Muhammad Shafiq Mohd Nizam
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(Free) 10th- Chapter 2: Future Path
🕑 Added 2025-08-17 09:27:34 +0000 UTCSandy, the female cop, badgered me about getting proper living supplies.
Clean shirts, underwear, shampoo, face wash, nail clippers, toothpaste, the works. She even brought me to the store in her police car and helped me pick up the stuff.
Sandy scrubbed the dried blood off the floor while I took a real shower this time—with actual soap.
“I’m going to spray Febreeze all over!” She shouted while I was in the bathroom.
“Oh… Thanks?” I was confused as to why they were helping me.
Then, I remembered something. In this world, the police needed to study for two and a half years before entering the workforce.
I remembered that from my Harvard law memories before. In the 1970s, there was a massive protest about police brutality and racism. That was when the institution changed their ways.
There were more minorities in the workforce, and the police trainee had to learn laws for about two years for them to enforce it.
It made me quite confident that I was in a parallel world.
“Are you sure you’re fine?” The male cop, Johnson, asked.
“I’m fine.” I waved it off.
Both of the cops left after poking around a little longer.
Thankfully, they didn’t see the fifty grand in cash stuffed inside my duffle bag. That would've earned me a full-blown interrogation. The money wasn’t exactly legal per se.
When asked about my finances, I told them I had enough money in the bank to survive for six months while job hunting.
They were way too nosy, but I understood it was their job. An emancipated teen needed to have financial stability. That’s what the court decided– a factor in which I used to leave the family.
"That reminds me, I need to pay rent."
It had been almost a month since my senses opened. I’d spent the entire time in a cultivation trance.
The energy here was thinner compared to the other worlds I’d lived in, but I still managed to condense about three years’ worth of internal energy through uninterrupted meditation.
Not bad, all things considered.
It would be hard to achieve a state like that again.
In the murim martial arts world, they used grain pills for cultivation. In wuxia, the body was nourished by qi. I merged both paths—wuxia for its versatility, murim for its grounding in human physiology.
I had no interest in chasing immortality. Who knew how long I had in this world? Even the foundation of immortality alone would take me decades to achieve. It wasn’t a feasible option for me who could die in any minute.
For now, the qi was filling the gaps in my system left by fetal poisoning, which meant I’d go through a small transformation over the next few months, and a big transformation afterward.
Inside my body, I was redirecting internal energy through my meridians, building a foundation.
I also sensed that, despite my weak body, I had remarkably high-quality spiritual roots. Maybe that’s why the body’s previous owner was incredibly smart.
"Hmm… I should fix my eyes." It was tough wearing glasses. I kept having to clean them because of my thick eyelashes. "But that has to wait until I fix the deformity in my heart."
By my calculations, it would take two months before my heart would change to a normal heart.
My stomach suddenly gurgled like a dying engine. "Oh right. I hadn’t eaten in a month."
I stopped by a Korean restaurant and devoured four bowls of samgyetang by myself.
"I should find a part-time job. Something relaxing," I muttered. Then, I sighed. Sandy was really troublesome.
In order for the court to release me from my family’s custody, my mother decided to put the name of her sister on the legal guardian list. The court wouldn’t let me go unchecked since I have a history of a heart complication.
The officers had done their job. They checked I wasn’t dying. But I needed to get my aunt on board with this entire ‘scheme’. She didn’t even need to do much, just pretend she had come to check up on me at least once a month.
Sandy said before she left, "I’m going to check in again. And if no one’s taking care of you, we’ll have to talk about placing you with a court-appointed guardian until you turn eighteen."
Emancipation wasn’t full freedom. I still had to listen to the court orders.
"Don’t worry," I told her. "My aunt’s in town. She’s... family-adjacent."
The flimsy excuse worked on the cop. Although she gave me a timeline. I had to show some proof of the guardianship in two weeks.
In the next few days, I decided to spend some money. I bought a table, a couch, some kitchen utensils, a mattress without the bed frame, and I got a beanbag for free at the used furniture store.
The hardware store clerk looked at me weird when I bought ten glass jars, three kinds of mesh wire, and a bottle of glycerin. They probably thought I was building a bomb.
What I was building was an insect habitat for spiders and centipedes. Maybe some scorpions too.
Back home, I cleared a corner of the living room—where normal people put potted plants—and set up a glass habitat.
Sealed, ventilated, sectioned. The spiders would have their nest, separate from the other poisonous bugs.
They didn’t need much—just the right humidity, a few beetles or maggots for food.
The centipedes, I caught myself. Tang Clan methods came back to me instinctively.
I rigged a sticky trap using sugar water, raw egg yolk, and crushed garlic. Set it in the crawlspace overnight. At dawn, there they were—three thick-bodied centipedes, each the length of my palm.
I dropped them into a jar one by one, letting them click and coil against the glass. The centipede venom would be useful—nothing too lethal, but it could cause temporary paralysis in a large enough dose.
"I still can’t break the habit huh? Although, it is pretty weird to be walking around without some proper defenses."
I was still learning about this universe. Who knew what dangers lurked around the corners.
The second ingredient I needed was easier. Rhubarb leaves. Nobody suspects them. Everyone grows them for the stalks, thinking the whole thing is edible. But the leaves? Toxic as hell.
I “borrowed” a few from a community garden in Highland Park. The old lady watering the tomatoes didn’t even look twice.
Dried and ground, the oxalic acid in rhubarb leaves could tear up kidneys. Not ideal for a fast-acting defense, but excellent if I wanted to keep someone weak—bedridden.
Next was the Death Cap.
I found the mushroom under an old eucalyptus tree in Arroyo Park, two blocks from my apartment. It looked too perfect. Smooth, pale olive-green, with a skirt-like ring on the stem and a little white bulb at the base.
I cut it carefully with a pocketknife, slipped it into a sealed wax paper packet, and muttered under my breath, "Thanks for coming to California."
One cap. That’s all it takes. It doesn't kill right away—first nausea, then a calm phase, and finally, your liver gives out.
And finally, the Lily of the Valley.
Someone had planted them in their front yard as decoration. I passed it every day on the way to the bodega. They probably thought it was just a pretty white flower. I wore gloves and clipped a few blooms under the cover of dusk. Cardiac glycosides—fast, quiet, no smell. A noble killer.
Back at the apartment, I ground and labeled everything:
Centipede Venom → "Crawler"
Rhubarb Leaf Dust → "Crimson Sleep"
Death Cap Extract → "Whisper"
Lily of the Valley Resin → "Silent Bell"
I also broke into the school lab to get some apparatus and pharmacies to get the chemicals I needed.
“It’s done.” I said as I stirred the beaker filled with bubbling green liquid.
The spiders and the scorpion venoms weren't ready yet. I took out some needles I bought in a Chinese store, and lathered the venoms onto the needles.
"Maybe I should search for some medicinal herbs. If only I could find some millennium ginseng or Lingzhi Mushroom. Then, I wouldn’t have to cultivate daily."
A millennium ginseng, once eaten, could supply me with 10–100 years of internal energy, depending on how much I could absorb it.
Days passed by, and my house slowly transformed into a home. I decided to take the bus to get to another town. Tinseltown.
"Hmm?" As I was getting out of my apartment, I saw the stove handyman hanging around the alley, watching me from afar. I ignored him and pretended I didn’t see him.
I was going to find my aunt, Jessica Sloane. Born Jessica Jackson. She’d left New Jersey long before I was born, but I met her once at my maternal grandpa’s funeral five years ago.
She was the only one who cried for her dad while everyone else was busy fighting for the inheritance. She’s someone who hugged too tightly. Deeply emotional. And quite a pushover compared to her siblings.
Compared to everyone else in the family, she was human. The only one who had given the previous me a hug for the first time in years at the funeral.
I didn’t know where she lived exactly—only that she was somewhere in Hollywood and married to a man who worked in special effects.
Her last published book had come out five years ago and tanked hard, though she was still trying to write the next Great American Novel. She had released a few more novels, but she never seemed to find her audience.
That was back then. I didn’t know what was going on with her now.
I had one goal: to get her signature on the paper.
The bus smelled like burnt plastic and stale French fries. I carried a backpack, a wallet full of quarters, and a steamed potato wrapped in foil. Since I had a stove, I could get creative with my cleansing diet.
The chicken soup—samgyetang—I'd eaten at a Korean restaurant earlier had been overloaded with salt and MSG. It nearly derailed my detox.
Still, a young boy eating a foil-wrapped potato in the middle of a crowded bus turned more than a few heads.
The bus screeched to a halt, letting out a long, wheezy breath like it was sick of LA’s smog too. I hopped off, hoodie drawn tight over my head, a worn bookstore flyer folded into my back pocket.
The sun hit like a spotlight. Hollywood was cracked pavement, fake gold stars, and a smell that swung between churros and trash juice.
“Hollywood is as weird as ever,” I muttered, passing a shaved-headed woman with a nose ring screaming at a billboard.
The bookstore was easy to find—small, shaded, forgotten—wedged between a psychic’s office and a strip-mall dental clinic. A crooked chalkboard sign out front read:
TODAY ONLY – MEET JESSICA SLOANE!
Author of Dust in the Stars
Signing from 4–6PM. Free cookies.
(Please come in.)
The doorbell gave a sad little ting as I walked in. No one looked up. Not even the blue-haired cashier, who was absorbed in a copy of People magazine.
I made a beeline for the back, past faded posters and crooked shelves of untouched hardcovers.
There she was.
Jessica Sloane sat behind a foldout table, three books stacked neatly in front of her, a flimsy nameplate that looked like it had been printed this morning.
She was scribbling into a notebook, half-distracted, half-despondent, chewing the end of her pencil. The cookie tray beside her sat untouched. A single fly buzzed lazily over the oatmeal raisin.
I paused and stared.
She was exactly how I remembered her: frazzled brown hair tied in a loose bun, gold earrings that didn’t quite match, and a soft expression dulled by fatigue. She was also rather thick, like Bryce Dallas Howard in Jurassic World.
I pulled a paperback from my hoodie pocket and laid it on the table: The Mourning Engines by Jessica Jackson (Sloane)—her first novel. Long out of print. Forgotten even by the bargain bins.
Jessica blinked and looked up.
“…Where did you get this?”
“Time machine,” I said flatly. “Or maybe the used section in Pasadena.”
I stole it, by the way. It wasn’t flying off the shelves, so I didn’t feel guilty about it.
That earned a faint, self-deprecating chuckle. “That book barely sold five hundred copies.”
Over the past few days, I've been gathering information. A tiny blip in an AOL forum—probably posted by her—mentioned the book signing, which is what led me here.
“Well, when I read it, I understood why,” I joked. Her smile faltered just a bit.
Jessica raised an eyebrow, a ghost of a smile twitching at the corner of her mouth. “I don’t think I have a normal audience anymore.”
“You never had one,” I said, then glanced at the signing pen in her hand. “Could you?”
She clicked the pen and hesitated. “Name?”
“Owen. Owen Chase.”
Using a pseudonym was pointless. No one knew about my name change—not even my parents.
She nodded and slowly wrote:
Keep chasing the stars—even when they go dark. —Jessica Sloane.
It must’ve been the tagline of her latest book. That one tanked too.
I slid the signed book into my bag and gave her a polite nod. “Thanks. Good luck with the rest of the signing.”
I turned to leave. Now that I had her signature, I could replicate it easily. No need to bother her further. I’d registered for a landline, so when the cop called, I could fake a woman’s voice and confirm everything.
“Wait—” Jessica said suddenly, straightening in her seat. “Aren’t you a fan? Don’t you want to talk to me?”
I froze. “I read one book. That… loosely qualifies me as a fan.”
“Well, still. That’s more than most.” Her voice was hopeful, almost shy. “Would you like a cookie? I mean—please take one. No pressure.”
“I think the flies called dibs,” I said, narrowing my eyes at the tray beside her.
My senses were warning me about that plate of cookies. Not because of the cooking—but something darker. A lingering whiff of... evil.
Either she was an awful baker and my sixth sense was trying to save me from death, or something had really tainted those cookies.
Jessica laughed. Not a polite one—a real, weary, warm laugh. The kind you forget how to do after a while.
“Right. Fair point.”
There was a quiet pause.
“You know,” she said softly, “I haven’t talked to a real reader in weeks. Do you mind staying for a bit?”
Her tone wasn’t desperate, just gentle. But underneath it was something I knew all too well: loneliness. Not the hollow kind. The quiet, deep ache of someone who used to matter—and now didn’t.
I hesitated. I hadn’t planned on this.
Still, I nodded and pulled up a folding chair.
“Alright. But if you start reading excerpts aloud, I’m fleeing.”
Jessica smiled and asked, “You said you understood why the story didn’t sell much? Are you just trying to sound smart, or do you genuinely not like it?”
“To be honest, it was a slog to get through,” I said bluntly. “The premise is intriguing, but the execution… It felt like an episode of Star Trek no one ever saw.”
The Mourning Engines was supposed to be a gripping survival story about a crew stranded in the vast emptiness of space with only one working cryo chamber for five people.
High stakes, right? Except… They meet a friendly alien, everyone holds hands, sings Kumbaya, and everything turns out fine. No conflict. No sacrifice. No real consequences.
“It would’ve worked better as a children’s book,” I told her. “Because that’s what it felt like.”
Jessica gave a resigned nod. “You sound like my husband. And my friends. And my publishers. But the second book actually sold well!”
She reached under the table and pulled out another book, sliding it toward me. The title read Heartfelt Desire.
“The title makes it sound like a romance,” I said, flipping it open. “But… yep. Sci-fi again. Almost said ‘shitty sci-fi.’”
It was close. Too close. I started flipping through it—two pages every three seconds.
“You haven’t even read it yet! How do you know it’s bad?” Jessica snapped.
“I am reading it,” I replied casually. “I’ve already finished the first chapter.”
She raised an eyebrow. “It takes longer than that to read a page.”
“Not for me. I can summarize the whole chapter for you right now, if you want.”
Her irritation softened into disbelief—then morphed into intrigue. In less than ten minutes, I’d already made it through most of the book.
“Yeah… this one also would’ve worked better as a children’s book,” I said. “I think the thirty thousand people who bought it thought it was a romance. Then they got stuck reading about two moon farmers on Ganymede.”
The largest moon on Jupiter.
Even the cover was misleading. One of the brothers had long hair and was hugging the other from behind. Who even designed this?
“You really did read it!” Jessica’s eyes lit up. “Are you, like, super smart or something?”
I nodded. “I’ve already graduated school and got into Harvard Law on scholarship. So yeah, I’d say I’m pretty smart.”
She squinted at me. “You? A college student? You look like you just started middle school.”
I just smiled. “You can believe me or not. Your choice.”
“Hmm… I choose to believe you. For now.” She said it with mock authority, eyes narrowing.
We ended up talking more about the book. By now, it was almost 5:30. No one else had come to her table since I arrived.
“You kept saying it would work better as a children’s book,” Jessica said. “How do you picture that, exactly?”
I scratched my chin. “You know what? If I had some supplies, I could show you.”
In my first life, I taught myself to animate and draw during COVID—started at thirteen.
Then AI took over the art world, so that dream didn’t last. I did start to review old movies on Youtube though.
But I never really stopped drawing. For most of my lives, I kept drawing. One of my yandere wives even made me paint her constantly, so I got pretty good with brushes, too.
Jessica sighed. “Really? Where are we supposed to get art supplies right now?”
I stared at her.
She caught my gaze and asked, “What?”
“We… are literally in a bookstore.”
Jessica blinked. “Oh.”
I got up and bought a sketchpad, some colored pencils, and a few basic tools. Then I shoved her books to the side and got to work.
“First, characters,” I said, sketching the pair of moon-farming brothers in a style inspired by The Adventures of Tintin.
“Or we could go Tim Burton with it,” I added, switching tone and linework.
The blank A4 page filled quickly. It was rough, but enough to give her a glimpse of what I had in mind.
Jessica was transfixed. Her expression shifted from impressed to almost overwhelmed. I kept drawing for nearly an hour as the sky outside shifted orange.
Finally, I leaned back. “Okay, I need to head home. But you see it now, right? The potential?”
Jessica jolted to her feet and grabbed my hand, eyes wide with excitement. “Owen! You’re AMAZING! Why don’t we do it together? You could illustrate the book!”
“What?!” I blinked. That was not my intention. I’d only meant to help her a little, since—ironically—she was about to unknowingly help me.
“Ma’am,” the shopkeeper called from the front, irritation thick in her voice. “The event is over. Please pack up and leave.”
I shot the woman a small glare. She would have an aggressive, unexplainable case of diarrhea for the next three days. A little divine justice for the dirty looks she’s giving us.
“Oh shoot! Right, right!” Jessica began stuffing books into her tote with practiced resignation. “Owen. Come to my place tomorrow. We can talk more. Here’s my address and number.”
I sighed. “Jessica, you really shouldn’t hand out your address and number to strangers.”
She waved it off and grinned. “For some reason, Owen, I feel like I’ve known you for a long time. And from what I’ve seen today, you’re a nice kid. So come by, okay?”
I was speechless for a second. “Alright then. I’ll come by tomorrow—with a rough draft of the illustrations.”
Since I couldn’t take on physically demanding jobs, this might actually be the perfect solution. I could earn a bit doing something I enjoyed—and help her a bit.
A win-win, for both of us.
“Now, what do I do with these cookies?” I said with a deadpan expression as she left me the plate of cookies to bring home. I felt bad even giving it to the homeless, so I just threw it away.
“Hmm… Since I’m going to her home anyway, maybe I can check and see… I hope that I’m wrong and everything is just in my mind though.”
Because of the cookies, I went to Chinatown and had to spend thousands of dollars buying the stuff I needed to create the talismans.
Comments
KingSpy25i .
Thank you for the great chapter 🙏 Nice reincarnation with slight supernatural in it, I love it!
