Chapter 1566: Chapter 1566: The 15th Official Copy World (Super Chapter—Seek Monthly Votes) [Age 0: You were born, and your parents hired a teacher to name you Loren. It is said that in ancient language, it had the meaning of laurel, symbolizing victory, glory, and knowledge. A learned scholar also once had this name.] [Age 1: You lived in Xiluo City, a small city in the northeast of the Federation. Your father was a machinery factory worker, and your mother did odd jobs to supplement the family income. Your whole family lived in a single-room rental apartment.] [Age 2: Life at home was not affluent. Your grandfather and grandmother passed away early due to illness, but your maternal grandfather and grandmother were still alive. They often visited you and brought some toys, which was often your happiest time.] [Age 3: When your mother worked, she tried to take you along, which meant you went to many places at a young age. Sometimes it was to a small convenience store, sometimes to a nursing home, or sometimes to an office filled with the smell of disinfectant in a cleaning company.] [Age 4: Your parents were both very busy with work. Although life did not improve, they still tried to spend time with you. You often heard them talking about moving to a two-bedroom for more free space for you; they seemed to have saved a considerable amount of money for this.] [Age 5: Your mother fell ill, not fatally but because she only had minimum coverage medical insurance, you had to pay a large sum of medical bills and maxed out many credit cards. After that, you never heard your parents talk about moving again.] [Age 6: You went to a public community elementary school, classes started at 9 a.m. and ended at 3 p.m., after which children had to leave. You could buy afterschool care to extend the stay until 6 p.m., but that required extra payment. You learned to walk back home by yourself every day. After your mother’s illness, her body seemed to become weaker, and the hospital suggested continuous follow-up treatment, but you no longer had any savings. Some kids brought their parents’ forbidden drugs to school. You were all curious. You told your mother, and she scolded you severely and forbade you from touching those things.] [Age 7: Bullied by older students, you fought them off. You were all covered in bruises. The teacher interviewed your mother, stating that if you fought again, you and the senior students would be expelled. Returning home, your father said you could just switch schools and not to be cowardly.] [Age 8: One day, your father came home suddenly excited, saying he had seen a good opportunity. After that, you often saw your parents discussing together. In the winter, your maternal grandfather visited many times. In the week after the first snow, your parents terminated the apartment lease and brought you to your maternal grandfather’s house. They told you they would work in Willens City, the largest city in the northeast of the Federation, where the weekly salary was much higher than in Xiluo City. Your parents said that if they settled down there, they’d bring you over, but you needed to stay temporarily with your maternal grandfather’s family. Your maternal grandparents liked you, and you liked them, but living with them wasn’t that easy to get used to. On weekends, they always made you get up early. You called your parents every week to tell them funny stories from school. Your academic performance wasn’t bad, and it was your happiest time each week.] [Age 9: After the first week of spring, news came from Wilens. In a huge disaster, your parents perished. From then on, you never received another call from Wilens on weekends.] [Age 10: You became withdrawn. Your maternal grandfather and grandmother often chatted with you, but they always couldn’t follow your train of thought. They no longer woke you up early on weekend mornings.] [Age 11: Your grades were decent but only compared to other students at the community elementary school. Your maternal grandparents’ health wasn’t good, and their income wasn’t high, but after every exam, they would take you out for a good meal to celebrate.] [Age 12: Both your maternal grandfather and grandmother fell critically ill and passed away.”,”Security at the rental apartment moved your family’s belongings to the street, and a secondhand goods dealer evaluated and bought these items to pay off your maternal grandparents’ owed rent, management fees, and cleaning fees. After all the fees were paid, there were 10 federal coins left, which were handed to you. A van had been waiting on the street for a long time, from the welfare orphanage; it was there to pick you up. In the first month at the orphanage, you were in a daze. Sometimes you imagined you were still at your maternal grandfather’s rental apartment, that one day the door would open and your parents would come to take you to Wilens. But when you awoke, there were only the iron bunk beds of the orphanage around you. The orphanage atmosphere wasn’t that bad. The director was actively arranging for you to enter middle school. You were very withdrawn with no friends. A big kid one year older, accompanied by two other kids, cornered you and tried to make you hand over your pocket money. You beat them up. The next day, the big kid suddenly disappeared. Orphanage staff told you that a kind foster family decided to take him in, so he left the orphanage. You suddenly noticed that, periodically, new children would arrive at the orphanage, but the number of children playing in the yard always seemed the same. In the third month at the orphanage, you escaped during a welcome event.] [Age 13: You survived the winter by begging and squeezing into tents with the homeless. You thought about going back to the orphanage but discovered that the former orphanage had become a sealed-off ruin. People living nearby said a fire broke out during a welcome event the night you left, and everyone perished in the flames. Begging didn’t always yield food. In the summer, starving and unable to endure it, you saw a man with a limp carrying a bag of burgers, sitting on a park bench making calls. You stole his burgers. You thought you could ditch a man with a limp, but he had blocked you in an alley in advance. His strength was great; you couldn’t beat him. He seemed ready to hit you but changed his mind. He asked if you wanted to earn money, although you might get hurt. You agreed. He treated you to a hearty meal, let you take a bath, bought you simple clothes from a secondhand market, and then took you to an old bar, where the strong smell of smoke had saturated the seats. In the middle of the bar was a big iron cage, where a kid about your age with boxing gloves looked at you aggressively. He was much more experienced than you. The man sent you into the cage, gave you a pair of boxing gloves, and told you to hit at will, just act as if you were fighting and surrender if you felt you couldn’t win. You won the fight, covered in bruises. The limping man carried you out, cursing as he went, saying you cost him a lot of money, then giving you a share of the prize money and a tube of ointment for external injuries. He never sought you out again.] [Age 14: You used the money shared by the limping man to nourish yourself, then through the network of young beggars, you joined a young gang member as his sidekick. Your lives weren’t any good, but they were manageable. That’s how street life was. You made many friends, some new beggars, some dancers from strip clubs, and some gang members. In the summer, your boss’s boss, a small gang leader, came to a nearby strip club bar. You were assigned to guard the back door, and you saw the little leader take a dancing girl into an alley, followed by the sounds of a beating. This was a gang-affiliated strip club, and it often happened that disobedient dancers turned up dead; it was nothing out of the ordinary. That’s street life for you. You used an anonymous phone to call the police. The police scared away the gang leader and saved the dancing girl. You didn’t know why you did this; you didn’t know the dancing girl. You thought you did it seamlessly and just walked away, planning to return to the small apartment you rented with other sidekicks. But on your way back, gang members cornered you. One of your roommates saw you calling from a corner and sold you out. You injured a few people, but were still knocked unconscious, beaten half to death, and left in a roadside ditch. You thought you were going to die. When you woke up, you saw only the simple hospital bed of a private clinic, a long bill, and the limping man.] [Age 15: You temporarily lived with the limping man, and nearly every day you heard him lamenting the cost of doing the right thing, despite finding an underground doctor. Treating you still cost a significant amount. You coerced him into teaching you boxing to earn money to repay his debt. He was unwilling, but he had no other choice. Eventually, he became your coach.] You have great talent, quickly learning what he taught you and winning several underground boxing matches. Then he started teaching you to rig matches.] [Age 16: The coach said you are the most talented person he’s ever seen, not only learning fast but also training fast, plus you have a sharp mind, leading him to joke that if you went into fraud, you could be sentenced for hundreds of years, or become one of those high-reward criminals beloved by bounty hunters. Sometimes, the coach would take you to the shooting range to practice marksmanship and brag about his glorious days as a bounty hunter, even though each story he told was different. He told you, in the ring, the fists are fast, outside the ring, the guns need to be quicker. Your talent with firearms seemed to be impressive too, and you quickly grasped it, combining with physical strength to develop some interesting techniques. You soon became a rising star in the youth category of Xiluo City’s underground boxing matches, and you took money cleanly from the coach. Then suddenly, one day, the coach found you with an admission notice from a private high school, saying this was prepared for you, but you’d need to take an entrance exam. You haven’t even graduated from elementary school and looked at this notice in confusion. The coach somehow got your junior high school credentials fixed so that you could directly attend high school. He said you have talent and should study hard, so you started catching up on middle school knowledge while training. Follow current novels on 𝙣𝙤𝙫𝙚𝙡⚑𝙛𝙞𝙧𝙚⚑𝙣𝙚𝙩 In the end, you successfully enrolled.] [Age 17: The school isn’t great, ranking last among private high schools in a small city like Xiluo City, but even so, you found it hard to keep up with your studies, compared to classmates who are at least a year younger. The coach halted most of your boxing matches, only requiring simple training, and he insisted that you focus on studying hard to strive for a good university. He said he doesn’t care about you, but a college boxer will have greater hype. One day, he secretly slipped you a charm with the ‘K’ letter, telling you to wear it, claiming it’s popular in Dawn City and can bless your way into college. The place you lived was far from school, causing most of your time to be wasted on commuting, forcing you to consider renting another apartment. Finally, you chose a studio apartment two blocks from school. It was fully furnished with nice decor but priced two-thirds cheaper than surrounding apartments, with clear exemption from management fees. The reason was simple, previous tenants said it was haunted. You only cared about the one-third price. The apartment manager required you not to move the furniture or decorations and warned that if you moved out within three months, you’d have to pay an extra month’s rent as a penalty besides losing your deposit.] [Age 18: Your life became simple, training on weekends, attending school on workdays, watching videos at home for supplementary lessons in the evenings, occasionally going to the shooting range. You seemed to have a knack for learning too, quickly closing the gap with classmates, even ranking among the top in your class. Your teachers saw your potential for college and recommended the school’s paid tutoring package to you. The coach didn’t allow you to compete, but to afford the tutoring fees, you had to secretly take some matches. You became a hot new star in the youth bodily category of underground boxing, winning every few competitions you entered, growing your odds fast. The coach found out and warned you not to take extra matches, saying some matches were untouchable, and if you got involved, he’d ditch you and disappear to another city to avoid being implicated. You further cut down on the frequency of matches. Autumn came, your third year of high school. You started to realize the high cost of private schooling, understanding that getting into a good university required more than just good grades, but also various activities and recommendations. You couldn’t help but take more matches. Given your reputation, a well-known match organizer approached you, hoping you’d participate in a match. This match had you facing a somewhat skilled new boxer with limited strength. The organizer needed you to lose, and lose real. To you, this was just a way to rig a match to make money from bettors. With your current odds, the organizer could make quite a haul. And they offered a generous ‘reward’ and an irresistible condition: they claimed they could help you get a recommendation letter from Dawn City’s former senator, enough to lower ‘standards’ at some universities. You accepted the ‘invitation’. Before the match, you sent a message to the coach but received no reply. The match site was an abandoned factory, with a large iron cage in the middle as the ring. You disliked this place, hearing that many had recently died there, but you had already agreed and couldn’t back out. Your opponent was a short man with solid muscles, less physically imposing than you. You entered the cage, the match began, and you initially gained an advantage, then moved intentionally to create an opening for him to knock you down. But unexpectedly, he showed far greater strength than his build suggested, swiftly knocking you down and launching a fierce attack on you. The audience outside the ring was roaring with a mix of anger and cheers, the world seemed to pull away at that moment. You realized the organizer didn’t want you to lose but wanted you dead. Death in underground boxing matches carries much higher odds than mere wins and losses.] [Your mission is: Investigate the cause of ‘abnormal’ activity.] ‘Abnormal’? What ‘abnormal’? “Get up!” “Kill him!” The chill mixed with the heat wafted from all around, and the intense roaring voices, like overlapping swarms of bees, rushed into He Ao’s mind.