The year was 2210 AD. High summer, Jinghua City.

Even out near the suburbs, the streets of Jinghua City could never quite shake off their crowding. Ye Tianxie walked alone through the flow of people, hands stuffed casually in his pockets, head dipped slightly to watch the ground at his feet. His idle gaze wasn’t aimed ahead at all — yet somehow he never walked headlong into a soul. A blue-checked collared shirt, slightly worn-out black slim-fit trousers, a pair of sky-blue slippers on his feet: a fresh, carefree, straight-out-of-the-house look. Even so, the dangerous aura he gave off without meaning to still turned plenty of young women’s heads his way.

Today marked the sixtieth day since the game devices for Fate had begun being distributed — and it was also the first day Fate would officially open, at twelve noon sharp. The clock right now pointed to nine in the morning.

Even sixty days in, the nearest distribution point still had a long dragon of a line. Ye Tianxie wasn’t surprised. He came to a stop at the very back of it. The size of the crowd now couldn’t be mentioned in the same breath as that first month of device distribution, and people patient enough to hold out until today, like him, were a rare sight. He tilted his head up, looking at the blue-and-white sky — and at the long scar running across the very center of it. That long white streak was like a rift where the sky had been sliced open. Ever since it had abruptly appeared a century ago, it had set off upheaval across the globe and no end of speculation from every so-called expert and scholar. But as time wore on, people had gone from treating the sky-scar as a marvel to, gradually, taking it entirely for granted. Every human born these days looked up at birth to a sky bearing that long scar; a flawless, pure-blue sky existed only in images left behind from a century ago.

“Hello, sir. Please provide your DNA sample.” The receptionist offered a professional smile — but for a good while, no answer came from the man before her. The corner of Ye Tianxie’s mouth curled up faintly as he took his time appreciating this girl, who fully earned the phrase a pleasure to behold. Admiring a beautiful woman was one of the great enjoyments of any man, and he was no exception.

Under his openly predatory gaze, this girl — who dealt with all sorts of people every day and never once lost her cool composure — actually began to feel her own heartbeat quicken. There was a dangerous depth in those eyes of his; even knowing it might well be a bottomless abyss, she felt herself being tugged and drawn by some irresistible mystery, sinking helplessly of her own accord…

A single snapped-off hair came to rest in Ye Tianxie’s palm, presented out before the girl. She seemed to wake from a daze, no longer daring to meet his eyes, and picked the half-strand of hair from his palm in slight disarray. In the instant her fingers brushed his hand, that brief contact quietly swelled the strange feeling in her chest.

This is a dangerous man… a voice told her, somewhere in the sea of her heart. But her pulse, thrown into disorder, refused to settle. Not daring to look up, she fiddled with the device in her hands to cover her faint fluster. “What sort of device would you like… a pendant, or a wristband?”

Full-immersion virtual gaming had risen at the close of the twenty-first century and reached its peak in the twenty-second. A virtual world linked together by gaming helmets and gaming pods had become humanity’s second world — its other half of life. Now, in the twenty-third century, virtual gaming had at last made another brand-new breakthrough: the utterly mystery-shrouded Fate. Everything else aside, the game device alone was enough to leave everyone slack-jawed. No longer a clunky gaming helmet or gaming pod, but a tiny pendant to hang around the neck, or a band to wear on the wrist. No cables needed to play, no complicated setup — not even charging. According to the official explanation, the built-in charge was enough to last over fifty years. You picked a device freely, to your own taste; one person could own only one, bound to their own DNA.

And the crazier part: every last device was handed out free.

Ye Tianxie tugged at the slender black cord looped around his neck, and only then did the girl notice the strange ornament hanging at his chest — jet-black in color, long and narrow and oddly shaped, with seven holes of identical size scattered irregularly down its length. Whether or not it was a trick of the eye, under the sunlight she seemed to catch each of the seven little holes reflecting an extremely faint glow — each glow different, and taken together they seemed to form the seven colors of the sun: red, orange, yellow, green, cyan, blue, violet.

“Sir, please… please wait a moment.” The girl caught herself slipping again; her expression and movements grew all the more unnatural. She placed the hair into the machine, and without meaning to, she committed the information displayed on the screen to memory before pressing the red button to complete the identity binding. She held out a black wristband and an exquisite name card to Ye Tianxie. “Sir, this is your device. Please keep it safe, and I wish you a pleasant game. This is my branch office’s service card — if you have any questions at all, you’re welcome to consult us anytime.”

Ye Tianxie extended his left hand, but was slow to take them. At last the girl worked up the courage to lift her head, and her gaze met his eyes and that face of bewitching, demonic charm. His reply set her heart racing all over again: “Charms Jasmine Dream — the perfect union of jasmine, rose, and lily of the valley, blending warmth and freshness side by side. Its elegant, gentle notes are pure and intoxicating, suited to a graceful, delicate girl brimming with tenderness. A girl like that is a sprite God has gifted to the mortal world. I wonder if I might have the honor of having her fasten this black bond upon me.”

A flush of rosy pink rose in the girl’s soft, tender cheeks; she lowered her head, at a loss, the professional composure she’d honed over these past years scattered off to who-knows-where. Charms Jasmine Dream — that was the name of the perfume she adored. From the first time she’d caught its scent right up to today, her devoted, stubborn love for it had never once faded.

Ye Tianxie hadn’t expected this girl to blush so easily — she seemed more like a girl without much experience in romance, and that only stoked his urge to tease her further. His deep eyes were full of a wicked, charming amusement as he watched her, with hands carrying a slight dampness, fasten the black wristband on for him. What should have been a simple motion was drawn out several times over by the faint trembling of her slender fingers. Through the whole thing, Ye Tianxie savored that lovely, easy-on-the-eyes expression of hers.

At last, the girl gathered up all her courage and, head bowed, pressed a thick slip of paper into his hand. “Sir, this… this is my private phone number. If you ever have questions about using it, you can… you can call me anytime…”

By the end her voice had dwindled to a mosquito’s whine. Even she could scarcely believe that she — who turned away countless suitors every single day — would actively slip her contact details to a man she’d met for the first time.

Ye Tianxie touched the wristband on his arm, which had almost no sense of weight to it, gave the girl a smile that left her intoxicated, and turned to go. She stared dazedly after his retreating figure, spellbound, unable to come back to herself for the longest time.

Rounding a corner, Ye Tianxie gave a flick of his hand, and the two slips of paper — the ones he hadn’t spared a single glance — turned, as if by magic, into a scatter of fluttering shreds. His expression unchanged, he strode off at an even pace toward his residence… that place that could no longer be called “home.”

In this era of rampant materialism, steeped everywhere in filth and sin, that girl was as precious as a diamond in the sands of the sea. But… to a man who had once possessed the most beautiful stars in all the world, she was, in the end, only a diamond.

He lifted his wrist and looked at the black band on it. Though he’d already learned most of what there was to know about it through various channels, holding one for the first time, he still felt a stir of wonder. Perhaps everyone felt the same doubt he did now the moment they got their hands on it. Something this size, this shape, this weight — could it really connect to that Fate world so widely hailed as the myth of the century?

While he was lost in thought, a somewhat hurried set of footsteps came from up ahead. Ye Tianxie had just reached the corner when he nearly collided head-on with a figure rounding it from the other side. On reflex, his raised left hand shot out to block what was coming — and in that instant, his palm met a round, soft fullness. The sensation, which could only be called perfect, sent a faint tremor through him, and his palm gave it a light squeeze almost beyond his control before he seemed to realize just what it was he’d grabbed, whereupon he spun on his heel and bolted.

“Aaahh—”

A shriek pitched far higher than Ye Tianxie could have imagined went up behind him. He shot a glance back and saw the girl — in a blue-and-white checked skirt — cradling her chest in alarm, while the four people who’d been trailing behind her all gave chase, faces darkening.

All four were middle-aged, decked out in jet-black suits and jet-black leather shoes, two of them in dark sunglasses on top of that — the textbook getup of bodyguards worried someone might fail to recognize them as such. They were startlingly fast, and before long they’d closed in right behind Ye Tianxie, near enough to touch his back with an outstretched hand. Ahead lay a narrow passage between two buildings. Ye Tianxie twisted his body and cut into it; the four followed practically heel-to-heel. But at once, they all stopped dead — not because the passage was a dead-end that cut off their target’s escape, but because the man they were chasing had, incredibly, vanished.

They’d watched him run in here with their own eyes, no more than half a second behind him — there was no way he could have dropped out of their sight… unless he’d flown off, or even turned invisible.

The four stood there stunned for a while, and after pacing about for a long stretch, they finally hurried off, spurred by one of them shouting, “This is bad — could this be a lure-the-tiger-off-the-mountain trick?”

High above, atop the six-story rooftop, Ye Tianxie watched them go, a thoughtful look crossing his face. He raised his left hand, the corner of his mouth hooking into a wicked smile. His palm seemed to still hold that startlingly soft sensation, and even, faintly, the intoxicating fragrance of a young girl drifting off it. “Looks like this little miss is anything but ordinary. If I’ve wounded that fragile little heart of yours, that would be a grievous sin on my part… because, you see — I did it on purpose.”

(End of Chapter 1)