My name is Cheng Yuan. I just want to quietly finish reading that novel that's been on hiatus for ten years.
Ten years ago, I was an ordinary engineer at the Old Flame Alliance Energy Research Institute. Every day during my lunch break, I'd pull out my phone and read the latest chapter of Nine Realms Immortal Venerable. The protagonist was a nobody, shoved off a cliff, but he got back up, swore, and kept climbing. I wanted to know how far he could go.
But I may never get to see how it ends.
I'm now sitting three thousand meters beneath the Pacific Ocean, inside a battered spirit-core submarine. The Old Flame Alliance has marked me as an "S-rank priority elimination target." My only companion is a girl whose projection can be sustained only by the residual energy of a spirit-core engine. Her body is made of pale blue particles of light, and her left eye doesn't glow. She says I'm her "causal anchor." Every time she helps me, she fades a little more.
This world has gone mad. They treat spiritual energy as superstition, but I measured it with a nuclear reactor: it's the fifth fundamental field. They generate electricity with uranium, while I've built the first spirit-core engine beneath the Pacific. It needs no fuel and produces no waste heat. It's a door. I pushed it open just a crack and saw something I was never meant to see.
They're hunting me because I know how to give all of humanity unlimited free energy. The Old Flame Alliance won't allow that. The Psionic Union wants to turn me into a test subject. The Riftwalkers pulled me out from under a depth charge and shoved a spirit-core engine into my hands, saying, "Don't die."
But all I really want is to read the ending of that novel. Three years, eight months, and fourteen days. The author left the protagonist beneath a heavenly thunderbolt and never updated again.
I'll survive, make it to the surface, and read that final chapter.
