The lightning was the final audit.
Jin Long felt it. A cosmic accounting. Every exposed secret. Every protected source. Every quiet evening with Li Mei.
Tallied in that white-hot instant.
Then, silence.
A voice made of numbers and dying stars spoke in his mind.
[Life #1: Final Balance]
Wealth Accumulated: ¥20,447,892,101
Wealth Lost: ¥20,447,892,101
Net: 0
Family Protected: 3/3
Family Lost: 3/3
Net: 0
Friendships Maintained: 7/7
Friendships Lost: 7/7
Net: 0
Legacy: Anti-Corruption Evidence (Archived)
Result: System Purged. No Change.
Overall Performance: Technically Solvent. Morally Bankrupt.
[Opportunity for Re-Audit]
[Different Tools Provided. Same Mission Optional.]
A screen flickered in the void. Green phosphor on infinite black.
[Financial Assassin Interface // Boot Sequence]
————————————————————————
Core Principle: All Reality Quantifiable
Friendship = Equity
Betrayal = Liquidation
Protection = Primary Directive
Vengeance = Compound Interest
[Parameters Set]
Reincarnation Age: 6 Years
Location: Primary Schoolyard, 1978
Known Assets: 1 (Li Mei, Age 5)
Future Memory Cache: 100/100 Units
Warning: Depletes with use. Non-renewable.
[Objectives]
Protect Primary Assets (Family)Accumulate Defensive Capital (Target: ¥20B)Optional: Balance The Ledger
[System Phase: 1 - Calculator]
Voice: Neutral Data Stream
Personality: None Detected
Integration: 0% (External Framework Only)
————————————————————————
[Reincarnation in 3…2…1…]
Jin Long opened his eyes.
Schoolyard asphalt under small palms. The smell of chalk and childhood sweat.
No cancer in his bones. No bullet wounds in his stomach.
Just the too-bright sun of 1978.
And in the corner of his vision, persistent and elegant:
[Long Jin // Age: 6]
[Net Worth: ¥347]
[Cache: 100/100 Units]
[Phase: Calculator]
[Known Assets: 0/1 Located]
[Objective: Find Asset 'Li Mei']
He stood. Small legs. Unsteady.
Seventy-two years of memory crashed into a six-year-old nervous system. The collapse of his empire. The friends around the table turning to ghosts. The silence after the gunshots.
Li Mei's hand going limp in his.
The fury was a physical heat behind his eyes.
He clenched tiny fists. The nails bit. The pain was clean. Real. A confirmation.
This was not a dream.
This was a second ledger.
Across the dusty yard, children shrieked and chased a ball. Teachers chatted by the wall, smoking in the afternoon light.
His eyes scanned. Methodical. A threat assessment of a primary school playground.
Then he saw her.
Near the rusting swing set. A five-year-old girl with twin braids, skipping rope alone.
Li Mei.
The sight was a physical blow. A sucker-punch to a heart he'd thought calcified.
She was alive. Not the wise, weary woman he'd buried, but the fierce, bright girl he'd met a lifetime ago. The girl who would become his everything.
[Known Asset Located: Li Mei]
[Proximity: 22 Meters]
[Status: Nominal]
[Emotional Capital Implantation: Recommended]
The system's cool text floated in his vision. It called her an asset. A line item.
He hated it. He needed it.
He began to walk. Each step was a negotiation between a child's body and an old man's will. The world was too loud, too bright, too much.
A boy bumped into him. "Watch it!"
Long Jin looked up. The boy was seven, maybe eight. A bully in the making. In another life, Long Jin would have ruined his father's business before breakfast.
Now, he just steadied himself. "My mistake."
His voice was high. A child's flute. It felt like a betrayal.
The boy scowled and ran off.
Long Jin kept walking. His focus was absolute. A tunnel vision that ended at the skipping rope.
She chanted a rhyme. Her voice was clear bells. A sound he'd mourned for decades.
He stopped three feet away. The rope swished, thumped on the hard-packed earth.
His mind was a storm. What to say? How to bridge a lifetime of love and loss across five years of age?
The system offered nothing. It was just a calculator. Waiting for data.
The rope slowed. She stopped. Brown eyes, curious and sharp, studied him. She wiped sweat from her brow with a small wrist.
"You're staring," she said. No fear. Just observation.
"I know you," Long Jin said. The words were inadequate.
"No, you don't." She coiled the rope. "You're new. Your name is Long. The teacher said."
"My name is Jin."
"That's your last name."
"It's the name that matters." He took a step closer. The memories were a flood. Her laugh at their wedding. Her steady hands bandaging a wound. Her final, bloody whisper. "I know you like the back of my hand, Li Mei. I know you hide candy in your left sock. I know you're scared of the dark but you tell everyone you're scared of spiders instead. I know the scar on your knee is from when you were three and tried to climb the bookcase to get the moon cookie jar."
Her eyes widened. Just a fraction. The candy was true. The fear was true. The scar was true.
A fortress of child-logic trembled.
"Who told you?" Her voice was smaller.
"No one told me." He looked at his own small, clean hands. "I was there. I'm… I came back."
"From where?"
"From a long time from now." He met her gaze. He poured seventy-two years of certainty into it. "Where we grow up. Where we get married. Where we have a daughter named Xiao Ling. Where they kill us for things I knew."
She didn't run. She didn't call him crazy. Her eyes just got deeper, older. She was five, but she was also Li Mei. She had always seen more.
"Prove it," she whispered.
He nodded. He'd prepared for this in the endless seconds of his walk over. He reached into his pocket—the cheap, rough fabric of his school shorts—and pulled out a stub of charcoal stolen from the art bin.
He knelt on the asphalt. Ignored the bite of gravel.
With a child's clumsy grip but an architect's memory, he began to draw.
Not a child's drawing. A blueprint.
He sketched the floor plan of their first apartment. The one they'd rented when they were twenty and poor and happy. He drew the leak in the ceiling over the bed. The crack in the bathroom tile shaped like a rabbit. The exact layout of the kitchen where she'd taught him to cook.
He drew the safe. The one they'd built into the false floor of the closet. He drew the combination lock. He wrote the numbers: 17-22-09. Their wedding date.
He finished. His hand ached.
He looked up at her.
Her face had gone pale. Her small hand was pressed to her mouth.
She recognized it. Of course she did. They had designed that hidden safe together, decades from now. A secret for a future they hadn't lived yet.
"How…" she breathed.
"I lived it." He stood. The world tilted, then righted. "They killed us, Mei. For money. For secrets. They took everything. I died an old man. I died… empty."
A tear traced a path through the dust on his cheek. He didn't wipe it.
"Now I'm back. I have this…" He tapped his temple. "This system. It sees the world as numbers. It wants me to make money. To fight. To prepare."
He took her hand. Her skin was warm and alive.
"I don't want to do it alone. I can't do it alone. It has to be you. It was always you."
She looked at their joined hands. Then at the intricate, impossible drawing on the ground. Proof etched in charcoal and memory.
The bell rang. Sharp. Dismissal.
Children began to stream toward the gates.
Li Mei didn't move. She was making a calculation. One that had nothing to do with green phosphor text.
"If we do this," she said, her voice suddenly firm, "we do it with no secrets. Ever. From now until… until whatever end."
"No secrets," he vowed.
"And we protect Xiao Ling." The name, their future daughter's name, felt sacred on her lips.
"With everything we are."
She nodded once. A decision made. A pact sealed in a schoolyard.
She let go of his hand and scuffed her shoe over the blueprint, erasing it from the world.
"Come on," she said. Not like a five-year-old. Like a commander. "My mother is waiting. We'll walk together."
They fell into step. Two small figures in a crowd of children.
[Objective Updated: Primary Asset Secured]
[Emotional Capital: Li Mei +100 (Fixed Bond)]
[Synergy Potential: 91%]
[System Note: Partnership increases survival probability by 340%]
The numbers glowed. Long Jin barely saw them.
He was watching Li Mei. The set of her shoulders. The way her eyes tracked the adults at the gate. Already assessing. Already protecting.
She was five. And she was his wife. And she was the only weapon he needed.
At the gate, a woman waved. Li Mei's mother. Young, smiling, unaware.
"That's my mom," Li Mei said. She looked up at Long Jin. "Your house is the other way."
"I know."
"Tomorrow," she said. "We start."
"Start what?"
"Everything." She squeezed his hand once, then let go and ran to her mother.
Long Jin stood still as the crowd flowed around him.
The system flickered.
[Net Worth: ¥347]
[Cache: 100/100 Units]
[Phase: Calculator]
[Primary Objective: In Progress]
He turned and began the walk home. To a house he remembered. To parents who were alive. To a childhood that was now a fortress under construction.
He had ¥347. He had 100 units of future memory.
He had a enemy that didn't know it was being hunted across time.
And he had Li Mei.
The calculus was simple. The variables were set.
[First Calculation: Initiated]
[Goal: Survive the Week]
[Method: Establish Baseline Operational Security]
[Step 1: Reconnaissance of Home Environment]
His steps were small but deliberate. Each one a deposit into the account of his new life.
The sun was beginning to set. It cast long shadows.
Long Jin walked into his. And he did not look back.