Chapter 2: I Am… Special

“I am special. I am the chosen one. My birth brought with it heavenly lightning and the chorus of the gods—”

*Thwack!*

“The only thing your birth brought with it was an average lower IQ for the population, so shut your mouth and get back to work, Jin!”

A rotund man with a snarl glued onto his face retracted his hand from the back of a young man’s head.

This young man, possessing a unique black-and-white hair color, was called Jin. And this year, he’d be turning nineteen.

When he was born, the home of his parents experienced the wrath of the heavens. Lightning struck the same spot for seven days straight, unfortunately ending the lives of his mother, father, and older sister.

Jin, of course, had been far too young back then to remember what actually happened. He also wasn’t sure what his parents or sister even looked like; he only knew that they were smiling when it all went down.

Logically, he should’ve died that day too.

However, from this tragedy, he somehow became the one sole survivor.

Him. Jin Stratus.

No one knew how that infant withstood the raging lightning for a full week, but he somehow came out perfectly unscathed.

Yet, as he grew older in an orphanage, the whisperings of others revealed his past. And since then, he somehow convinced himself that he was the chosen one, and that his destiny went beyond the imagination of anyone on the Pacific Blue Star.

“Why do they never believe me?” Jin grumbled, rubbing his bruised head. “I really am the chosen one. In my dreams, there is a door. That door must be the gate to heaven and is certainly my destiny.”

He nodded to himself as if it were the absolute truth.

*Ring—*

A sudden ringing blared, causing Jin to sharply turn his head.

“It’s break time,” he said as he rose up off the ground, stretching as if he had just endured countless hardships.

In a sense, this actually wasn’t too far off from the truth, as he was a Synthscrubber.

A Synthscrubber was a profession designed for the lowest class of people on Pacific Blue Star. You didn’t need a fancy degree, thirty years of experience before the age of twenty, or anything of the sort.

You just had to be willing to…

“No, please don’t do this! I’ve been cleaning your cloning vat for weeks—”

SNAP!

…die.

“Just another day in the Cloning Factory,” Jin whistled, acting as if a fellow co-worker hadn’t just had his neck snapped by a naked man stepping out of a cloning vat.

In this world, anything was possible.

But if you were a Low-rank Evolver who died while on a contract with a cheap, shoddy cloning factory, then things were bound to go wrong. And though it wasn’t always the case, those who were ’revived’ here at the Sunny Sea Cloning Factory sometimes came out… broken.

With a strange device in hand, Jin minded his own business. He walked around the glitching naked clone and paid no heed to the screams that echoed in the surroundings thereafter.

“Time for food,” Jin declared, tapping a few glowing buttons on a machine.

PLOP!

A spurt of unknown glop shat out of the machine, landing disgustingly on Jin’s plate.

“Yum,” he said. “Nothing beats raw nutrients in the Cloning Factory.”

Without a care in the world, Jin sat down on a nearby pipe and began eating his food. For entertainment, he watched the rogue clone fling workers around like paper dolls, and in his mind, he was predicting the total number of people that would end up dying from this incident.

“Oh, damn, there goes the boss.” He smiled, observing what remained of the rotund man who slapped him on the head. “This rogue clone is quite a lot stronger than the previous ones, huh? One must know that the boss was a 1st Rank, 2nd Level Evolver—yet he was still taken out in three hits.”

By Jin’s calculations, the original owner of this rogue clone was at least in the 3rd Level of the 1st Rank. This made him curious as to why someone so strong and likely wealthy chose to sign with the Sunny Sea Cloning Factory, the trashiest cloning factory around.

“Perhaps the owner of the clone accumulated a massive debt?” Jin tilted his head, narrowly dodging a flying bloody arm that splattered on the wall behind him.

“There’s also the chance that this guy was just a really big cheapskate,” Jin added, shaking his head. “Unluckily for him, there’s no room for regret on Pacific Blue Star. His file has definitely been corrupted by now, and unless he has higher privileges, he’s never making a comeback from this.”

After the deaths of more than fifty factory workers and three supervisors, a group of high-tech cyborgs arrived. They each possessed strength exceeding the 3rd Level of the 1st Rank, and after a brief exchange, were able to “terminate” the rogue clone.

“Wow,” Jin clapped, finishing up the last of his glop. “So powerful.”

The cleaning crew arrived right after the high-tech cyborgs left the workplace, and in seconds, the place once drenched in blood returned to its original spiffy state.

Those who perished were also speedily replaced.

It was as if a bloody massacre hadn’t just occurred before the frightful eyes of hundreds…

“Just another day in the Cloning Factory!”

When faced with a life like this one, it was best to just smile.

Only that way could you avoid depression (which, by the way, was illegal in some poor districts).

“Even if life sucks now, one day my full potential will be unleashed,” Jin hummed to himself, continuing to do his job. “I am the chosen one, after all!”

The rest of the day proceeded relatively smoothly. No more rogue clones, at least.

When it neared the end of his fourteen-hour shift, Jin packed up and clocked out of the factory. The robot security outside was as tight as always, and the atmosphere was very suffocating, but little could be done about that.

After all, a… killer was on the loose.

Source: Webnovel.com, updated by NovelKeep