Alex stood inside a wooden house, the air thick with the smell of timber and dust.

He had seen this kind of place many times before. Xia architecture. Old, stubborn, rooted in tradition.

They refused to trade wood for steel, refused to raise glass towers into the sky like Prussia.

They believed living close to nature strengthened their cultivation, that wood and earth fed the body with natural power.

Alex slowly turned his head.

There was a massive hole torn through the roof.

Sunlight poured through it in a harsh beam, illuminating the wreckage beneath.

The VÖXEN Lucifer lay half-destroyed in the middle of the room, its once flawless frame split open like a wounded animal.

The vehicle was filled with nanobots. Given the right materials, they could rebuild it atom by atom, following the original blueprint stored in its core.

With enough time and resources, the VÖXEN could return to perfect form.

But that would take time.

Time he wasn’t sure he had.

With slow, painful movements, Alex activated his space-storage ring and stored the wrecked vehicle away.

Only then did he notice the body.

A man lay sprawled across the wooden floor.

Dismembered.

Blood soaked into the planks.

“Gaia,” Alex whispered, speaking to the nanobots embedded beneath his skin. “Where are we?”

A calm voice answered directly inside his mind.

“Sir. We are currently outside any communication coverage. Xia forbids all external transmissions. They hold deep hostility toward both Prussia and Estoria.”

“We are in enemy territory. If they find you, you will be executed without question. Especially because you have killed one of their people.”

Alex’s face drained of color.

“So what are we supposed to do?”

He was not in his normal condition.

His inner power was gone completely destroyed. He couldn’t fly. Couldn’t fight. Couldn’t defend himself.

Right now, he was no different from an ordinary human.

And in Xia, an ordinary citizen was as strong as ten trained men from Prussia or Estoria.

They had trained in natural cultivation since childhood. Strength was simply part of daily life here.

“Sir,” Gaia continued, “place me on the corpse’s head. Within five minutes after death, I can still retrieve partial memory traces. After ten minutes, nothing remains. Approximately four minutes have passed. I can attempt extraction. The copying process will require ten minutes.”

Alex swallowed.

Time was running.

Alex pulled the nano strip from behind his ear and pressed it gently against the dead man’s bleeding head.

The nanobots slid inward, burrowing into the skull and threading into the brain, mapping and extracting what information they could before it faded.

He lifted his gaze and scanned the room.

It looked like the inside of a wrecked ship-splintered wood, shattered furniture,

debris scattered everywhere. Then a sharp thought hit him.

He and his pursuers had crossed into Xia’s border during the crash.

Normally, Xia cultivators would have already been dispatched to investigate. There was a strong chance people were still tracking whatever had fallen from the sky. Alex moved fast.

He took out ten repair drones from his storage ring and released them into the air. “Repair everything. Restore this place exactly as it was.”

The small glide drones hummed to life. They scattered across the room and began working with terrifying precision.

Broken wood was lifted, aligned, and fused at the nano level. Cracks disappeared as if they had never existed.

Table legs reformed. Chairs reshaped themselves. Even the shattered vase rebuilt piece by piece.

Flawless.

This was Gaia’s newest technology.

And then Alex felt it.

A wave of force.

Heavy. Oppressive. Powerful enough to make the entire wooden house tremble.

“I felt something fall across the border after the explosion. It should be somewhere in this direction.”

A woman in a blue robe hovered roughly ten meters above the roof, suspended in the air with effortless control.

“But there is nothing unusual here,” said another voice—a woman in yellow robes. “That’s what makes it strange,” the woman in blue replied. “I cannot be mistaken.” “Let’s question the people nearby and find out what happened,” the yellow-robed woman said.

Hearing their voices from inside the room, Alex felt a cold sweat break across his skin.

They descended from the sky and stepped onto the ground.

Then they began walking toward the house.

The roof finished repairing itself at the last possible second. A narrow miracle.

But if they forced their way inside, there was no chance he could survive even one strike from them.

A knock sounded at the door.

“Excuse me,” the woman in yellow called out.

Alex hurried to the corpse and examined the man’s face and body.

“Damn it… I have to do this.”

He pulled the VÖXEN Lucifer back out and issued a command. “All nanobots-

gather.”

A cluster of nanobots, no larger than a pill, floated up from the vehicle’s core.

“This is the central Al nanobot core,” he muttered to himself. “The one that handles repair, reconstruction, programming. The heart of the VÖXEN.”

This was a risk.

A serious one.

Alex swallowed the pill-sized cluster and gave a mental command.

Restructure my bones and body to match this man.

“Excuse me. I know you’re inside. We need to ask you something,” the woman in

yellow called again from outside.

Inside Alex’s body, the nanobots went to work.

They flooded through his blood vessels, mapping his skeletal frame, comparing it to the corpse beside him.

His bones began to shift. Muscles tightened and moved. His face tingled as the structure beneath the skin subtly reshaped itself to match the dead man’s features.

He glanced down and realized he was still wearing Prussian clothes.

He quickly stored both the clothes and the corpse inside his space ring.

“I am asking politely, and you still refuse to answer?” the woman snapped.

A split second later, the door exploded inward, splintering like it had been hit by a blast.

The two cultivators stepped inside.

They stopped when they saw Alex standing there, naked, still mid-transformation.

“What are you doing naked here?” the woman in yellow demanded.

Alex’s heart hammered.

He wasn’t fluent in Xia’s spoken

language. He could understand in et

but his pronunciation was rough. He forced his voice low and hoarse as if he had just been coughing.

“I just finished bathing. You could have waited a moment.”

The yellow-robed cultivator frowned at him with visible irritation.

“Go put on your clothes. There’s nothing worth seeing there anyway.”

Alex glanced at the woman in yellow. She had a sharp, intimidating presence, but

she was undeniably beautiful, with striking features and a confident posture.

At that moment, the nanobots were still adjusting his body beneath the his manhood’s skin.

Unfortunately, his body reacted at the worst possible time. When he looked at the yellow-robed woman, the involuntary response was very obvious.

It stood there with ridiculous

confidence, like it had its own personality silently protesting the insult, as if to say, “Excuse me? Which part of me is not worth seeing? Would you like a closer inspection?”

Her face immediately flushed red with embarrassment.

“Do you want to die?” the woman in blue snapped sharply. “Go put on some clothes.

Now.”

Alex didn’t argue. He turned quickly, walked to the wardrobe, and grabbed a loose

robe, pulling it over himself as fast as he could.

The woman in blue watched him closely.

“Who are you?” she asked. “Did you see anything fall here from the sky?”

“I… I…” Alex stalled, his mind racing.

He didn’t know the dead man’s name yet. If he said the wrong one, suspicion would

explode instantly.

“I didn’t see anything.”

“Why are you stuttering?” the woman in blue asked, narrowing her eyes.

Alex forced himself to stumble over his words again.

“I… I’ve never seen women as beautiful as you two before. I get nervous when I

speak to beautiful women.”

It was complete nonsense, but he delivered it with just enough awkwardness to sell

it.

The woman in yellow smiled faintly. “You certainly know how to flatter.”

Before anyone could say more, a furious shout echoed from outside.

“Bai Xiaochun! Where are you hiding?! After what you did to my sister, today is the

day you die, you piece of trash!”

A violent kick shattered the wooden gate outside.

Heavy footsteps thundered toward the house.

Within seconds, nearly twenty townspeople stormed into the yard behind a furious

man at the front. All of them were glaring at Alex with open hatred.

“That’s him one of them shouted. “That’s the scum who’s terrorized

this city for decades! He raped whoever he wanted and did whatever he liked because his

parents were powerful!”

“His parents are dead now!” another yelled. “He’s just a useless parasite living off

their name! This monster deserves to die!”

The woman in yellow and the woman in blue slowly turned to look at Alex.

Their expressions changed.

“Are you the man named Bai Xiaochun?”