Nan He didn’t let out a sigh of relief until she had been on the run for more than ten days and the ship finally reached the starport of Imperial Capital Star.
To put it bluntly, in her eighteen years of life, Nan He had either been running for her life or on the way to running for her life. Her existence had been miserable beyond words.
Her bad luck had started before she was even born.
Nan He was born on Planet 31150, a remote and barren world in the U Star Region.
Planet 31150 had once been a fairly prosperous mining planet, but after its mineral deposits were exhausted, it was abandoned.
Her father was supposedly a scion of some great family. After making a mistake, he was exiled to Planet 31150 to oversee its mining operations.
While he was there, he took a liking to Nan He’s mother because of her beauty. He had a daughter with her—Nan Zhi—and later another child, Nan He.
By the time Nan He was born, mining on Planet 31150 was already nearing its end. Before leaving, her scumbag father tested her mental power and discovered that she had been born with an F-rank rating—a useless failure.
Although that was slightly better than Nan Zhi, who had no mental power at all, it was still nowhere near enough to earn his attention. Without the slightest hesitation, he abandoned the three of them and left Planet 31150.
To him, Nan He’s mother had been nothing more than a plaything during his exile, while Nan He and Nan Zhi were merely the waste products produced by that diversion.
Nan He’s mother hated her for being useless—for failing to possess the high mental power of a genius and thus being unable to convince her father to take them along. So she ordered Nan Zhi to throw Nan He into an abandoned mine and leave her to die.
At the time, Nan Zhi was already twelve years old. Unable to bear the thought of her baby sister dying like that, she secretly raised Nan He in the abandoned mine.
Nan He truly had a tenacious life. She survived her fragile infancy in a dark, freezing mine and somehow made it to the age of six.
Only when Nan Zhi turned eighteen and got married did she bring six-year-old Nan He to live with her. Even through the most difficult days, she never once considered abandoning Nan He.
It could be said that Nan He had been raised by her sister. To her, Nan Zhi was the most important person in the world.
Nan He had been a beauty in the making from childhood, as well as exceptionally intelligent. Whatever she encountered, she learned at once.
A smart and beautiful girl on that filthy, chaotic garbage planet, wrapped in darkness and poverty, was like a delicate butterfly. At any moment, someone could cast a net over her, break her wings, and leave her maimed.
As Nan He grew older, even deliberately covering herself in dirt could no longer conceal her beauty. More and more greasy, disgusting eyes began to cling to her.
After secretly dispatching the seventh man who had tried to take advantage of her, Nan He stood in the gray, dusty pit of an abandoned mine and gazed up at the gloomy sky.
She knew she couldn’t go on like this.
She had to leave this abandoned planet. She had to escape.
When she was twelve, a spacecraft finally landed on Planet 31150, and Nan He seized the opportunity to escape.
She had thought that from then on, she would have a vast sky and open seas before her, and a free, happy life. Once she had made something of herself, she would return and bring her sister out to enjoy a better life.
Who could have known that the outside world would be just as dangerous—or perhaps even more dangerous?
Not long after escaping Planet 31150, she was captured by the White Bone Pirate Gang and spent a year and a half among them.
After finally escaping the White Bone Pirate Gang, she was captured again and sent to an underground genetic laboratory, where she became a test subject.
Fortunately, although those two years as an experimental subject were excruciating, she was also lucky enough to have her mental power raised from F-rank to D-rank.
She had naturally been strong to begin with, and after two years of modifications in the laboratory, her physical strength and stamina increased by a tremendous amount.
Later, relying on her clever mind, she conned the doctor in charge of her, Doctor Zuo, and seized the right opportunity to kill the people in the laboratory before making an arduous escape.
By then, Nan He no longer knew whether she was lucky or unlucky.
If she was lucky, then aside from having a good sister, the Goddess of Fortune had shown her no affection whatsoever during her eighteen years of life.
But if she was unlucky, then how had she managed to escape the White Bone Pirate Gang and an underground laboratory alive and in one piece?
She soon found out.
She was unlucky. Not merely unlucky—she was cursed with catastrophic misfortune.
Just after escaping from the underground laboratory by the skin of her teeth, she accidentally stumbled into the Federation’s foremost rebel army: the Black Shield Legion.
Nan He: “...”
She was practically on the verge of tears, speechless before the heavens.
But there was nothing she could do. She had to find a way to stay alive, didn’t she? Her sister was still waiting for her back on Planet 31150.
Fortunately, she soon earned the admiration of the Black Shield Legion’s Young Marshal, Yin Yan, and became one of his trusted aides.
As the Young Marshal of the Black Shield rebel army, Yin Yan was an exceptionally powerful man with SS-rank mental power. He was tall, strikingly handsome, and incredibly strong.
By becoming his trusted aide, Nan He rose with the tide.
Although she was merely a D-rank weakling, the person standing behind her was the Young Marshal. Nearly everyone in the Black Shield Legion was willing to show her some respect.
Under normal circumstances, Nan He had been doing quite well in the Black Shield Legion. There should have been no reason for her to flee.
But Yin Yan was vicious and ruthless, with a volatile, unpredictable temperament.
For two years, Nan He had lived beside him in constant fear, treading on thin ice. During that time, she had forced herself to act like a bright, cheerful, caring little sun.
For those two years, she had done her utmost and handled every task flawlessly.
Yet none of that earned her the slightest bit of pity from Yin Yan. He would glower at her and threaten to kill her at the drop of a hat.
That alone might have been bearable, but recently, she had no idea what she had done to offend him. Somehow, he had developed murderous intentions toward her.
For the sake of her life, Nan He had no choice but to run.
If there was one thing she was good at, it was escaping.
Before fleeing, Nan He had thought about where she should go.
After much consideration, she decided that Imperial Capital Star was the safest choice.
Imperial Capital Star was the ancestral home of the ten great high-level genetic families, as well as the center of power and politics.
The Black Shield Legion didn’t dare extend its reach here too far. Even if they had people stationed on Imperial Capital Star, there wouldn’t be many of them, and they certainly wouldn’t dare conduct an open and reckless manhunt.
However, before escaping, Nan He had risked pulling off something big.
She had stolen an unidentified source stone.
Calling it a source stone wasn’t entirely accurate. Compared with an energy stone, it looked more like a stone chip.
She hadn’t originally intended to steal it, but judging from the importance the Marshal and the Young Marshal placed on it, it had to be a treasure. She simply couldn’t resist.
Besides, given the Young Marshal’s vindictive nature and his hatred of betrayal, he would never let her off even if she had only run away. Fortune favored the bold, while the timid starved. She might as well go all in and make it count.
She had managed to steal the source stone, but during her escape, she had secretly turned it over and over in her hands and studied it for a long time. She still had no idea what it did or how to use it.
But she wasn’t in a hurry. She could experiment with it slowly once she had settled down.
Not only had she fled, she had also stolen the Young Marshal Yin Yan’s precious treasure. He would certainly hate her to the bone. If she were caught, the consequences would be dreadful.
Therefore, she had to find herself a proper hideout on Imperial Capital Star.
