Chapter 183 Chapter 178 I Saved You
Flying to a location near the park, I found a spot to avoid the cameras and quietly appeared.
No one knew that there were more people on the street.
In the park, the crowd flowed toward the company entrance, and one by one, the young people took out a card, swiped it at the entrance, and with a beep, the door opened.
There was no cutting in line, nor were there any arguments or fights, let alone anyone carrying weapons. Everything was in order, a silent discipline restraining everyone.
Ji Ma felt a bit uncomfortable, but she overcame this small unease.
One day, she would complete her revenge in her homeland and make a name for herself. That being said, George had shed an unknown amount of blood to get to Earth.
If she didn’t make a name for herself on Earth, wouldn’t George’s blood have been shed in vain?
Thinking this, Ji Ma strode forward, swiped her plastic card, and the entrance opened in front of her. She followed the crowd toward the place where she had jumped in her past life.
Downstairs, breakfast stands were already set up, surrounded by a group of people, white steam rising from the stands.
Memories from three centuries ago gradually resurfaced, and the feeling of familiarity grew stronger.
Ji Ma stepped on the stairs, walking over the bloodstains on the ground alongside groups of three to five people. Due to Ji Ma’s extraordinary abilities, no one paid attention to the faint bloodstains on the ground.
She stopped in front of the building, turned around, and looked toward the entrance.
“University…” she uttered the unfamiliar yet familiar word: “It’s very much like university life.”
Except for the excessive number of people.
It was already nine-thirty on Earth, and the time remaining until work started was unknown, but Ji Ma felt no panic rising in her heart, which indicated that there was still some time before work began.
Ji Ma entered the elevator, which contained only five people, but she still felt uneasy.
Someone pressed the metal button, and the numbers on the button lit up; one of the numbers looked familiar. Ji Ma reached out to press it and then habitually pressed another button below.
The silver metallic door closed, sealing the small space tightly like a fully enclosed metal coffin. After a few seconds, the coffin was lifted, and she felt the overwhelming weight.
Ji Ma anxiously held her “branch axe gun” at her waist. The people around her seemed unfazed; either they bowed their heads tapping on their “smartphone” screens or stared straight at the door.
This place was truly suitable for an ambush. Just a few cannon fodder, numb me, pause halfway, seal off my escape route, and then use extraordinary abilities…
Ji Ma simulated an “ambush battle” in her mind, subconsciously reciting incantations, occasionally making sounds reminiscent of her “branch axe gun” slicing through metal.
A girl frowned and turned to look at her. In the girl’s eyes, this man with oily hair muttering strange languages must be suffering from a case of being overly dramatic.
Ji Ma didn’t care about others’ gazes until the elevator stopped, and the metal door opened. She snapped back from her “simulated battle” as she walked out while muttering in a common language to herself:
“Used up fourteen percent of magic power…”
A few strange looks followed her as she walked away, and just as the elevator doors were about to close, murmurs floated out from within.
“Is he crazy?”
“Is he being overly dramatic?”
“I remember him; he seems to be someone named Wan. That guy who borrows money everywhere. Don’t lend him money; I heard he owes over a million.”
Ji Ma usually ignored others’ evaluations of her. Countless people cursed her behind her back, calling her cheap, promiscuous, a demon… and so on, and she wouldn’t even blink.
But that third whisper made Ji Ma’s head tremble slightly.
Memories of the past surged to her mind.
She recalled that she had been very introverted back then, feeling pent-up for a long time before going to ask colleagues for money. Looking at their faces made her legs feel weak and filled her with fear. The words she had prepared came out hesitantly, fragmented.
She couldn’t remember if she had managed to borrow money.
But she remembered her emotions, the anxiety and unease. She even remembered how she didn’t disguise her fear at all, hoping the other person would feel pity for her, be more courteous, and not poke at her fragile heart.
Many were courteous, but some responses were sharp, like saying: “Didn’t you make a lot of money?”
“How come you’re so broke?”
“You’re out of money, so am I.”
Ji Ma couldn’t recall those faces; otherwise, she wouldn’t mind slightly violating her plan of “being low-key as a demon” and arranging some accidents for them. Just a small curse would guarantee that within three months, they would all be reporting in their urns.
She only remembered the emotions of those times.
Knowing full well she couldn’t borrow money, but always pressured by this and that, she had to grit her teeth and beg like a beggar with her palms upturned.
“Anran, Anran, good morning.”
Someone called to her, and Ji Ma discerned the Chinese words, remembering that her original name was Wan Ziqi, so she ignored it and continued walking.
“Anran, why did you leave early yesterday?”
Only then did Ji Ma stop and turn around to see a young man in a white short-sleeved shirt and sports pants waving at her, looking quite clean.
Ji Ma pointed to herself with her index finger: “Me?”
“Yeah.” The man in the white shirt smiled and said, “I must have spoken too quietly, Anran.”
Ji Ma remembered that in the company, everyone had to take on flower names; what a waste of memory.
“I forgot, do you think I’m strange?”
“Strange.” The man in the white shirt said, “You actually left early yesterday. The supervisor called you twelve times and you didn’t answer. The entire team’s progress got stuck. Even An Ning looked for you yesterday.”
Ji Ma surprisingly felt a small surge of guilt. She was shocked herself; other than giving George an axe, she really hadn’t felt much guilt.
Including but not limited to forcibly abducting beautiful women, buying maids, signing up good slave contracts, and then enjoying their escape attempts, those were small matters. The bigger ones involved cutting off the legs of injured soldiers and throwing them to chasing war hounds to delay… and so on, countless similar events.
She realized this guilt came from the corporate slave Wan Ziqi.
Ji Ma suppressed it and asked, “Who is An Ning?”
The man in the white shirt looked at Ji Ma with confusion: “He’s the high P.”
What’s a high P? A high bottom?
“His official job title?”
“He’s our department supervisor.” The man in the white shirt looked at Ji Ma with wide eyes, “And what does job title mean?”
“It’s like this: today I want to play a game to relax.” Ji Ma fabricated a lie on the spot: “I’m pretending I lost all my memory and am trying to recover it through inquiries.”
The man in the white shirt immediately accepted Ji Ma’s explanation: “So that’s it. That’s quite rare for you.”
“What was I like before?”
“Relatively… introverted and hardworking. You didn’t even join us for online gaming; you just read code by yourself.”
Ji Ma could sense that the other person was likely of lower status than herself.
“Alright, where’s my seat?”
The man in the white shirt pointed to a desk: “Over there.”
Following his directions, Ji Ma looked over. The desk was much better than she had imagined. It was spacious enough to accommodate three large LCD screens surrounding the seat. There was even a somewhat battered laptop sitting on it, marked by a bite taken out of an apple; it looked quite ugly.
Clearly, the original me had terrible taste.
However, it was evident that Wan Ziqi was treated much better in the company than in the rental apartment.
Ji Ma sat in the office chair, the lumbar support propping her up, and opened the laptop. A familiar feeling rushed over her as she typed on the external keyboard. Her intuition told her there was a lot of personal data of Wan Ziqi inside.
This would greatly aid in restoring her memory.
The computer screen displayed a login prompt that required her to enter a password to unlock.
Ji Ma placed her right hand on the numeric keypad and skillfully punched in a series of numbers. If she remembered correctly, this was her commonly used password, one she had been using since she got the personal system.
A line of asterisks appeared in the input box.
Ji Ma pressed the enter key.
It didn’t unlock.
After several unsuccessful attempts, the sounds of the bustling crowd drew closer.
Ji Ma turned her head to see the man in the white shirt coming over. He said, “By the way, Anran, can you help me check the branch I submitted on Git? It would be best to do it quickly; at this rate, we won’t finish the schedule.”
“Oh.”
“Also, the supervisor said he wants to see you.”
A sense of crisis bubbled up from the bottom of Ji Ma’s heart, just like the feeling of not having done her homework yet being called out in class.
But she easily suppressed the sense of crisis.
Just mere mortals, why should she care?
“Just in time, I also want to find him.” Ji Ma said, “To resign.”
“Resign?!” The man in the white shirt looked surprised for a moment and then laughed and asked, “Why do you want to resign?”
“It’s none of your business.”
Ji Ma picked up her laptop, intending to find someone to help her unlock it; even if they couldn’t open it, she could probably exchange it for money.
The man in the white shirt watched Ji Ma’s retreating figure, and the colleagues around them were chattering away, surprised that the main force of the development team was actually going to resign; this was bound to be big news.
A few minutes later, Ji Ma turned back and casually asked someone, “Where is the supervisor An Ning’s office?”
Her tone was calm and flat; neither her expression nor her tone would reveal the truth that she lacked common knowledge.
But why was the young woman being asked staring at her curiously?
Was there another meaning to the word “office”?
“Anran, I’m over here.” A hand was raised from a nearby desk.
Ji Ma looked over.
It was an old man with half-white hair, amber eyes perched on his nose, wearing a pink short-sleeved shirt. His outstretched hands looked like burnt black pottery, and he had a polite smile on his face.
That feeling of familiarity.
Yes, he was the department supervisor, her supervisor’s supervisor.
Department supervisors didn’t have offices.
Ji Ma’s expression remained unchanged as she walked over and said, “I want to resign.”
“I just heard about it, Anran—”
“Resign. Pay me my salary for this month. I’ll leave immediately.”
“Why don’t you talk to your supervisor first?” An Ning said, “His name is An Tuo.”
“You have a higher position.”
An Ning laughed, adjusted his glasses, picked up a thermos, unscrewed it to drink, and said, “I have to manage three hundred people. Yesterday, when you left early, others thought you had jumped off a building. I called you about everything. You say, do I still have to work?”
“Because I saved your life.” Ji Ma snatched the thermos away and said, “That water is toxic.”
As she spoke, she poured the contents of the thermos onto the ground, tea leaves and yellow tea simultaneously spilling out.
An Ning looked down at the tea leaves on the ground, then at the tea-stained pants he was wearing.
Ji Ma said, “To correct you, it’s the tea that’s toxic, very potent. You nearly died.”
