Outside Blue Sky Net Cafe, Evan stood in the weak daylight with his jaw locked and his future narrowing into a single brutal line.
He didn't have the luxury of being less than determined.
An hour of digging through websites, rankings, guides, legal summaries, gossip boards, and public records had finally taught him what a martial artist really meant in this world.
It wasn't just some modernized version of old kung fu novels.
Yes, martial artists were still what they sounded like: people who trained, fought, broke through ranks, and stood above ordinary bodies in very literal ways.
But in this world, martial arts wasn't just another high-risk profession.
It was power.
Status.
Access.
Protection.
The right to expand.
The right to keep what you'd built.
That was the part that had hit him hardest.
If martial artists had merely existed, Evan might have stayed interested from a distance. He liked superhuman things as much as anybody else, but liking something and staking your entire future on it were different matters.
But the more he read, the clearer the trap became.
Martial strength wasn't sitting off to the side of society.
It ran through the middle of it.
In his old life, the difference between rich and poor, powerful and powerless, had been real, but it had still been softened by one universal fact: most people were just people. However money and influence worked, a gun could flatten almost anyone.
Not here.
Here, hierarchy had muscle and bone and legal recognition.
He understood Derek's offhand comments now. Earlier in the day, when Derek had said that without the warrior track you'd never get far in politics or business, Evan had only half grasped it.
Now he got it all.
Ordinary people still made up the vast majority of society. On paper, they could go into any field they wanted.
In practice?
The rules closed in fast.
Some of them weren't even hidden.
Some were written directly into law.
A company that wanted to expand beyond city limits had to list a martial artist as its legal representative. Any rank would do.
If the company wanted to expand across provincial lines, the threshold jumped: the legal representative had to be at least Tier Four.
That wasn't custom.
That wasn't an industry preference.
That was the law.
Evan had reread that clause twice just to make sure he wasn't hallucinating.
He wasn't.
The rank ladder itself was simple enough. Nine tiers, bottom to top. Tier One at the base. Tier Nine at the summit.
Below Tier Four, you were still low-rank.
At Tier Seven and above, you entered the realm people treated with reverence. Grandmaster territory.
And if you wanted to build a business with reach beyond one province, you needed somebody at Tier Four or above attached to it from the start.
Not because a banker thought it looked nice.
Because in this world, expansion without force behind it was less business strategy than public suicide.
That also explained why Grandmaster Mason had challenged Tim Vale the moment he broke into Tier Eight.
Back in Evan's old world, a corporate leader settling expansion rights with a public duel would have sounded like satire.
Here, it was business.
Blackwing's products still looked more or less the way he remembered. Messaging software. Massive domestic reach. The same familiar footprint, just boxed inside a different set of rules.
And that was the point.
Blackwing had scale at home.
It didn't have freedom abroad.
Atlas Search had a Tier Eight powerhouse stationed in Asia.
Before Mason broke through, Blackwing couldn't seriously fight for regional expansion no matter how good its product was. Not because the code wasn't ready. Not because the market wasn't there.
Because strength had to be demonstrated before resources could be contested.
And once Mason crossed into Tier Eight, he had to prove it publicly.
Winning and losing almost came second.
The challenge itself announced the real message: Blackwing now had the right to sit at the table.
That wasn't only a business rule, either.
Politics worked the same way.
Resources flowed toward strength.
Which explained why Derek had nearly vibrated with excitement while talking about Governor Shaw's possible breakthrough. A Grandmaster-level governor could drag more resources into Southriver. More training. More state attention. More investment. More chances.
From business to government, from the military to entertainment, the same rule kept showing up.
Even the biggest stars weren't allowed to live on charm alone. Talent helped. Looks helped. Fame helped. But without martial strength, none of it was secure.
Why would it be?
If you couldn't protect your money, then it wasn't really yours.
If you couldn't defend your position, then somebody stronger could simply take it.
Unless, of course, your parents already had the power to do the defending for you.
That was another thing he'd seen online.
The wealthy second generation in this world had an informal label of their own.
Not rich heirs.
Warrior heirs.
Because the people who held serious money and influence were, more often than not, martial artists first.
Yes, a very small number of ordinary people still clawed their way into high places.
But every case Evan found came with the same ugly footnote: backing. Powerful support. Some kind of value so exceptional it bought protection.
The standard for ordinary people was harsher by an order of magnitude.
If you weren't a martial artist, then elite status, power, and true security existed at a distance.
You could look at them.
You just couldn't reach them.
Evan let out a breath and muttered to himself, "Doesn't matter how many good ideas you've got if you can't hold on to them."
That was the cruelest truth of the whole thing.
Everything unrelated to martial arts looked almost identical to the world he remembered. Which meant his so-called rebirth advantage was still real, at least in theory.
Products.
Timing.
Trends.
Concepts.
He still had those.
But what good was a brilliant idea if the moment it grew large enough to matter, it stopped belonging to you?
He could make a little money, sure. Maybe even a decent amount if he stayed small and careful.
But building something major?
Without the strength to protect it?
That was fantasy.
If he somehow introduced an app like WeChat into this world years ahead of schedule, only two endings seemed remotely plausible.
One: somebody stronger took it.
Two: it stayed trapped inside one city as a niche toy because expansion required a level of martial backing he didn't have.
After that, whatever the app earned would depend on which bigger forces fought over it.
Not on him.
And that was in the best case.
At least the legal system in this country still seemed functional. The state had enough high-rank powerhouses to keep outright murder from becoming casual business practice.
So people probably wouldn't just kill him for a good idea.
They'd do it the polite way.
They'd take the business.
Ordinary people were still allowed to work. Allowed to build little companies. Allowed to stay inside city lines and circle through small-scale lives.
But even there, safety wasn't guaranteed.
Compared with the ordinary life he'd known before, this version felt tighter. More precarious. More dependent on not offending anyone stronger than you.
If he refused to become a martial artist, then he'd be stuck living as one more harmless, powerless thing drifting through the world.
And if he wanted to be harmless debris, he'd at least prefer the well-fed, secure kind.
There was one mercy.
This world had not completely closed the door on ordinary people.
The path existed.
It was just narrow enough to make your teeth hurt.
The college entrance exam was still the great social gamble of the year, the place where people without background got to throw themselves at a gate and pray it opened.
Some elite universities now had warrior-track divisions.
Dedicated martial colleges recruited through the same season.
The old saying still applied, only more cruelly than ever:
Cultivating the mind might be cheap.
Training the body was not.
Raising a martial artist consumed money at a rate ordinary families could barely imagine. Public cultivation through the warrior track was one of the only realistic ways in.
Naturally, that made the competition vicious.
In 2007, roughly nine million students had taken the national college entrance exam.
Fewer than twenty thousand had ultimately been admitted to warrior-track programs across the entire country.
That wasn't twenty thousand at one famous university.
That was the total.
More than a hundred schools offered some version of warrior-track admission, and together they still took less than twenty thousand.
Spread across the whole country, it was laughably small.
From far away, the percentage almost looked survivable.
Up close, especially for kids from smaller cities, it looked impossible.
That was why Caleb and the others sounded so defeated whenever the warrior track came up.
And that wasn't even the full picture.
The registration fee Derek had mentioned earlier?
That was only the first step.
The bare minimum.
The one-thousand-yuan problem would have been annoying.
The ten-thousand-yuan problem was a wall.
And registration opened next week.
There was a deadline.
Miss it, and money wouldn't matter, because the chance would already be gone.
"Ten thousand just to sign up..."
A little while ago, Evan had been ready to storm the world.
Now that flame had gone out by half.
And that was before the rest of the requirements even started lining up behind it.
He rubbed his forehead.
"This is a headache."
Reborn genius.
Modern world.
Still broke.
There couldn't be many people in history who'd managed that combination so efficiently.
...
By the time he finished a cheap lunch and made it back to school, he had fifteen left in his pocket.
Afternoon classes hadn't started yet.
Some of the students were bent over practice papers. Others were still talking about the Grandmaster fight Zack had brought up that morning.
Caleb looked up as soon as Evan walked in.
"So? Go waste time on games?"
Evan rolled his eyes so hard it almost hurt.
"At a time like this? You think I'm brain-dead? I was checking exam information."
Then he put on his most shameless smile and leaned over.
"Caleb. Be honest with me. You got any spare cash?"
Caleb frowned.
After a pause, he said, "I've got ten yuan. If you're asking for lunch money, say that."
Evan coughed.
"No, I mean real money. Got ten grand you can lend me? Maybe eight? Once I make it big, I'll pay you back a hundred times over."
"Sure," Caleb said flatly. "And when that happens, I'll buy the school."Caleb pushed his glasses up and went back to his work.
Evan sighed.
That route was dead.
They were students.
Even kids with decent family situations weren't going to hand over ten thousand because a classmate suddenly started talking like a lunatic.
So what was left?
His parents?
That thought landed heavily.
His family wasn't poor enough to be tragic, but they were ordinary in exactly the wrong way. Ten thousand wasn't impossible money. It was worse than that.
It was serious money.
The kind that triggered discussions.
Arguments.
Silence.
And from the way he currently looked on paper, he had almost no shot at making the warrior track anyway.
If he went home and asked for the fee, would they even agree?
Today was Saturday. Technically registration started next week, but next week was basically tomorrow with extra steps. Monday was less than two days away.
If he had a month, he might have figured out something clever.
Two weeks, maybe he could've gambled.
But less than forty-eight hours?
What was he supposed to do, turn his rebirth into cash by sheer force of personality?
And even if he somehow scraped together the registration fee, that only bought him the right to stand at the first gate.
Everything after that cost more.
That was another illusion he'd managed to lose in a single afternoon.
Strength wasn't built on wisdom alone.
Strength was built on resources.
Money.
Supply.
Sustained investment.
Of course powerful people wanted bigger companies and stronger institutional backing. Of course those who didn't run businesses moved into government structures instead.
What else were they supposed to do?
Live on enlightenment and fresh air?
For years, stories and TV had sold him the same fantasy: suffer a little, get enlightened, come back stronger.
Now he knew better.
It was nonsense.
Even a Tier One martial artist, the weakest kind worth naming, reportedly cost at least a million to cultivate if you totaled up the resources involved.
A million.
For the bottom rung.
And once you climbed higher, the numbers became ridiculous.
Without industry, state backing, or a serious financial engine behind you, pushing upward was practically impossible.
What ordinary family was supposed to fund that on top of regular schooling?
That was why warrior-track universities mattered so much.
They didn't just offer prestige.
They covered a huge portion of the cultivation cost. The state paid to train you.
And if that wasn't enough, being admitted opened other doors.
Banks would lend.
Big companies would sign early agreements and invest in promising seeds.
But all of that came after one condition and one condition only:
You had to get in.
No money, no backing, no admission, no future.
Evan let out another long breath.
He'd spent half the day doing that.
At this rate, being reborn felt less like luck and more like being handed a harder version of the same life.
And this time, there was no pretending he could drift through it.