Chosen: Beyond Fate

Whenever Ji Jue had free time, he would sit across from Ye Chun, sighing dramatically. He lamented how difficult it was to perform good deeds and how exhausting it was to work for the welfare of Cliff City’s impoverished citizens, but then, the moment he thought about the smiles on everyone’s faces, he felt it had all been worth it. Then, he’d say smugly, “Heh heh heh, don’t you agree, Ye Chun?”

By now, Ye Chun’s nightmares were full of a smug workaholic bragging endlessly about his badge with nonstop laughter. This was outright psychological pollution!

Ji Jue beamed with excitement. “Ah, it’s already been ten whole minutes since I last told the story of the great philanthropist Ji Jue. Do you know why the great historical figure Ji Jue never hid the shameful fact that he was once forced by his senior into being a second author on a low-quality paper?”

Before Ye Chun could answer, he slapped his knee and declared solemnly, “Because... he’s too kind!”

Kind my ass! Ji Jue, you overachieving workaholic. You even worked on your thesis in secret during vacation just to outperform me! If you had even the tiniest shred of conscience left, you couldn’t possibly do something this offensively inhumane!

The corner of Ye Chun’s eye twitched as she raised her hands in surrender. “Enough, enough, that’s enough already. Even big shots can’t compare to you, Ji Jue. Please stop flexing.”

Ji Jue’s expression immediately turned mournful. He sighed as if deeply wounded. “Ah, I was only trying to share my joy. Why must you be so cold-hearted?!”

Before he finished speaking, his expression flipped back into smug delight. “By the way, do you want to touch my badge?”

Ye Chun gritted her teeth as veins bulged on her forehead. Her knuckles cracked loudly as her fists clenched. At last, she had reached her limit! She could tolerate heaven and earth, but she absolutely could not tolerate this damn motherfucker!

Ye Chun turned around and sighed. She glanced toward her aunt sitting on the living room sofa. Professor Ye remained focused on her newspaper without the slightest reaction, seemingly having no intention of stopping this.

So Ye Chun nodded. With a twitching smile, she squeezed out a sentence through clenched teeth. “You’re sharing your joy, right?”

Before Ji Jue could react, she raised a hand to signal him to wait, then turned and walked toward a cabinet. From below, she pulled out a box. Nobody knew how much stuff was packed inside or how much storage space the cabinet contained, and half her body practically disappeared into it while she rummaged around.

After a while, she pulled out a case, then slammed it down onto the table in front of Ji Jue. “You mean this?”

The moment the case opened, Ji Jue thought his eyes were playing tricks on him. Inside lay a badge almost identical to the one on his chest. In fact, it even had one more gold trim line than his!

The seal of the Radiant Church was impossible to counterfeit.

When his trembling hands finally managed to flip the badge over, he saw a name engraved on the back in both Federation and Empire script: Ye Chun.

“Uh... this...”

Dumbfounded, Ji Jue stared at it speechlessly. When he looked back up at Ye Chun, now sitting there with crossed legs and a cold smirk, he couldn’t help but gasp with his words caught in his throat.

Such low-key behavior. Such a ruthless counterattack. And such an absurdly familiar plot development. She’s pretending to be weak while secretly being overpowered? Wait, the protagonist of the power fantasy story isn’t me?! No, this is bad... I’ve become the side character who gets humiliated in the classic trope! So, you’re the Dragon King[1]?!

“What’s wrong?” Ye Chun pinned the badge onto her shirt and crossed her legs, as though gazing down from the summit itself, casting an endless shadow over everything below. “Do you want to touch my badge?”

Like a solemn deity, she sat there with majestic dignity and icy authority, looking down upon the monkey before her. “You insolent creature, now that you have seen the future, why do you not kneel?!”

A long silence followed. Several times, Ji Jue looked like he wanted to speak, but he stopped himself every time. After stammering awkwardly for a while, he stiffly turned his gaze away.

“Um... how about we talk about the blessing I just obtained instead...”

“No. Let’s keep talking about the Radiant Benevolence Badge!” Ye Chun said, raising her voice. “It’s already been ten minutes since I last heard a story about the great philanthropist Ji Jue. I’d really love to revisit the classics. Come on, tell me again how the great benefactor Ji Jue painstakingly guided people back onto the righteous path, and how Chen Xingzhou tearfully repented beside the memorial hall!”

Ji Jue shrank back pitifully, humbly pleading, “Let’s... talk about blessings instead.”

“The badge!” Ye Chun snorted coldly. The corner of her mouth curled into a crooked grin. “Do you know why the great historical figure Ye Chun still hasn’t smashed open the skull of her idiotic, overachieving, workaholic junior?”

“...I’ll go cook.” Ji Jue lowered his head obediently and stood up, not daring to push his luck any further. He retreated all the way to the doorway before finally turning around and disappearing into the kitchen.

“Keep the flavors light. Four dishes and one soup is enough. Don’t use too much oil or salt. After cooking, mop the floor, clean the kitchen, and wash the fruit for me too. Remember to peel it,” Ye Chun ordered. “Tidy up and move quickly. Tidesound Workshop doesn’t keep idle people around, got it?”

Hearing the clatter of pots and pans coming from the kitchen, she couldn’t help letting out a smug cold laugh. Curling up cross-legged on the sofa, she looked immensely pleased with herself. “Hmph. Thought I couldn’t deal with you?”

She easily handled Ji Jue! Next time she padded out her thesis, she’d even name him a co-author again!

And then, from the seat of honor in the living room, came the sound of a newspaper page turning.

“Now that you’re done showing off, put it away,” Professor Ye calmly said without even looking up. “You’ve dragged this on for several days already. Don’t forget to hand in the revised arguments today.”

And thus, the familiar sound of anguished wailing echoed through the room once more. Ye Xian picked up her teacup and took a sip. Behind the newspaper, the corner of her mouth curled upward slightly.

Life was becoming more and more interesting.

***

After a flurry of activity, five dishes and a soup were finally served on the table. Seeing there were still vegetables left in the refrigerator, Ji Jue casually made a cold bitter melon salad as well. His cooking couldn’t be called exceptional, but after spending so many years helping Mrs. Lu in the kitchen, he had learned a thing or two. At the very least, the food wasn’t bad.

Although Ye Chun, having regained the upper hand, spent half the meal picking faults and complaining, she still hadn’t stripped him of his human rights entirely. He was at least allowed to sit at the table and eat.

“That’s because, well... I’m kind, you know?”

Without the slightest politeness, Ye Chun took the largest piece of sausage into her bowl and savored the fruits of victory.

She had even already prepared the lines she would use later in the afternoon while criticizing his fruit-cutting skills. After finally gaining the upper hand for once, how could she not thoroughly avenge all the suffering she’d endured these past few days?

As for lofty philosophical questions like when will cycles of vengeance ever end, such matters had never entered her consideration in the slightest. The strong were meant to ruthlessly humiliate the weak!

And just as Ji Jue was busy cleaning up in the kitchen after the meal, the electronic alarm clock in the living room suddenly emitted a string of beeping sounds.

Ji Jue instantly poked his head out, delight written all over his face. Wiping his hands in a hurry, he rushed over to check the time.

“How long has it been?” Professor Ye asked.

“Seventeen hours and forty-one minutes.” Ji Jue’s eyebrows practically danced with excitement. “It’s already broken the previous record.”

Before starting the timer, Ji Jue had used the minimum possible output to cast Deus Ex Machina on the alarm clock. The sole command he gave it was to stop timing and issue a notification the moment the effect ended.

As a result, even Ji Jue’s lowest-output version of Deus Ex Machina could now last for nearly eighteen hours! If he infused more spirit matter into it, although the increase in duration wouldn’t be as dramatic, he could at least maintain it for around twenty hours.

More importantly, he could still sense that this wasn’t the limit yet. With more training, maintaining Deus Ex Machina for a full twenty-four hours wouldn’t be a problem.

In other words, once he reached that point, a single activation would sustain the effects of Deus Ex Machina for an entire day. Then, before the twenty-four hours expired, he could simply cast it again and maintain it for yet another full day.

By now, he could effortlessly maintain constant control over multiple targets simultaneously. Considering the recovery speed of his spirit matter and the strain his body could handle, Ji Jue could keep the effect on five targets at all times without affecting delicate operations or compromising his ability to respond to sudden combat situations.

In Cliff City, that was equivalent to five fully loaded trucks capable of turning the tide in any battle. Even accounting for drone battery reserves and charging time, they were still five ever-vigilant sets of eyes and ears.

Or perhaps...

Ji Jue had already begun seriously considering one hell of a robbery and bringing home a few precious howitzers from the Cliff City military base warehouse. He’d already done the calculations. Just two artillery pieces would be enough to cover the entire North Mount District and more than half of the South Ridge District.

Imagine: as long as he remained in the North Mount District, he could call in artillery support at any moment. Life would simply be too beautiful. His sense of security would shoot straight through the roof.

Unfortunately, once his own security reached that level, Ji Jue would become extremely unsafe. Setting aside whether the governor of Cliff City could still sleep at night knowing there were two howitzers permanently aimed at important locations throughout the city, the Haizhou military command would personally come down with the iron hammer of justice and pound Ji Jue into paste.

The dream was too beautiful, but reality was too cruel.

He let out a melancholic sigh and ultimately pulled one foot back from the edge of criminality. As for the other foot... Well, he could leave it hanging over the edge for now. At least it served as a nice little dream, right?

“Looks like this trip really brought you quite a harvest.”

Professor Ye shook her head with a sigh of admiration.

She had finally figured it out: someone like Ji Jue, a demolition-and-explosives version of the Travel Frog[2], would only cause headaches if kept at home. You had to let him loose outside before he’d come back carrying interesting treasures.

Last time he went out into the rift realm, he came back with the long-lost Pacifier and the complete art of Fluid Alchemy. This time, after merely taking a week off, he returned with a critically important blessing. The duration of Deus Ex Machina had doubled! At this point, his absurd luck could no longer be described as merely bad or bizarre. It was downright cursed.

Within the Encyclopedia of All Things made by the Aether Chosen Ones, most abilities belonging to the Ember Path were focused on altering the properties of matter, such as disintegration, guidance and transformation of spirit matter, and the catalyzation of reactions. Even the very term “alchemy” had been coined by Chosen Ones capable of turning stone into metal.

Abilities like Deus Ex Machina were collectively classified as control-type abilities. Among control-type powers, the vast majority naturally leaned closer to the domains of Origin, Ascension, or Heart Core. Very few belonged to the Ember Path. Control abilities could be further divided into command-type, control-type, and autonomous-type powers, each with distinct strengths and weaknesses.

For example, command-type abilities involved directly issuing instructions to the controlled target. If one pushed the machine gun fifty meters forward, then it would move exactly fifty meters, not one more, not one less. The advantage was low energy consumption. As long as the target possessed its own source of power, dozens or even hundreds of such commands could be issued without exhausting spirit matter.

The downside was the lack of flexibility. If there happened to be a wall somewhere along those fifty meters, then too bad, the target would keep trying to force its way through, like an NPC in a video game repeatedly walking into a wall, until the command changed.

Control-type abilities, as the name implied, replaced the target’s will and preset directives, allowing the user to directly pilot it, like controlling a game character manually. If one encountered a wall, they could go around it. If one encountered a ditch, they could avoid it. Every action could be fine-tuned until it met the operator's satisfaction, with none of the problems associated with dumb or erratic AI behavior.

The drawback was the immense mental burden. The controls were too complex, making it difficult to manage multiple targets in coordinated operations simultaneously.

As for autonomous-types like Deus Ex Machina, they were the most complex and the most spiritually expensive category. Their operational effectiveness wasn’t necessarily better than the previous two, and against certain targets their coercive force could even prove insufficient, but their greatest advantage was adaptability and convenience. Ji Jue only needed to issue commands. Figuring out how to accomplish these commands became the controlled object’s responsibility.

These three categories weren’t always completely separate. Sometimes their boundaries overlapped. With Deus Ex Machina, for example, Ji Jue could directly take over a target and manually control it whenever necessary, but the independent thought and autonomy granted by Deus Ex Machina were so powerful that doing so was rarely needed.

Under such circumstances, the lack of spirit matter became Ji Jue’s deadliest weakness. If his tools were destroyed too quickly or he got dragged into prolonged combat, he would run out of spirit matter and become completely useless in under five minutes.

Now, however, the arrival of this Ascension-type blessing had partially compensated for that weakness. By doubling the duration of Deus Ex Machina, it effectively reduced the spirit matter wasted on repeatedly reactivating the ability, and it further increased both Ji Jue’s spirit capacity and his recovery speed.

Even among Ascension blessings, something this valuable was exceedingly rare. This was the foundation of Spirit Primacy!

1. I think this is referring to the Crooked-Smirk Dragon King, which is a series of promotional videos used to advertise web novels turned into a classic trope and meme. The protagonist endures humiliation and conceals their true status for most of the story, only to reveal their real identity at the climax and strike back with a signature crooked smirk, turning the tables on everyone who looked down on them. ☜

2. I’ve explained this before in a footnote, but I’ll explain again to refresh your memory. Travel Frog is a mobile game where the player prepares the frog for its journey and sends it off on its way. The frog returns from a trip that lasts from a few hours to a few days, and brings back with it local specialties from its destination, as well as photos of its memories of the trip, which the player can view. The player cannot interact with the frog during its journey, but only waits for its return. ☜