Military engineer Chen Shu died with seventeen bullets in his back.
The last message he received before dying came from his superior: “Mission complete. Clean up everything.”
When he awoke, he wasn’t at the Bridge of Helplessness. He was at the recruitment window of the Underworld’s Military Engineering Bureau. His merit score was minus seventeen thousand, his professional rating was S+, and his assignment was: no reincarnation for now, placement in a high-risk technical position.
His superior told him the Underworld was on the verge of collapse. The extradimensional “Purifiers” would return in three hundred years, the rifts were widening year by year, and their mainstay, the old Sword Immortal, had already dissipated his immortal form to reincarnate. Flying swords and thunder magic had such high barriers to entry that three years of training couldn’t produce even one qualified cultivator.
He asked, “What do you need?”
The answer: “Something that lets ordinary souls kill the invaders within three months.”
So in an abandoned workshop on the outskirts of Fengdu City, the unfinished blueprints of a craftsman from nine hundred years ago were spread out once more. Modern firearms and talisman engravings were brought together beneath a six-axis mechanism. When an ordinary person pulled the trigger, the bullet left a silver trail and pierced Song-dynasty lamellar armor three hundred meters away.
At the ferry crossing on the River of the Dead, the Red Flame Army reclaimed lost territory with five hundred talisman guns, achieving its first battle with no casualties from hand-to-hand combat.
But the Underworld was never of one mind. A messenger from the Yaksha Marshal arrived bearing lavish gifts, with an ulterior motive. Secret orders from the Palace of the King of Hell and spies in dark alleys drew Chen Shu into a deeper game of intrigue.
In seven hundred days, the rift would welcome its true master.
He would finish the road left unfinished nine hundred years ago.
Thirty years ago, his old company commander had asked him: “What are you most afraid of in this line of work?”
His answer: “Living for nothing.”
This time, he would serve no one.
Only the old bullet casing he had carried for thirty years, so he wouldn’t let it down.
