Central Research Institute, Fu’an Base.
Jiang Fu disguised herself as a researcher. Using the access codes she still remembered, she quietly passed through layer after layer of security, skillfully avoiding surveillance cameras as she made her way into the central zone.
There, she opened a door leading underground and slowly descended.
This research institute had been built single-handedly by her mother. At first, it had been established to study the Great Catastrophe. After the apocalypse began, its focus shifted to researching abilities, zombies, and various mutant beasts.
The institute was enormous, its internal divisions complex. Every core researcher was absolutely loyal—of course, their families, their weaknesses, were all firmly in her mother’s grasp.
Her mother had always valued people’s hearts and knew how to win them over. But she would never rely on goodwill alone to trust someone.
After Jiang Fu took over, she did the same. She believed the institute would never have problems, and so she stored her most important possession here.
But she had not anticipated that during the transfer of power, people’s loyalties would waver. The instability had already seeped into the institute. Someone had betrayed them—nearly causing harm to her mother’s remains.
More than fifty meters underground, she opened the final electronic door. A space of just over thirty square meters appeared before her. The motion-sensor lights flicked on automatically, casting a faint, warm orange glow—like candles in a funeral hall, carrying a mournful, desolate stillness.
An ice coffin lay quietly in the center of the room.
Jiang Fu stood there, suddenly overcome with a strange timidity, as though returning home after a long absence. She did not dare step forward.
After a moment, she raised her hand and pressed the switch on the wall. The heavy electronic door closed behind her. Then, step by step, she walked toward the ice coffin.
Soft light inside the coffin illuminated the tranquil face of the person within. Jiang Fu’s eyes burned instantly; tears welled up uncontrollably and dripped onto the transparent lid.
“Mother…”
She sank to one knee, leaning close to the coffin, greedily studying her mother’s lifeless yet still imposing face. Gently, she pressed her cheek against the lid, as though she were once again nestling in the safe embrace of her mother’s arms as a child.
“Mother… Mom… I’m back. I missed you so much.”
In the silent underground chamber, a daughter who was neither fully alive nor truly dead—returned after half a century—knelt beside a mother long deceased, softly recounting what had happened to her.
Gravely wounded, drained of strength, ambushed.
Her head severed and left to bake in the sun.
Her body chopped apart and melted into molten bronze, cast into a statue forced to kneel for a full fifty years.
People lined up to curse her, to splash filth upon her. Countless novels were written about her, countless plays performed. Villain. Pervert. Devil. Whore. Spy. Traitor… She was made to play every grotesque caricature imaginable.
For half a century, the name “Jiang Fu” had become synonymous with infamy—condemned to eternal disgrace, her corpse metaphorically whipped again and again.
But not wanting to distress her mother, she spared the details. Suppressing her emotions, she summarized only the essentials.
In the end, she choked out, “Mom… they all bullied me.”
She lay against the ice coffin, crying in grievance. “How could they treat me like that? How could the world treat me like that? The victor is king, the loser a bandit—I accepted that. But they went too far. Too far… They even denied you just to deny me. In the history books they compiled, your name doesn’t even exist…”
“So I can’t endure it anymore. You know me—I was never someone who swallows humiliation. You never taught me to suffer in silence. Whoever makes me unhappy, I’ll repay them a hundredfold.”
She lifted her head and gazed at her mother.
“You once taught me to protect the base, to protect Teyun. I swore before your memorial hall that I would inherit your will, lead everyone through hardship, guide them out of the apocalypse, and create a new world.”
“But now… I don’t want to do that anymore. I don’t want to protect anyone. I don’t want to give anything for anyone. They’re not worthy! In fact, I want to turn against this world.”
She steadied her breathing and said softly but firmly, word by word:
“If there is no place for me in a peaceful and beautiful new era, then let that new era never arrive.”
“Mother… you’ll forgive me, won’t you?”
“After all, the one you loved most was me. Everyone else came second.”
Her mother gave no answer.
Jiang Fu rose, stepped back, and knelt again before the ice coffin. She kowtowed three times solemnly. On the final bow, her emotions broke free, and boundless grief swallowed her whole.
“Mom, why didn’t you live longer? Those people—those bad people—are seventy or eighty years old and still lively, still thriving, enjoying good lives every single day. You should have lived that long too. How could you bear to leave me alone in this world to suffer?”
Through blurred tears, she stared at her mother’s body and sensed the ability energy still circulating within it. That mad idea surfaced once more.
She pulled a small black kitten from her pocket.
“I can come back to life after death. I can exist in this half-dead state… then maybe Mother can too—”
The little black cat paled in shock. “Drop that dangerous idea. Your mother essentially died to serve the plot. She dies at the beginning of Part Two. She’s a background character. This world has no soil for her survival!”
Jiang Fu snapped, “Then shouldn’t I have died too? But I’m still alive! In this damned apocalypse, even zombies can regain consciousness. Highly intelligent zombie kings can be born. Aren’t they walking corpses? Why can they exist—but not my mother?”
Yes. She had refused to cremate her mother’s body. Every day, she used her own ability to keep her mother’s organs from failing—harboring the intention of turning her into a zombie.
The idea was shocking, almost unthinkable. She didn’t know if it would succeed, nor what the consequences might be. So she had never dared to act.
She feared failure. She feared that even if it succeeded, her mother’s rationality might never return. She feared that if it all amounted to nothing, she would ruin even her mother’s legacy.
Jiang Fu rose and paced urgently beside the coffin.
“My mother was a ninth-tier ability user! Do you know what that means? A lifespan of at least one hundred and fifty years. Immune to blades and bullets, untouched by fire or water. The only one of her kind in the world!”
“It’s unimaginably hard for high-tier ability users to advance. It took me seven years into the apocalypse to reach eighth-tier. Three more years to reach ninth! And at that time, I was the only one at ninth-tier!”
“Which is exactly why she had to die!” the black kitten said sternly, standing atop the ice coffin. “Her power was already abnormally high. If she had continued living, she would have seriously threatened the balance of the entire world.”
“To be precise, it’s just the author’s setting—and not even a reasonable one. It was all to lay the groundwork for you, the great villain. To show that you’re practically born noble, so the male and female protagonists grassroots righteousness can shine by contrast!”
“Just because the author wrote it that way, my mother has to be a background character who dies the moment she appears?!” Jiang Fu’s voice cracked. “But in my memories, in my life, she was real. She was alive.”
Jiang Fu slammed a hand down onto the ice coffin, shouting furiously, her emotions nearly spiraling out of control. Cracks split across the coffin lid beneath her palm with sharp cracking sounds.
Startled, she hurriedly withdrew her hand and stepped back. She stood there blankly for a moment before finally forcing herself to calm down.
She closed her eyes and let out a cold laugh. “Author’s setting, is it? What kind of bastard author is that, to think they’re worthy of controlling my life and my mother’s?”
If this was just a novel world—if this was nothing more than a game—then why couldn’t she be the one to write the rules?
She looked at the resentment steaming from her hands. Agitated as she was just now, her malice had surged, and the speed at which her resentment recovered had increased dramatically.
Gazing at her mother inside the ice coffin, she said firmly, “Mother, wait for me.”
Back then, after her mother’s body had nearly been stolen, she had sat there all night in a daze, struggling for hours before finally deciding to let go of her delusions and cremate her mother, granting her peace.
But this time, she wouldn’t.
She would insist on trying. She would see whether she—a variable that had stepped off the track of fate—could turn her mother into a second variable.
Still, she had to convince the “herself” here first.
She rubbed her forehead and glanced once more at the ice coffin.
The coffin had been attacked. The “her” in this timeline must have received the alarm and was already on the way. But now was not the time to meet. She didn’t dare gamble on the consequences of recognizing each other.
She walked to the wall, wrote two lines, then opened the electronic door and slipped out.
…
The Central Research Institute went into full lockdown.
The base’s military surrounded the entire institute. Air units sealed off the airspace overhead.
Ability-user squads guarded every entrance and exit. In particular, psychic-type ability users released their spiritual power, weaving layer upon layer of airtight nets—so tight that not even a mosquito could escape.
All of this happened within just a few minutes.
And Jiang Fu arrived even faster than the defensive measures. The moment she received the alarm, she moved at the greatest speed of her life—almost like teleportation—racing from the office building to the research institute in under a minute.
The instant she arrived, her spiritual power spread outward. Then, through a secret passage only she could access, she went straight underground.
On the way, when she passed a certain spot, her heart twitched again. That strange sensation returned. But worried about her mother, she didn’t dwell on it and didn’t slow her steps.
After she left, Jiang Fu stepped out from a corner, her face pale and her body swaying. Watching the other her retreating figure, deep wariness filled her eyes.
She wasn’t wary of that self.
She was wary of the violent reaction caused by their near encounter.
At that moment, if they had truly collided face to face, she almost suspected she would have vanished on the spot.
It seemed she really needed to keep her distance.
She turned and quickly left.
Before the outer encirclement fully formed, she slipped out of the research institute.
Meanwhile, Jiang Fu rushed into the room. Seeing that her mother was still lying safely inside the ice coffin, she let out a huge sigh of relief.
“Mother… you’re fine… that’s good…”
Her heart had nearly stopped from fright. She gasped violently, feeling as though she had died once already.
Then her gaze froze on the two handprints on the ice coffin.
The alarm hadn’t been wrong. Someone had indeed entered this place—and even attempted to break open the coffin.
No. The position, the direction… it didn’t seem like they were trying to push the lid open. And the lid was clearly on the verge of giving way; a little more force would have destroyed it. Yet that person hadn’t done so.
She stared at the handprints. The longer she looked, the more familiar—and strange—they seemed. Almost unconsciously, she placed her own hands over them.
They matched perfectly.
Jiang Fu: !
As if shocked by electricity, she jerked her hands back. Disbelief filled her eyes. “Mother… what happened here?”
Of course, her mother inside the coffin could offer no answer. Turning her head, she noticed the writing on the wall.
She strode over.
First line: Zhou Jia, Wang Mianzhi, and others are plotting to steal the remains. Several people in the institute have been turned.
Jiang Fu’s hand clenched instantly. That useless Zhou Jia dared?!
Wang Mianzhi had been one of the more capable people her mother had left to her. If even he couldn’t be trusted… then there were likely far more people with ulterior motives around her than she had imagined.
When she read the second line, her pupils contracted sharply:
I may be able to bring Governor Jiang back to life. Suspend your “proving the Dao through killing” plan and follow my arrangements.
Jiang Fu stared fixedly at the words bring back to life, her entire body rigid. Only after a long moment did her gaze move on.
The “proving the Dao through killing” plan…
In reality, it meant executing a batch of corrupt and law-breaking officials and death-row inmates—people who deserved to die—using their blood to deliver a brutal warning. It would establish her authority and conveniently purge the base of its scum, restoring proper order.
“Proving the Dao through killing” was merely her own internal summary of the matter. Because it sounded overly dramatic, she had never told anyone about it, nor written it down. Logically, no second person should have known.
Was there some ability that could read minds?
Someone who knew she had hidden her mother’s remains, who could come and go freely here, who even understood her most secret thoughts—and wanted to control her…
Jiang Fu narrowed her eyes. Her right hand rubbed the bracelet on her left wrist as killing intent churned within her. Yet the word resurrection ultimately forced her to restrain herself.
Even if there was only a one-in-a-billion chance, she was unwilling to give it up.
Suddenly, she noticed something. Stepping back a few paces, she carefully examined the writing on the wall.
Why did the handwriting also look strangely familiar?
…
A short while later, Jiang Fu returned to the surface.
Shen Muyun, the commander of the base military legion, personally led the deployment. She came forward to report, “Base Commander, the research institute and surrounding streets have been completely sealed and secured. No suspicious individuals have been found so far. Shall we conduct a carpet search?”
Jiang Fu did not answer immediately. She looked at the commander, her gaze softening slightly.
The woman had been her mother’s right hand—her most loyal supporter.
Among her mother’s subordinates, the ratio of men to women had actually been fairly even. But among her confidants, women greatly outnumbered men.
Her mother had once said that most men resented being ruled by a woman, whereas women would instinctively safeguard the rights of their own sex. Anyone with half a brain would know that having someone of the same gender in power could only benefit them.
As for those without brains—just look at the condition of women in other male-led bases, and they should understand.
Facts had proven it true. The ones who had recently jumped out in opposition were overwhelmingly male. Zhou Jia, Wang Mianzhi, those audacious enough to attempt such crimes—they were all men.
Damned men!
She very much wanted to dismiss them all in one sweep. It would likely make things much quieter.
But her mother had also said that if men were given no path upward, they would go mad as if they had no tomorrow. They would band together, become more reckless, and make the situation even harder to control.
She exhaled. “Aunt Shen, thank you for your hard work. After my mother was cremated, half of a shattered ninth-tier crystal core was left behind. I stored it in the research institute. Zhou Jia colluded with Wang Mianzhi and others to steal the crystal core. There’s an inside accomplice in the institute.”
Shock flashed through Shen Muyun’s eyes, then understanding. Like zombies, ability users also had crystal cores. It was one of the reasons ability users turned on each other.
However, Jiang Junrong had died from an ability backlash explosion. No crystal core had been found during the cremation—otherwise the representatives from various regions who came to pay respects would have already tried to seize it.
Who would have thought that half a core had remained?
She said angrily, “Beasts! They deserve death! Base Commander, please give your orders!”
Jiang Fu raised her voice and commanded, “Effective immediately, place Zhou Jia, Wang Mianzhi, and the other rebels on wanted lists across the entire base! Anyone who shelters or colludes with them will be arrested as well!”
She glanced at Shen Muyun, placing particular emphasis on the words across the entire base.
Shen Muyun understood instantly.
Locating those people wouldn’t be difficult. Arresting them would be easy. This was an opportunity to comb through the entire base and apprehend everyone who ought to be arrested.
Someone had dared to lay hands on her mother’s remains—and on something as important as a ninth-tier crystal core. For the insult to her deceased mother and the attempt to seize such a treasure, no amount of upheaval would be too excessive.