Chapter 1
On the hospital corridor bed, Xu Bin had a bandage wrapped around his head and an IV in his arm. The blood on his face and body still hadn’t been wiped clean.
Sitting beside him, his mother-in-law, Shen Ruyu, had a sullen face as she lashed out furiously, "You blind idiot. You’d dare provoke anyone."
"Just a little security guard, and you dared stop the boss lady’s car. You really are tired of living."
Xu Bin kept his head down and let her scold him, his mind drifting back to how he had ended up in the hospital.
Xu Bin was a small-time security guard at the entrance of Xinhui Real Estate. Back then, a Ferrari had stopped at the gate and kept honking nonstop, as if it were urging someone to death.
Xu Bin hurried over. "Miss, this is the internal staff parking lot. Visitors should park in the underground garage."
The Ferrari’s window rolled down, and a beautiful married woman with permed waves and sunglasses at once bristled. She yanked off her shades and threw them at him. "You filthy guard, who are you calling miss?"
"No, that’s not what I meant."
Xu Bin patiently explained, "This barrier is electronically controlled. Only cars with registered license plates are allowed in."
"You old bastard, you didn’t even register my plate?"
The woman driving the Ferrari panicked when she heard that and immediately floored the accelerator, smashing through the barrier.
The red Ferrari charged into the company grounds, and the barrier that had been knocked flying smashed into Xu Bin’s head, knocking him out cold. When he woke again, he was already in the hospital.
His wife, Yao Nan, came back after paying the fee and saw her mother losing her temper. She said carefully, "Mom, this really isn’t Xu Bin’s fault."
"If it wasn’t his fault, would there have been this disaster because he had to stick his nose in it?"
Shen Ruyu grew even angrier at that. She slapped the hospital bed and said, "He finally got a job, and he’s offended the boss lady after only two days. I really don’t know how you ended up being blind enough back then to fall for this worthless, poor loser."
Shen Ruyu had just turned forty, right at the age when a woman was at her most alluring. Her hair was carefully permed, and her whole look was charmingly seductive. Though faint crow’s feet showed at the corners of her eyes, her features were delicate and refined, and with light makeup she looked very pretty. It would be no exaggeration to say she still had all her charm.
When she was young, she had been the famous beauty of the area. Tall and well proportioned, she had gained a little softness with age now, not the flabby kind of fatness, but the mature fullness that made her look stunningly sexy and alluring.
She had breasts and hips, a perfect, voluptuous body. At the moment she was wearing a low-cut top, and every time she moved, the valley of her cleavage and the pale flesh of her breasts would sway into view. Even with a bra on, that shocking fullness could not be hidden.
Xu Bin couldn’t help stealing a glance, swallowing unconsciously. His mother-in-law’s figure was practically a human bombshell; no matter how conservative her clothes were, you could still tell how prominent her chest was.
His wife, Yao Nan, didn’t notice her husband’s wandering gaze. After being yelled at by her mother, she was so scared she lowered her head and fell silent.
Shen Ruyu’s marriage had not been happy, and her temper was extremely bad. She was basically a fierce tigress, and her sharp tongue had only gotten worse with menopause. When she lost her temper, she was truly frightening.
"What did the doctor say?"
After cursing for quite a while, Shen Ruyu finally asked angrily, "If there’s no saving him, then just let him wait to die."
Yao Nan said cautiously, "Mom, the doctor said it’s a concussion and he needs to be observed overnight."
"This useless loser was never that smart to begin with. Observe my ass."
Shen Ruyu stood up, picked up her bag, and said, "You stay here. I don’t want to see this waste of space."
With that, Shen Ruyu left. Yao Nan gave a bitter smile, sat down by the hospital bed, and said gently, "Husband, are you okay?"
"A little dizzy."
Xu Bin still felt dazed, and he was hurt and resentful in his heart. He sighed. "Wife, I really don’t know what Mom was thinking. A security guard job only pays four thousand a month, and she even said she had to pull strings for it."
"Xinhui Real Estate is a leading company."
Yao Nan soothed him, saying, "Mom is only doing it for your own good."
Xu Bin didn’t even feel like arguing anymore. His mother-in-law was vain and materialistic, and she simply refused to support freelancing. It was nothing more than wanting something she could brag about when people asked, so she could say he worked at Xinhui Real Estate and look good doing it.
"Just rest properly. Your job matter, your aunt will go ask about it. They’ll definitely have to compensate the medical bills."
A nurse came to insert the IV, and his wife, Yao Nan, sat gently at his side, sighing helplessly.
Lying there, Xu Bin looked dazedly at his wife, the woman he had married, and there was only one word that fit her from head to toe: ordinary.
Neither tall nor short, neither fat nor thin. Her breasts were small and her hips were the same. Her features were plain too, neither beautiful nor ugly, and there was even a birthmark on her face, which made her very insecure.
The Yao family had three sisters. The eldest, Yao Xin, was tall and dazzling, a top-tier beauty. The youngest, Yao Le'er, was the kind of cute girl with a baby face and huge breasts. Even the mother-in-law was a mature, plump, and gorgeous woman.
Standing beneath their glow, Yao Nan looked ugly by comparison. It was even said that Yao Baichuan, her father-in-law, had once specifically gone to have a paternity test done, suspecting that this ugly daughter might not be his own.
After marrying into the Yao family, Xu Bin had lived a stifled, frustrating life. If there was one thing that supported him, it was probably his wife’s gentleness.
"Sleep well. Don’t think about so much."
Yao Nan lowered her head in embarrassment and held her husband’s hand.
Xu Bin closed his eyes in a daze, feeling as if he were dreaming. Before him, a huge computer screen flickered with static.
"Signal connection successful..."
"Brain frequency stabilized, network link established..."
"Genome database backup complete, data calculation passed, beginning host binding..."
Xu Bin’s eyes widened as his whole body began to convulse. His mouth opened, but not a single word came out.
After that strange voice sounded, his whole body was wracked with intense pain. Xu Bin could clearly feel every cell in his body suffering pain like electric shocks.
Under the agony, his body fainted again, but his consciousness instantly became clear.
Xu Bin found himself in a four-dimensional space. Around him, line after line of code flashed past at high speed, accompanied by that illusory, ice-cold voice:
"Binding successful. Host Xu Bin, human, male, 25 years old..."
"Analyzing all data. Genetic data is still being collected..."
Xu Bin shouted anxiously, "Wait, what the hell are you?"
The rushing code all around made him a little dizzy. Then a monitor appeared before his eyes, and a huge screen lit up.
"Host, it is my honor to successfully pair with you."
"Host, you, what are you?"
Xu Bin felt like his head was spinning. This dream was bizarre beyond belief.
"I am a system, a system you summoned into existence!"
The monitor suddenly extended a USB interface, which snapped onto Xu Bin’s brain. He watched in terror as the interface vanished into his forehead.
A faraway advanced civilization no longer needed physical bodies for technology. This system, stranded on Earth, had been collecting information from humans, those lower animals, slowly taking shape, but it had never been able to start up.
Today Xu Bin’s brain had been severely damaged. By rights, he should already have been brain-dead, but the sudden violent fluctuations in his brain frequency happened to match its own frequency, and once the genetic calculation aligned, he instantly became its host.