Espionage: The Underdog's Comeback

Chen Shu is twenty years old. His public identity is that of a waiter at the Great World nightclub in Shanghai’s French Concession. In truth, he is a dormant agent planted by the Communist Party between the Japanese military’s Special Higher Police and Wang Jingwei’s puppet regime’s Number 76. Even his direct handler doesn’t know what he looks like. Three years ago, he transmigrated to Shanghai in 1939 and awakened a daily sign-in System. By signing in at specific locations, he could obtain all kinds of items: disguise masks, shorthand cigarettes, one-day language mastery, and even a pistol that could shoot through steel plates. He decided to play the part of a sly opportunist. While others relied on courage to stay undercover, he got by with sign-ins. The first thing he did every morning was find a place to sign in. Over time, his pockets filled with all sorts of bizarre lifesaving gadgets. Missions could be deadly, but he was still alive. Somehow, he turned a perilous undercover life into a daily clock-in routine: occasionally gathering intelligence and, along the way, attracting the attention of a few women. He never expected that Shen Manci, the dancer he casually rescued, would be a communications agent planted by the Military Statistics Bureau; that Gu Wantang, the student he knocked over on the street, would have a complete radio setup hidden at home; or that Ikeda Xuehui, the daughter of a Japanese trading company owner whose life he saved by taking a knife for her, would have a father who was a translator for the Special Higher Police... Each woman was more troublesome and more dangerous than the last. But Chen Shu realized they weren’t just trouble. In this long, lightless night, they were the only living people he could talk to like human beings. The items the System gave him for signing in each day were getting more and more outrageous. Today it was “three minutes of absolute invisibility”; tomorrow it might be a pack of cigarettes that could knock out an entire street. Chen Shu used these ridiculous toys