All the Dust that Falls - Chapter 21: A Clean Start

Demien Walter died on a rain-soaked road in 2025, his career a footnote in football history.A journeyman midfielder whose playing days ended in obscurity. A tactical obsessive whose notebooks gathered dust. A coach whose first opportunity came too late and ended too soon.Until he opened his eyes in 2003, inhabiting the body of Yves Laurent — head coach of AS Monaco.Now, armed with twenty years of football knowledge from a future that hasn't happened yet, Demien faces the ultimate tactical challenge: rewriting history from the touchline.He knows which players will become legends. He remembers which matches change careers. He's witnessed the tactical revolutions that transformed the game.Monaco is just the beginning. With each victory, each tactical masterclass, each deviation from the timeline he remembers, Demien alters football's destiny. From the Champions League's bright lights to World Cup glory, from Milan to Madrid to Manchester, his journey will reshape the beautiful game in ways no one could predict.No cheat codes. No supernatural abilities. No second chances.Just a man with future knowledge in a past world, attempting to build a legacy that even death couldn't erase.Football isn't just played on the pitch. It's won in the mind.And Demien Walter's mind has already lived through everything that's about to happen.

On the night of her coming-of-age ceremony, Nan Zhi is lured into a trap by the people closest to her and falls pregnant.

Four years later, she returns with her son.

A respected and domineering man suddenly barges into her world.

“Speak! Who is the child’s father?”

An adorable child holding a water gun appears out of nowhere, shouting, “Who is this wild man? How dare he snatch Brother Jie’s goddess?!”

From then on, two small domineering brats and a manchild are added to her world.

In the middle of the night, he sneaks into her room, pressing a heated kiss onto her lips.

“Woman, do you know what’s the result of stealing my seed?”

“What?”

“From now on, you have to let me kiss and pamper you everyday.”

Erm… How was her inability to walk the next day, the result of his pampering?

In her last life, Qu Zhi tried her best to be a good wife who was sensible and did not cause trouble, a filial and good daughter who helped her family, and a good mother who accompanied her children. However, Qu Zhi worked hard and suffered all her life. When she was about to die, she realized that in the end, all she got back for her hard work were complaints. Her husband complained that she was an idle, rich wife all day long who wasn’t satisfied with her happiness at home, and that she was a greedy woman.

But after decades of marriage, her husband had a firm, deadly hold on all her money, and she didn’t even have a dime to her name, nor a property to call her own. Every time she asked for money, he would trample all over her self-esteem. Her husband’s cold and sarcastic words made her unable to lift her head, and his friends would demean her while drinking wine, making her tremble with anger. This man had once said he would take care of her, yet he turned a blind eye! Those people focused on her happiness as a topic, and made a joke out of it.

Even her three children resented her for her uneven love towards everyone, and their relationship only became more strained as time passed. She had spent her whole life as a loner, and she had nothing. Lying on the operation table, Qu Zhi thought that if she could do it all over again, she wouldn’t be a housewife. She wouldn’t have given her second daughter away, and she wouldn’t take care of her blood-sucking relatives.

She wouldn’t marry her indifferent, cold husband either! When she next opened her eyes, she was back to twenty years in the past. Her eldest daughter was still in elementary school, and her second daughter had been in her belly for several months…

When natural disasters ran rampant, with extreme cold and storms spreading endlessly…When the world mutated, zombies surged like tides, and eerie horrors emerged…When the apocalypse descended, massive Devouring Abysses hundreds of kilometers in diameter began appearing around the globe…When people looked up at the atmospheric cloud layers and saw the slowly emerging corpse of a colossal evil god…From that day, people began to notice that daylight was arriving later and later, until the sun no longer rose, plunging the world into an unending polar night.For survival, on that day, the Apocalypse Radio made its final broadcast to the world:“Everyone, flee eastward—escape to dawn!”…Lin Xian awakened the [Mechanical Heart] ability. He could devour machinery to gain various mysterious skills, scan machines to obtain blueprints for manufacturing, and even use his thoughts to achieve unified control of different machines.Thus, he found a 200-ton heavy gas-powered locomotive, towing specially modified storage, planting, production, medical, and living carriages, and embarked on a 320,000-kilometer journey along the planetary orbital rail—charging eastward toward the dawn!