Ever since Jiang Chen could remember, he had known one thing: he was a good-for-nothing.
It wasn't something other people had called him. The testing device had told him so. At the age of eight, during the Federation's awakening test, his star meridian capacity was only three percent. The awakening standard was fifteen percent. He didn't even qualify as "failed": he wasn't even eligible to be evaluated.
At nineteen, he hauled ore at a mine tailings sorting station for 120 dollars an hour. His mother's star meridians were deteriorating, and her medicine cost 4,000 a month: 120,000 over three months. If he couldn't scrape together the money, she would die.
With nowhere else to turn, he entered the underground iron cage on Seventh Street. An E-rank good-for-nothing against a C-rank fighter, with 2,000 for the winner.
As he threw that punch, the mysterious scar on his chest suddenly burned. His left hand rose of its own accord, catching the full-force strike of a C-rank Star Warrior with one hand.
The Federation Star Warrior Bureau came looking for him. They told him two things: first, his father, Jiang Yuanshan, was one of the Federation's only nine S-rank Star Warriors, and had gone missing fifteen years ago during a classified mission. Second, his star meridians weren't naturally useless: someone had sealed them. Beneath the seal lay an unknown entity, waiting for the day he could no longer hold out.
"If you keep relying on it, sooner or later it will devour you. If you grow stronger on your own, you can keep it suppressed forever."
He chose to rely on himself.
