The earliest memories Xiang Yi could access only stretched back to the time he'd first been locked away in this prison — everything before that was a complete blank.
But the word "asteroid" that Long Ge had just let slip triggered the recollection of a deeply troubling fact.
This prison hadn't been built on a planet. It was constructed on an asteroid sitting within the planetary ring of a world somewhere in a Star System, kept livable only by some kind of device that gave the whole rock a normal gravitational field.
A place like this had exactly one connection to the outside world: a ship.
The moment Xiang Yi had pieced together from his fragmented memories that he was in a prison, he'd already started thinking about how to break out.
Because he wanted to see what was out there.
The Mining Laser Gun in his hands was a constant reminder — its technology was easily a hundred, maybe several hundred years ahead of anything from his original world. He wasn't about to let an opportunity like this pass him by.
He'd more or less been a law-abiding person back in the day, but that stopped mattering the moment he wound up behind bars. The concept was irrelevant now.
Besides, whatever he'd done here had clearly been serious enough to land him in a place like this — and he didn't even know how long his sentence was.
Ten years? Twenty? Life?
He had to find a way out. Whatever it took.
But the situation had just made that exponentially harder. Even with the Spiritual Energy he'd somehow acquired, he couldn't see any clear path forward.
How was he supposed to escape from this place?
For a brief moment, lost in thought, Xiang Yi's attention drifted — and Long Ge saw his opening.
He snatched a fistful of dirt from the ground and hurled it straight at Xiang Yi's eyes.
Those two steps Xiang Yi had taken toward him earlier had closed the gap just enough to make it possible.
But just as Long Ge thought he'd blinded him and lunged forward to close the distance —
An orange-red beam swept across both his legs, completely destroying his balance, and he crashed face-first onto the ground less than a meter in front of Xiang Yi.
The violent jolt of reacting to Long Ge's sudden burst cost Xiang Yi his footing, and he dropped hard onto his ass, chest heaving as he gulped for air.
His wounds were taking a serious toll on him, but he still managed to speak: "I'd like to think none of you are stupid. You all know any one of you could get dragged down to the bottom of the mine — unless, of course, they've been sweetening the deal for you somehow."
Long Ge was clearly faring far worse. All the strength had gone out of him, and he was feebly trying to push himself up with one arm.
It wasn't working. His other arm was pinned under his own body, completely trapped.
He tried a few times before giving up, slumping back down, and exhaling weakly in Xiang Yi's direction: "You're sharp, I'll give you that. Played dumb the whole time, and in half a month you'd already figured out how everything works around here."
"If you hadn't been so convincing about it — and if your body wasn't such a wreck — you'd have been waiting with us for the next batch of fresh meat to show up."
"Physical condition doesn't matter. This does." Xiang Yi steadied himself and got to his feet, tapping the casing of the Mining Gun in his hand.
"You're an Engineer?"
Xiang Yi gave a slight shrug, neither confirming nor denying it.
"By the way — do you know what I was actually sent here for?"
Something seemed to click in Long Ge's mind. The look he turned on Xiang Yi was like a man staring at something deeply wrong. "Crimes against humanity…"
"Figured as much," Xiang Yi thought to himself.
Alongside planning his escape, he'd been trying to work out why he'd ended up here in the first place.
From what little his fragmented memories had given him, the version of himself that belonged to this world was fundamentally no different from who he'd always been.
Which meant he had a pretty solid grasp of what he would and wouldn't do — and ending up in a prison like this didn't fit.
On top of that, judging by this prisoner's reaction, his past behavior here had clearly been pathetic enough to make him an easy target for bleeding dry. That told him he almost certainly wasn't some cold-blooded killer.
In other words, the more serious the charges against him, the more it suggested that the reason he was here wasn't straightforward.
So what had really brought him to this place?
What could he have possibly done to end up branded with something as severe as crimes against humanity?
Xiang Yi kept turning it over in his mind, reaching into the fragments of memory again and again, searching for anything.
But there was nothing. Not a single thing. The charge hadn't shaken anything loose — he was still completely in the dark.
And yet, strangely, it was precisely that silence — that total absence of a reaction from his own memory — that left Xiang Yi with a thoughtful look on his face.
"Hey, Long Ge — you weren't honestly expecting me to let my guard down and just stroll right up next to you on the way out, were you?"
"What?"
"The hand you've got pinned under your body. There's something in it, isn't there?"
The instant Xiang Yi said it, Long Ge's eyes went cold and sharp — the dying act vanished completely.
He knew Xiang Yi had seen through it: the last card he'd been holding, the one that could drag Xiang Yi down with him.
"You bastard!"
The hand Long Ge had kept hidden beneath him whipped out a razor-sharp blade — a piece of iron ground down to a dagger-like edge — and flung it at Xiang Yi. It sailed past his side and clattered onto the ground.
"Ah. There it is."
From the moment Xiang Yi had first laid eyes on the three of them, he'd been wondering where the blade was — the one they'd used to cut themselves.
The crude chunk of rock in Kun Ge's hand clearly wasn't it. And Long Ge had been keeping one hand tucked behind his body from the very start.
Whether kneeling or sprawled face-down, that one hand had never been visible. It didn't take much thought to figure out what he was holding.
So Xiang Yi had been ready the whole time.
Those two steps he'd taken toward Long Ge at the start, and the act of pretending not to notice the blade — all of it had been deliberate. He'd left Long Ge just enough of an opening.
Because that was the only way to get Long Ge talking.
If Long Ge saw nothing but dead ends ahead of him, Xiang Yi was certain a man like him would take every last piece of information to his grave without flinching.
But give him even a sliver of a way out, and he'd naturally start reaching for it.
Sure, a hardened criminal like Long Ge would never actually believe Xiang Yi intended to let him go — but at least taking Xiang Yi down with him would count as the next best thing.
So in a twisted way, that had been his "way out."
The one miscalculation was that Xiang Yi had underestimated how badly his own body was holding up, which had given Long Ge a genuine window to actually finish him off early on.
He simply had no experience dealing with injuries this severe, and he'd misjudged his own limits. It wouldn't happen again.
But that was all it was.
The moment Xiang Yi had gained that power, the three of them had never had any road left but the one that ended here.
Now that he'd gotten everything he needed out of Long Ge, he saw no reason to drag things out.
He raised the Mining Gun and burned through every remaining joint in all three of their limbs with the laser, then used Long Ge's own discarded blade to open up a generous number of cuts across their bodies.
The Mining Gun's laser left only charred, cauterized wounds — the cuts were necessary to make them bleed.
The whole time he worked, the three of them screamed obscenities at him without pause.
They went after his asshole son, his dead ancestors going back eighteen generations — nobody got spared.
Xiang Yi didn't so much as blink. If anything, he looked almost cheerful as he finished up and left the three of them there to die.
Deep in the mine tunnel, the Blood Crystals — or rather, the Abnormalities that secreted and produced them — were drawing closer.
The soft, skittering sounds crept through the darkness like the wailing of death itself, already filling the ears of Long Ge and his men.