Translator: Nyoi-Bo Studio Editor: Nyoi-Bo Studio
After the sudden heavy blow, the old clam’s surface glittered with light. A shapeless multicolored light spread in all directions.
Boom. The view in front of Gao Peng changed. The whole world suddenly changed. He could smell nature, the scent of flowers from all seasons, plus he heard the roar of airplanes and the whizzing sound of cars.
Cars? Gao Peng became alert. I must be in a dream.
With Gao Peng’s realization, all the sounds and visions around his ears disappeared, and Gao Peng reappeared in the cold lake. Suddenly, the sky darkened overhead. Time seemed to be solidified and static.
When Gao Peng regained alertness, he found his chest had been pierced by a platinum spear. What the… Gao Peng felt weak all over, and his strength was seeping away.
Blood gushed out from the wound while Gao Peng lowered his head. There was a wound that was bleeding heavily where the platinum spear pierced.
Gao Peng summoned Xiao Cao to help him heal, but when Xiao Cao’s milky white light shone on the wounds, there was no effect. When Saint-level healing was used on wounds caused by the Metal rule, it usually didn’t have much effect. It required at least a Quasi God-level ability to have any effect.
Is this my end?
Gao Peng closed his eyes and despondently sat at the bottom of the sea, waiting for the end of his life. He felt very tired, closed his eyes, and went to sleep.
Muddleheaded, in a daze, and not knowing how long he had slept, Gao Peng suddenly woke up with an additional memory in his consciousness.
I’m Gao Peng? No, no, aren’t I dead?
Voices by his ear started chattering increasingly loudly. Gao Peng opened his eyes and several nurses looked at him kindly. “It’s a boy.”
One of the older nurses with a fierce look came up, looking around at the attitudes of the other nurses. Her position didn’t seem low. She could have been the head nurse or something of the like.
The head nurse grabbed Gao Peng’s tiny hand, took a test tube from the side, and dripped a purple medicine on the back of Gao Peng’s hand. Gao Peng felt a burst of pain on the back of his hand. Several nurses around him popped their heads over to look.
“Ah.”
“Oh?”
“What a pity.”
“Well, this is bad.”
Several nurses chattered.
The voices gradually became smaller, and Gao Peng was rather tired, so he closed his eyes. Young bodies always needed more rest.
Am I traversing or reincarnating after death? Gao Peng wanted to think, but every time he deepened his thoughts, other ideas would suddenly appear and interfere with his thinking process. Slowly, Gao Peng seemed to give up his deep thinking to just live and let live.
As time went by, Gao Peng grew to understand why the nurses had shown such expressions and said those words. This was a cruel world, but also a world with distinct classes. From birth, everyone generated a number. This number represented a person’s talent and status.
From birth, talent determined his life.
The numbers were 0 through 9, with 0 being the weakest, akin to mentally retarded, 3 an ordinary person, and 9 the greatest genius.
Unfortunately, Gao Peng’s talent was 0. When Gao Peng first learned of the news, it was like a bolt from the blue. Fortunately, though Gao Peng had little talent, his family background was very good. His father was a senior official of the government, and his mother was also from a political family, so he had a respectable background. This saved Gao Peng from many setbacks. Of course, there were unavoidable rumors in the process.
The adults’ attitudes allowed Gao Peng to ignore the naysayers and made him tougher. But he could sense his anomalies.
According to logic, a person with 0 in talent should have been the most incompetent in everything they learned, yet Gao Peng found himself learning things very quickly. He could understand lot of things just by him looking at them.
Had he been labelled as an alternative kind of failure? Gao Peng sometimes thought about it, but always laughed it off in the end.
On one dark rainy day, his father didn’t return home from work as usual. Gao Peng sat on the windowsill of their villa. The sky outside the window had darkened. The rainstorm became a curtain of water that hindered one’s view so only a hazy fog was visible. Lights penetrated the rainstorm, and a black car stopped in the driveway in front of the villa.
A figure with a black umbrella hurried inside. When the door of the villa opened, a tall, thin woman with long wavy yellow hair came into Gao Peng’s room. Her black clothes were wet, clinging to her body like spandex and outlining all her curves.
“I was entrusted by your father to take you away. He was caught for corruption, had offended many, and has many enemies. You’ll be in danger if you stay here, so I’m here to pick you up.”
Gao Peng was silent and didn’t really believe her. The woman who claimed to be entrusted by Gao Peng’s father seemed to have anticipated this. She took out a series of identity cards from her bag, photographs of Gao Peng’s father being arrested, and a certificate of custody and transfer signed by his father.
Gao Peng stared at the photograph for ten minutes. Thirteen years after he came into this world, Gao Peng had established some tacit understanding with the man.
Perhaps he couldn’t be onsidered a qualified father, since he hardly spent time with Gao Peng, and they only shared a few memories, but ever since the death of his mother after childbirth, the two men depended on each other. He had never mentioned finding a stepmother for Gao Peng. He had never brought a woman back from outside. It was hard to say how outsiders judged him, but it could be said that he was, at least, trying to be a father.
Gao Peng finally believed her and left with the woman. He said goodbye to the place he had lived in.
The woman with Gao Peng roamed around with him, and he grew to truly appreciate the pain and harshness of the world. The number of talented people didn’t have much impact on the upper class, because even a paralysed person could be well cared for under such power, but for the bottom and middle classes, talent was really what determined fate.
Gao Peng had originally had a private teacher. After losing his original identity, Gao Peng could only go to public or private schools, but because of Gao Peng’s talent level, even private schools wouldn’t accept him. Although they wanted to make money, they wouldn’t spoil their reputations for a meager amount of money.
Time flew by. In a blink of an eye, ten years had passed. In the past decade, Gao Peng and the woman had left their home country to keep their identities hidden and hid in neighboring countries.
Of course, it may have been because Gao Peng’s talent was at 0, but the former political enemies of his father didn’t look for him.
“Ah Tang, bring the boiled water down,” the woman shouted towards the canopy behind her. The woman had tied up her hair, no longer with big wavy hair. Her black shoulder-length short hair was easier to brush.
“Here you go.” A young man with a stubbled beard wearing flip-flops and a tattered singlet came out of the house holding a big pot.
One could vaguely tell Gao Peng’s original appearance. To survive, he had changed his name to Ah Tang. Without a degree, he couldn’t do most work. They could only make food in the slums and become hawkers for a living.
Fortunately, she and Gao Peng were diligent. They woke up at 3:30 in the morning every day to prepare food and roll noodles. The stall opened at 4:30 and sold from noon to 1:00 in the afternoon, then they would go to the market to purchase ingredients and return home to marinate them.
Every day was repetitive, and though boring, she and Gao Peng were used to this kind of life. Although they weren’t legally husband and wife, both of them lived as a couple.
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As a talent level of 0 made for a useless person, the government forbade these people from marrying. They didn’t want this gene that didn’t help society to continue and spread.
Since she and Gao Peng couldn’t go to the Civil Affairs Bureau to get a certificate, they simply continued to live together in this manner. They would probably live their entire lives like this.
She was nine months pregnant. With a big stomach, she sat on a stool and looked blissfully at Gao Peng, although he had repeatedly emphasized that she should have a good rest. She was used to her biological clock and continued to wake up at the usual time. To watch her husband work for their family was an enjoyable thing.
If she’s by my side, even in the event of an accident, I can easily take care of her, Gao Peng thought.
Drunken shouts came from the corner of the street on the other side.
“Brothers for a lifetime.”
“Anything for my brother.”
Several wobbly drunkards staggered over, their faces red as blood, gazes unsteady and dressed in floral outfits. Alcohol brought out the lust in people.
One of the drunkards saw the woman sitting by the street, and while laughing, he blurted out obscenities and vulgarities. Gao Peng saw that he was drunk and didn’t want to cause trouble. He just waved his hand to shoo the drunkard and told the woman to return to the back room.
To his surprise, the five drunkards suddenly swarmed over. Gao Peng’s face changed slightly. He took out a sharp glistening knife from the basket. The knife was so well polished that he could open one’s stomach with one swipe.
A normal person would have been frightened off, but the cold sheen of a sharp knife triggered the five drunkards, and they wouldn’t stop even if a ghost appeared in front of them. Instantly, a fight broke out. As the screams of passers-by were heard, six people lay on the ground, which was seeped in blood.
As the five drunkards laid in a pool of blood, the woman suffered a scare and was in great pain. She fell on the rugged gravel road in the slums. An ambulance hurried over, accompanied by a police car.
Gao Peng went to jail. Fortunately, the ambulance arrived in time. Stuck between choosing to save the mother or the child, Gao Peng chose the mother, so the woman was saved, but the child was gone.
Before Gao Peng even had time to grieve, he was sentenced to life imprisonment for malicious injury and illegal reproduction. In prison, Gao Peng was a recluse and didn’t get along with the other inmates. Twenty years later, Gao Peng was released early for good behavior.
The woman had also waited for Gao Peng outside the prison for twenty years. With wrinkled eyes, she held a bag of apples and waited outside the prison door for his release, smiling. Because of the injury, the woman was no longer able to have children.
Gao Peng accepted fate and no longer entangled himself in worldly matters. With the women, he found a quiet little city and worked day and night to earned a small sum of money, then opened a small shop. Days went by. Years went by.
The woman was now very old. Due to her injuries when she was young, her sickly body had completely collapsed at the age of seventy-two. Before she passed away, she happily laid in Gao Peng’s arms with her eyes closed.
That night, Gao Peng shut down the small shop that had little business. One by one, he slowly placed the coins in the cash cabinet, then wrote down a note for a donation. When he got home, he closed the doors and windows and went to sleep with the woman in his arms.
The woman’s face had a faint smile as if she had just fallen asleep. Closing his eyes, Gao Peng recalled his life. From his birth to the scenes in his later life, Gao Peng sighed. There were many regrets.
In the deep darkness, Gao Peng’s memory faded slowly. All the memory fragments were like old photos, lost little by little with time.
…
Gao Peng opened his eyes, and a few nurses gathered around him, looking at him kindly.
“It’s a boy.” An older nurse with a fierce look came over and dripped some medicine on him.
Gao Peng felt a burst of pain on the back of his hand, as though he had been pricked by a needle.
“Ah.”
“Oh?”
“This is bad.”
This felt familiar. Gao Peng had a sense of déjà vu. He tried to recall but couldn’t. After all, a child’s brain wasn’t made to think too much.
“Oh, I remember; this is my second life. I went back to the day I was born, and she was there.” Gao Peng had a sudden awakening, but he felt as if he had forgotten something important. He squinted his eyes, thinking and thinking, then fell asleep.
Five years later, beside the window, a fair little boy sat by the bed and looked at the sky in a daze. After a while, he looked down at the white paper on the table in front of him.
On the white paper was written “familiars,””Grandpa,” and “Da Zi.” Only when he came into contact with these words would Gao Peng remember some things.
“I’m almost forgetting them…” After rebirth, Gao Peng felt that his memory had been reduced quite significantly. If there was another life, maybe he would just forget all about it.
The little boy’s face was filled with helplessness, but soon, his eyes regained some certainty. No matter what, I will never forget it.
Gao Peng’s life this time was much more successful than the first one, because he knew in advanced the timing of some major events. Therefore, his father wasn’t caught, but did better and better, and Gao Peng also found “her,” the one from his previous life.
Everything was perfect, with not much difference from a realistic dream. Gao Peng lived for 103 years. When he died, his descendants came to his room.
A little boy looked around curiously. He found Grandpa’s temperament odd. The room was full of paintings, all of which were lifelike paintings of a terrifying centipede.
On top of the bed was calligraphy of two words—Da Zi! Of course, in the eyes of some of the younger generation, the old man must have written the wrong word. The old man must have wanted to write Da Zhi, which was the Chinese character for wisdom. Still, to follow this, Gao’s family motto was wisdom.
In his third life, Gao Peng opened his eyes.
There were fewer memories in his mind. Every time, at least 99% of them had been erased. Gao Peng had no other choice but to strengthen his memory and force himself to remember as much as possible about his previous life in this life so that he could retain more things in the next life.
However, Gao Peng knew that if such reincarnation continued from one life to another, he would be lost in it eventually. He let out a long sigh. Gao Peng didn’t know how long he could hold on.
“Hey, you have woken up?” He heard a sound by his ear.
Gao Peng suddenly felt that something was wrong, because he remembered that as long as he didn’t create a butterfly effect, most things wouldn’t change. How could the sound be different from the memories of his previous two lives?
Gao Peng turned his head and saw a big fat fish head on the nurse’s neck. It looked at Gao Peng carefully with a tilted head.
Gao Peng shouted, “Monster!”
Crash. The scene in front of him exploded instantly, like broken glass. Memories flooded Gao Peng’s mind, and in a daze, Gao Peng finally remembered everything.
“I’ve eaten the old clam. It just released power and dragged us all into dreams.” Fatty Big Sea explained with a big round stomach as it smacked its tongue.