Chapter 31: The Nine Great Corporations and the Twisted Era

Ren Zhong once again accessed the slumber space through his wristwatch.

A tingling sensation spread from his wrist, swiftly enveloping his entire body.

Simultaneously, his vision and hearing were engulfed in a double-layered illusion.

A massive VR screen appeared before his eyes, and a melodious goddess-like voice rang in his ears.

"Welcome to the Eighth..."

He skipped the advertisement.

Ren Zhong did not immediately click on any other function but began to think subconsciously.

This was the third time he had heard the goddess voice recite the ad, and he noticed some details he hadn't caught before.

It seemed that this female voice was a bit too alluring.

Though the words were nothing more than ordinary advertising lines, they nonetheless stirred a subtle, almost imperceptible tremor of desire deep within him, as if someone were gently blowing into his ear.

This might be reasonable for an average person, but he was Ren Zhong.

He further wondered: now that he wore the wristwatch, he heard a female voice, but what about female users? Did they hear the same, or was it a deep, magnetic male voice?

What was Deep Communications' intention behind crafting such alluring advertisements?

Unable to figure it out, he set the thought aside and moved on.

He then focused his gaze on the fifth icon among the six.

Hypnosis.

The hypnotic function was nothing short of miraculous.

Once activated, it would put him into unconscious sleep instantly, far more effective than any five-second knockout drug.

Moreover, from his own experience, the hypnosis always granted him an extraordinary eight hours of complete, deep sleep.

This clearly exceeded normal human requirements.

But then another paradox presented itself.

The young Night Watcher had said that even without the wristwatch, everyone in this world had to fall into deep sleep at midnight unless they employed special means to resist it, only to awaken at eight the next morning.

Undoubtedly, that too was eight hours of deep sleep.

But Ren Zhong was different—he was even prone to insomnia.

He needed to activate the watch to sleep deeply for eight hours like everyone else, and only then could he make full use of his sleep time in the slumber space.

This allowed him to have twenty-four hours of productivity each day, working around the clock, year-round without rest—a dream come true for his 21st-century self.

Yet as his dream became reality, his scientific instincts raised alarms.

He even began to doubt.

According to others, humanity had always been this way.

Perhaps everyone in this world had been deceived, and only he, this "ancient man," truly knew what sleep should be like according to human physiology.

There is no such thing as a free lunch; with the wristwatch, you got paid and your sleep improved—this reeked of irrationality that only he could sense.

The prematurely aged mother at thirty-eight, the town chief Madafu already withered in his early forties—could their conditions be related to this sleep?

As the thought arose, he looked at the hypnosis icon and felt as if he was staring into an abyss.

Fear gripped him, a tremor emanating from the depths of his soul.

Yet, in the end, he still pressed "Hypnosis."

Like anyone else, Ren Zhong had his own set of Maslowian needs.

Even if he couldn't see through the strangeness for now, and even knowing it might be drinking poison to quench his thirst, he braved it.

He wasn't afraid of sudden death from overexertion—he decided to swallow this poison just like everyone else.

His life now was one of constant pretense.

Though he never spoke of it, nor dwelled on it, the fact that he had once been targeted for extermination after a Hunter entered the city was ever-present in his mind.

Perhaps the "Eye of Judgment" hung perpetually over every head.

Some unknown evaluation system, invisible to ordinary people, was constantly scoring everyone.

When your score exceeded a certain threshold, the Hunter would descend as Death's own judge.

Last time, he had died because he had spoken far too much at once and triggered a fatal spike in his score.

Now he treaded carefully, but that didn't mean he couldn't "gain points" or be erased.

Death still stalked his every step.

Ren Zhong desperately needed this wristwatch to "see" the world, to armor himself with a new worldview.

Yes, he was clever and a fast learner. But he had only been integrating into society for two or three days at most.

The natives of Origin Star had spent ten, twenty, even thirty years building their "indigenous worldview."

For Ren Zhong to forge a flawless "worldview armor," to become a master of disguise unrecognizable to the Eye of Judgment, he needed to absorb a massive amount of information, and as quickly as possible.

He took a deep breath and opened the icon for the professional training system again.

This time, he wasn't browsing the Mecha Warrior profession, but the other four.

He divided his eight hours of sleep into three strict segments.

First, he would spend three and a half hours further deepening his knowledge of the Gunsmith, Demolitionist, Disassembler, and Armored Warrior classes.

He intended to memorize every trait, weapon specification, and combat technique associated with these professions.

Having survived another day and joined Zheng Tian's team, he now faced an unknown, dangerous future.

To survive and thrive in Spark Town, he needed to study not just his enemies, but his teammates as well. Knowing both yourself and the other was the only way to adapt to any situation and remain undefeated.

He hoped that one day, he could reach the point where he wouldn't need resurrection, but could instead predict and prepare for everything like a true master.

Next, he dedicated another three and a half hours to frantically browsing the Ruin Beast database.

If possible, he wanted to commit the entire database to memory.

In science, forming a hypothesis required a flash of inspiration, but true progress came from exhausting all known information.

By understanding every Ruin Beast, he would be able to respond more calmly to emergencies—even if he was defeated the first time, he could use his absolute informational advantage to crush the challenge in future encounters.

The final hour, he would spend freely surfing the internet, gathering scattered bits of information.

At five in the morning, Ren Zhong clicked on another software icon next to Virtual Life—Daily Headlines.

This was a massive information aggregator, the best source for lower-class Origin Star people confined to their small corners to learn about the world.

He first scanned the interface.

The software seemed to have been finely tuned to his personal preferences, its layout and information integration uncannily similar to a certain popular news app he had used many years ago.

There were numerous categories: Following, Recommendations, Corporate News, Combat Professions, Finance, and dozens more.

The default page was the Recommendations section.

The first thing that caught his eye were headlines that made him want to click on each one.

Summing up, they fell into several categories:

Epic battle records and detailed commentaries of high-level experts clashing with top Ruin Beasts.

Reports on beast tide outbreaks.

Coverage of technological innovation and new product launches by the Nine Major Corporations.

Reports on mergers and acquisitions among small and medium enterprises.

Updates on new weapons and equipment development, production, and sales—always with an ad thrown in.

Announcements of new administrative units or abolishments.

All of these were recommended by big data, matching new users’ likely interests and recent events.

Ren Zhong’s eyes blazed as he read each headline, switching to speed reading mode, scanning everything as fast as he could.

After reading over a hundred articles in forty minutes, he finally confirmed his hypothesis.

There were indeed no countries on Origin Star.

The famed Nine Major Corporations each dominated a sector, their influence interlocking and overlapping, with their reach extending to every corner of the planet.

The nine corporations were as follows:

Tanggu Group, controlling scrap recovery and Ruin Beast hunting resource recycling.

DeepInfo Group, controlling the chip and internet industries.

Locke Group, controlling the energy sector.

Tianlong High-Tech, in charge of agriculture, food processing, and sales.

Mengdu Group, overseeing the biomedical industry.

Amethyst Mining Group, managing materials extraction, processing, and sales.

Bath Group, handling daily goods and chemicals.

Yalson Group, in control of finance, trade, logistics, and interstellar commerce.

Origin Star Armaments Group, monopolizing all military resources.

These nine corporations divided by industry, not territory, each entrenched in their own domain, overlapping yet separate, together controlling everything on the planet.

At the same time, they had jointly formed the Origin Star Chamber of Commerce to coordinate relations and promote cross-sector technology and resource cooperation.

In society, the pyramid-structured Chamber of Commerce had essentially replaced the function of nations.

For example, Spark Town was a subordinate administrative unit of the Chamber, and Town Chief Madafu was appointed by the direct superior association.

Ren Zhong felt complicated emotions about this.

He didn’t even know how to describe this system.

Was it capitalist, or feudal?

But it certainly wasn’t a republic.

Because the highest echelons of the Nine Major Corporations were hereditary.