Chapter 1: The Awakening of the Sword Bearer
1. Thermodynamics in the Security Booth Chen Ming learned of his father's death from a push notification.
Not a phone call.
Not a text message.
It was an automatic work handover alert from the security company's internal system.
His father's phone was linked to the company's attendance software,
which detected "abnormal attendance data for employee Chen Jianguo
during this shift" and sent it to the emergency contact. Chen Ming was the only emergency contact. Time sent: 07:14. His father's time of death, the forensics team later estimated, was between 03:40 and 04:10 in the early morning.
More than three hours passed. No one knew.
Chen Ming was sitting against a concrete pillar on the second basement floor of an office building in Pudong, waiting for the first wave of food delivery orders to refresh during the morning rush.
There were more than a dozen riders in the basement, some playing cards, some sleeping. Fluorescent lights turned everyone's face the same pale gray.
When he saw the notification, he thought he'd misread it. He turned the screen brightness to maximum. Read it again.
Then he stood up, walked out of the basement, got on his electric scooter, and headed toward Jiading. Forty kilometers. It was just past five in the morning in Shanghai in winter, and traffic on the elevated highway was already thick. Chen Ming rode in the rightmost auxiliary lane; his helmet visor had a crack, and cold air squeezed through that gap every time he faced the wind, cutting right into his left eyelid.
He didn't cry.
Not because he wasn't hurt. The pain had hit him, collided with something inside him, and instead of spreading, it solidified—growing heavier, denser, until it became an indescribable clarity. He rode forty kilometers, staying that clear the entire time. His father died in a security booth at an industrial park in Baoshan.
The north gate, where few leaders ever passed; only delivery drivers and factory workers cutting corners to catch the subway came through. Two square meters. Sheet metal. No heating in winter. A folding chair, a walkie-talkie, a handwritten registration log.
His father had sat in that chair for six years, twelve hours every night shift, earning 3,200 yuan a month—no social security, no housing fund.
His contract was renewed every year, sometimes not at all. A colleague who found him said he'd thought the old man was asleep at first.
Touched him. He was already cold.
By the time Chen Ming arrived, the ambulance had left. Yellow police tape cordoned off the booth, and two officers were taking routine notes.
The property manager stood nearby, looking awkward, checking his watch constantly—it was Monday, and the morning rush meant heavy vehicle traffic; missing a guard was slowing things down.
The manager saw Chen Ming approaching and stepped forward to shake his hand. "Sorry for your loss." Just those two words.
Then he handed over an envelope, saying it was his father's salary for the month, settled early by the company. He added that Chen Ming would need to sign a few forms for follow-up procedures and asked when he'd be free. Chen Ming took the envelope. Inside was cash. He counted it—380 yuan. His father had worked twelve days that month, the rest calculated at a daily rate. The manager was already talking to someone else about other matters.
Chen Ming stuffed the envelope into his pocket, walked into the booth, and stood in front of the folding chair for about two minutes. There was a shallow indent on the chair—left by a man who'd sat in the same spot for six years. He said nothing. Squatted down, picked up the canvas bag on the floor, and left.
On the death certificate Chen Ming received, the "occupation" field was filled in as "unemployed"—the security company had never renewed his father's labor contract to save money. He'd existed in this city for his final six years as a "flexible worker," then vanished as an "unemployed person."
His father's life was a classic example of how civilization collapses rapidly in the face of violence. In Chen Ming's memory, his father always wore a faded dark blue Zhongshan suit. By day, he was a gold-medal physics teacher at a key middle school. When he stood at the podium, waving chalk to derive theorems, the space around him was low-entropy—the last fortress of order and logic. "Ping, rules are the language of the universe," his father once said, pushing up his glasses taped at the temples, his eyes glowing with an almost divine light. "Master logic, and you hold the power to interpret the world." But that "power of interpretation" was completely erased one afternoon three years earlier. After reporting the school principal for embezzling subsidies for poor students, Chen Jianguo went from "engineer of the human soul" to a "dismissed employee with unstable mental health" overnight. No announcement, no arbitration—only an irreversible physical collapse, ordered by those in power. Chen Ming remembered how his father had to work two jobs, hiding in a cubicle less than five square meters at the end of an alley. He still kept his teacher's habits, wiping his desk spotless. On scrap paper he'd picked up, he graded homework for free for children of migrant workers nearby. In those moments, he tried to fight the collapse of his life by maintaining local low entropy. He remembered that when the last afterglow faded over the Huangpu River, his father would change into that loose, cheap plastic-feeling security uniform. He was no longer Teacher Chen—he was "Old Chen," "the gatekeeper," a lonely point wandering in a dark forest without coordinates. Before leaving, he'd always say to Chen Ming: "It's nothing. I'll be back after a sleep. Easy work." But he never said that guarding a park on the outskirts of Baoshan meant chaos and disorder. Late-night delivery drivers and foul-mouthed foremen would insult him at will if he was a second slow. "You stinky gatekeeper, acting like some intellectual?" Chen Ming had snuck over once. He saw the duty schedule on his father's