Chapter1

My skin still lingered from the intense pain of being licked by flames, and my lungs felt as if they were still filled with thick smoke, but my nostrils were filled with the cool air and freshly ground coffee smell unique to upscale office buildings in downtown Seattle.

I opened my eyes abruptly, my heart pounding. There was no inferno, no collapsed ruins, only a mahogany conference table. Opposite me, in a leather chair, Elena was fidgeting with the diamond ring on her ring finger, while her lawyer was rattling off the unfavorable terms of the property division.

I was reborn. I returned to the twelve hours before that hellish catastrophe occurred.

"...Based on the above reasons, my client requests to retain this property and regarding visitation rights..."

"Shut up." I said, my voice hoarse as if I had swallowed glass, but it carried an undeniable coldness.

The lawyer was stunned, and Elena frowned: "What trick are you trying to pull now?"

Without a word, I slammed a stack of photos onto the table. The photos slid down to Elena, showing her and that man named Marcus in an unsightly situation in a hotel suite.

“Thirty million in cash, immediately wired to my offshore account. And full custody of Mia.” I stared at her face, which had turned deathly pale, each word like a nail hammering into the table. “Sign it and get out of my sight. Otherwise, these things will be in the media and your company’s board of directors’ inboxes in ten minutes.”

Watching Elena tremble as she signed her name, humiliatingly relinquishing custody of Mia, I felt a surge of vengeful satisfaction.

After completing all the formalities, I took my three-year-old daughter Mia's hand and hurried out of the office building. The sky in Seattle was so overcast it seemed ready to press down at any moment, and an unsettling smell of static filled the air. It was a sign of the eve of the "Blue Genesis."

Just as I opened the car door to put Mia in the child seat, my phone vibrated in my pocket.

A text message from Elena lit up the screen. It contained only a few words :

"You're back too."

My blood instantly dropped to freezing point.

I whirled around to look at the glass curtain wall of the upper floors of the office building, as if I could feel those sinister eyes staring at me. She didn't care about the thirty million at all, because in twelve hours, the cash would become worthless paper. Giving her daughter to me wasn't out of submission, but rather some deeper calculation.

"Daddy, you're hurting me." Mia's timid voice pulled me back to reality.

"Sorry, honey. We're going on a long trip." I tried to sound calm, shoved her into the car, and floored the gas pedal.

We sped eastward through the night, heading straight for the Cascade Mountains. There lay an abandoned military bunker from the Cold War era, my last refuge, which I had accidentally discovered and secretly converted in my past life. Along the way, the weatherman on the radio was broadcasting, in a bewildered tone, an "abnormal cyclone" that was about to sweep the globe.

At midnight, a torrential downpour began pounding on the car roof. But the raindrops I saw through the headlights had an eerie, chilling blue sheen.

"Blue Genesis" is here.

I carried Mia and rushed into the rain, sprinting to the heavy blast door disguised as rock deep in the mountainside. I skillfully entered a ten-digit password composed of Mia's birthday on the numeric keypad.

Beep—Incorrect password.

The red warning light stung my eyes.

I gasped, my fingers trembling as I typed in again, but it was still a red light.

Without hesitation, I pulled out the hacking terminal from my tactical backpack, roughly stripped the wires, and plugged it into the motherboard. Ten minutes later, accompanied by a piercing crackling sound, the heavy steel door slowly opened with a dull groan.

Upon entering the control room, I immediately disconnected the external network and accessed the local monitoring logs. The scene on the screen sent shivers down my spine: three days earlier, Elena and Marcus had swaggered in. Marcus had changed the password at the console, while Elena looked around and gave the camera a mocking smile.

It was no longer safe here, but running in the blue rain outside was tantamount to suicide. I frantically pulled all the physical locking levers, started the backup generator, and pushed all the internal defense systems to the highest level.

Just then, thunder roared. Through the gaps in the exhaust fan, blue rain turned into fine mist and seeped into the bunker.

The mutation has begun.

My heart felt like it was being squeezed by an invisible giant hand. The lights around me began to distort, and the shadows seemed to come alive, climbing up my calves like a viscous liquid and connecting with my nerve endings.

I gasped for breath, feeling this power I had never possessed in my previous life. Wherever there is shadow, I am the master.

But this power came with an extreme level of perception. In the instant my powers awakened, my consciousness seemed to stretch miles away, and I clearly sensed another soul fluctuation that resonated with it intensely—it was Elena. She was nearby, her aura like a slippery serpent, coiled in some corner of this mountain range.

Suddenly, a completely different wave burst forth at an extremely close distance.

Faint, fleeting, yet so pure it's breathtaking.

I opened my eyes abruptly and turned to look at Mia, who was curled up on the cot. The three-year-old girl was holding up her hands, her eyes wide with terror.

Under the dim emergency light, a soft yet dazzling pure white light seeped from her small palm, illuminating her tear-streaked face.

"Daddy..." Mia's voice trembled with tears, her body shaking slightly, "Why...how come there's light in my hand?"

I stood frozen, my throat so dry I couldn't utter a sound. In my reborn memories, in this absurd world, superpowers were always accompanied by violence, darkness, and destruction; I had never seen such pure energy. I didn't know how to explain to a three-year-old what monster had just awakened within her.

The sound of the downpour suddenly stopped.

As if someone had pressed the mute button, the world outside the bunker fell into a deathly silence.

Then, the heavy sound of tracks crushing gravel broke the silence. Next came the piercing crackling of a walkie-talkie, transmitted directly through the loudspeakers outside the bunker, causing dust to fall from the ceiling.

"This is the United States Union Army. We are now enforcing Article 5 of the Emergency Declaration."

A cold male voice rang out from outside the blast door, every word carrying a deadly threat.

"All civilian shelters are to be immediately requisitioned by the military. Listen up, you have ten seconds to open the doors. Otherwise, we will proceed with tactical breaching."