’s command ship and missing his General Bai.
Using these star coins, he traded the ordinary nutrient solutions he used to use through the black market for military-exclusive Type A1 nutrient solutions, as well as advanced repair potions and gene-enhancement fluids that he could previously neither touch nor afford.
A month’s time was neither long nor short. During this period, his physical constitution level improved rapidly.
Perhaps this time, his physical assessment score during the military academy exams could score a grade D.
Regardless, it was still better-looking than the E+ he got in his past life.
An E+ physical constitution grade was actually already considered high among ordinary people on the fringe planet, where the average population constitution grade only reached F for the sickly and malnourished. For a nineteen-year-old who had not yet undergone secondary gender presentation, reaching E+ was already the result of him putting in hardcore effort.
Yet even though Rong Zhiting had presented as an Alpha, his bloodline grade was only F. Secondary presentation provided almost zero boost to his physical constitution, leaving him no different from an ordinary Beta.
Even though in the current interstellar Federation, ordinary Betas engaged in desk jobs had an average physical constitution grade ranging from E to D.
In his past life, his physical condition was pushed to the limit by his General Bai and only reached C. In this life, he advanced it by seven years, starting to use gene-enhancement fluids before his presentation, hoping to raise his upper limit higher.
Having said that, while this method could rapidly improve physical constitution, burning star coins was also truly a reality. Therefore, he still had to occasionally venture deep into the city ruins to scavenge some weapon materials to sell.
This was also his main purpose for coming to the black market tonight.
Since this was destined to be a sleepless night, he always needed to find something to do for himself, much better than sitting in bed until dawn.
When he first reborn, every time he was awakened by nightmares, he would sit blankly all night.
In the cold, abandoned house, there was only him. By his side, there was no other person’s body temperature; no one would hug him from behind, no strong arms and chest would wrap around his entire person, asking him what was wrong with a whisper-soft, pleasant voice. Upon hearing the answer about the nightmare, they would let out a low chuckle that made his ears tingle, holding him as they fell back onto the bed, massaging his hair and the back of his neck until he fell asleep again, or simply pinning him down on the bed to do things that could exhaust him until he cried himself to sleep.
He spent many sleepless nights. Later, finding that this would not do, he began forcing himself to do energy-consuming tasks, which was better than constantly thinking about that person and crying unworthily.
Sometimes it was doing physical training, sometimes repairing some precision mechanical parts, and sometimes it was just like today.
At this moment, Rong Zhiting did not yet know what his temporary decision to go out at night would cause him to encounter.
At three in the morning, a dark gray mecha left the underground city via the black market’s direct surface mecha tunnel.
In the sky, dark, heavy rainclouds rolled.
Lightning flashed across the horizon, the sound of thunder approached from far away, and the pitter-patter of raindrops began, gradually turning into a torrential curtain of rain.
Amidst the city ruins blanketed with collapsed buildings, the dark gray mecha shuttled through.
Inside the mecha cockpit, Rong Zhiting looked at the pitch-black curtain of rain outside and silently sighed.
Bad luck. In such heavy rain, the functions of the detectors would inevitably be affected to some extent. Furthermore, after getting drenched in acid rain, he would have to pay out of his own pocket to apply a protective coating to this mecha again. Oh, and he had to do it himself.
The 6991 energy detector was something he specially added when modifying this mecha, specifically designed to facilitate the search for energy residues of abandoned mechas and fighter planes in this city ruins.
At this moment, the detector was spinning in circles on the dial, showing not a single trace of energy signal fluctuation.
They had already entered deep into the city ruins. There were quite a few broken walls and ruins nearby caused by the war back then, and occasionally one could see fighter plane and mecha fragments blown to pieces, already damaged beyond repair and reuse.
Two hours passed, and the detector finally showed some movement.
Tracing the signal of the energy source, Rong Zhiting found a fighter plane with half of its wing missing on the second floor inside a skyscraper whose upper half had collapsed.
That fighter plane should have had half its wing blown off back then, subsequently crashing straight into the building’s interior and ending up embedded in the second floor.
There were no pilot remains inside the fuselage, and the cockpit had been destroyed beyond recognition. Whether they successfully ejected and escaped or were taken away by comrades, Rong Zhiting did not check closely, but the absence of bodies made him breathe a sigh of relief.
Whenever he saw those remains, he always felt very uncomfortable. Coupled with this thundering and rainy weather outside, and the pitch-black interior of the building, it was rather frightening.
He began skillfully dismantling the still-usable parts of the fighter plane, storing those components into his spatial button.
This spatial button was originally meant for holding mechas, but Rong Zhiting used it as a storage device for mechanical components. As he dismantled the final two energy panels, his peripheral vision caught something flashing outside the window. Right on cue, a loud clap of thunder exploded, startling Rong Zhiting so much that all his hair stood on end. He hurriedly turned his head to look out the window.
He saw in the distance a dazzling ball of fire piercing through the dark clouds, slashing across the horizon like a shooting star, leaving a trail of flame in the process of piercing through the atmosphere.
A meteorite? No, that was no meteorite!
Rong Zhiting immediately vaulted into the mecha cockpit and turned on the long-range magnification assist. Sure enough, that was a burning mecha!
And strangely, why did this mecha look somewhat familiar?
He could not be certain and struggled to adjust the focus trying to get a clear view, but the distance was too far, and the mecha was enveloped in a ring of fire, quickly disappearing from his field of view.
Rong Zhiting could no longer bother with dismantling the energy panels; he immediately started the mecha and rushed toward the direction where that mecha had crashed.
There were not many mechas that looked familiar to him. Aside from the Second Legion’s configuration mechas, the owners of all other exclusive mechas were Second Legion commanders. Better safe than sorry, no matter whose it was, regardless of whether he had mistaken it, anyone under Brother Bai’s command must not be allowed to meet with disaster right under his nose!