I

Hao Zhen awoke with a groan. He scowled. His whole body hurt, and he didn’t remember his bed being this hard—or this prickly. Prickly. Like grass. He blinked, and his gaze focused. Branches and leaves hung above him. A canopy. He was… under a tree?

He shakily stood up. His body protested—for some reason he felt exhausted—but he wasn’t about to sleep in this unfamiliar place. He was in a forest, he quickly ascertained. A moment later it came to him—the mission. Right. He had left the sect on a mission.

While thinking, he kept looking around, and as he did, he caught sight of something blue. He blinked. Not something—.

A body wearing blue robes. Tian Jin’s robes—Tian Jin’s body.

Hao Zhen’s drowsiness fled him as if scared away. Yesterday’s events, which had been trying to recall, rushed through his mind. Finding Tian Jin and Ke Li, being suddenly assailed by ungodly pain, being sent flying by Tian Jin’s punch, and finally feeling an all-consuming pain that rendered him unconscious…

He hurried over to Tian Jin’s body and checked on his condition. The taller boy was alive—his chest slowly rising and falling, his skin fair instead of the deathly pale it had been yesterday. If anything, Tian Jin looked like he was in a painting, with his long black hair loosely spread out beneath him and his face set in a peaceful, relaxed expression.

Hao Zhen slowly breathed out, thoughts churning in his head. He doubted Ke Li would have left without ensuring that Tian Jin was dead. This could only mean that the inner disciple had failed. So what happened to him?

Hao Zhen’s gaze fell on a tree on the opposite side of the clearing. Held up against its bark was a corpse, the hilt of a sword sticking out of his chest—the rest of it no doubt buried into the bark of the tree. The corpse’s head was hanging down, so he couldn’t see its face, but Hao Zhen recognized the white robes it wore.

That answered his question. Hao Zhen looked away; it wasn’t a pretty sight to behold.

Tian Jin had, somehow, turned the tables on Ke Li and killed him. But how? Hao Zhen groaned. The mission had really gone south, hadn’t it? In hindsight, he should have expected this. Tian Jin’s presence was already a major red flag. How that hadn’t occurred to him, he had no—

Hao Zhen blinked. What did that even mean?

A sign that something bad was about to happen.

Right. He nodded to himself. That was what it meant. So why— No. Wait. How did he know what it meant? He didn’t remember ever hearing that term before. And then he remembered: he hadn’t heard it; he had come across it while browsing the…Internet.

He had found it on the internet. The internet. His eyes widened. He didn’t know that term—or did he?

His vision swam. He felt his thoughts slow to a crawl, and then…

Memories. Memories flooded into his head, tearing through his thoughts, piercing his mind like ice-cold needles, fighting for relevance. He stumbled backward and fell onto the ground, clutching his head, a storm of alien memories burrowing into him.

It ended as abruptly as it began. Hao Zhen gasped as the swirl of memories in his mind subsided. Closing his eyes, he took a moment to calm himself down, trying to understand what had just happened. Then, slowly, he felt his mind rearrange itself, adapting to the new memories, and as he reviewed them, he soon found the centerpiece that held them together.

Amyas Auclair.

A name. name. Somehow.

Hao Zhen took in a deep breath and tried his best not to panic. These memories he had just received weren’t new, but old—the oldest memories he had. Although they seemed foreign at first, the deeper he looked, the more he absorbed, and the more he felt himself resonate with them.

Earth. Transmigration. Another world.

Those were the words at the forefront of his mind. They echoed throughout his thoughts, guiding him from memory to memory, from thought to thought. He just stood there, thinking, recalling, adapting. With every memory he assimilated, the faster he assimilated the remaining ones, and before long, he was taking in one memory after the other without stopping.magic

A while later, Hao Zhen opened his eyes. He was still in the forest, it was still morning, but nothing looked the same. More questions than he could count plagued him. There was just too much he wanted—too much he —to know.

Transmigration. In his current life, as Hao Zhen, he had never heard the word, but he was familiar with reincarnation, which could be considered a type of transmigration. Children were taught about the Cycle of Reincarnation, a process that all souls underwent after the death of the body. And as far as Hao Zhen could tell, these new memories inside his head belonged to his previous incarnation. He couldn’t think of a way to confirm it, but they at least felt like they were his. If that was indeed the case, then something had happened, and he had somehow managed to recover the memories of his previous incarnation. He couldn’t tell what had caused it, but that wasn’t his main concern at the moment.

He reviewed what he remembered about his previous incarnation. Amyas Auclair. That was his name—or at least it used to be. He could remember almost everything about his old life—his family, his friends, his sister—but only until a certain day. He had been at home, cooking dinner in the kitchen… And then his life as Hao Zhen began: his mother dying, his father remarrying, only to also die a few years down the line, the abuse from his stepmother and stepbrother, running away from home, and finally joining the Blazing Light Sect.

Hao Zhen couldn’t remember how, exactly, he had wound up in this world. Did he die and somehow reincarnate? Was there a way to go back to Earth? He paused. Did he even want to go back? And who was he? Moments ago this would have been a stupid question, but as the memories of what he believed to be his previous incarnation burrowed into him and took root, he couldn’t help but ask himself… Was he Amyas Auclair, or was he Hao Zhen?

That thought gave him a pause. Was he even still sixteen years old? As Amyas, he had also lived to sixteen, so he now technically had thirty-two years’ worth of memories in his head. He didn’t feel any older, so he reckoned that his mental age hadn’t changed, but it still felt strange.

Hao Zhen groaned. Great. Just what he needed—an identity crisis. Yet another thing he would have to worry about later.

He set his previous life and his transmigration aside for the moment. After receiving these new memories, Hao Zhen was forced to reevaluate the world he had grown up in and spent the last sixteen years in.

Absurd. That was the only word he could use to describe it. There wasn’t any other way to think of it—not after remembering his previous life, knowing what he now knew. He found himself questioning many of the things he had taken for granted all his life. The world itself, the people, the powers they had… Particularly the people. Including him. him.

Everything else aside, he should have turned around and left the moment he learned that Tian Jin was his teammate. Everyone knew that Tian Jin had powerful enemies, and that trouble seemed to find him wherever he went. He couldn’t understand how someone as careful as him had missed all of that.Then there was what happened last night. In hindsight, he realized how stupid he had been. He had pretty much just stood there as if he were a sitting duck, waiting for Ke Li to make his move, even though Ke Li had been visibly straining to keep Tian Jin under control. Sure, that could have been an act, but it was still better than nothing. The situation had been obvious from the start. He should have at least tried something—to run away, to attack first, to help Tian Jin. He should have acted instead of just reacting when it was too late. That made him think a little further back, and he felt a sinking feeling in his stomach, realizing that this wasn’t simply a case of hindsight being twenty-twenty.

He was a cautious—overly cautious, according to many people he knew—person. So how come he just rushed over without thinking twice when he saw the red cloud from Tian Jin’s spiritual flare? How come he just threw caution to the wind?

Now that he thought about it, he should have realized that something wasn’t quite right about Ke Li’s friendliness. Hao Zhen frowned, realizing that he found Ke Li’s behavior odd. He remembered thinking about how Ke Li’s behavior was so unlike the kind of behavior usually expected from inner disciples. The problem was that he had then simply waved it off as Ke Li being an exception. Instead of being suspicious, he had just taken Ke Li’s highly irregular behavior for granted.

Hao Zhen had been acting completely out of character—inconsistently, incongruously.

That thought opened the floodgates of his mind. He recalled bizarre events one after the other—situations in which people, now that he was looking back, had just acted completely illogically and inconsistently. It was as if a fog that had clouded his mind all his life had just cleared up, and for the first time, he was actually seeing the world for what it was.

Just as alarming was that the world he now lived in closely resembled that of a certain genre of novels he used to read back when he was Amyas.

Hao Zhen, as well as all the other members of the Blazing Light Sect, was a spiritual cultivator: someone who practiced spiritual cultivation, which was the act of cultivating the soul through magical means. More specifically, Hao Zhen was a redsoul—a cultivator at the first realm of cultivation, the Red Spiritual Realm, red being the color of spiritual energy of the lowest grade.

Cultivation was divided into six realms, and whenever a cultivator advanced to the next realm, the color of their soul would change as it turned into spiritual matter of a higher grade. Each realm was further divided into eleven levels.

What cultivators cultivated was their crux: a fist-sized orb of concentrated spiritual energy that could only be found inside the soul of magical beings, spiritual energy being a magical substance that was usually physically intangible, visible only through the use of Spiritual Sight. Cultivation essentially boiled down to absorbing magical energy into the crux, increasing its density, and whenever the crux reached a certain level of spiritual density, the cultivator would advance to the next level.

The spiritual energy comprising a cultivator’s crux emanated spiritual power, and it was precisely this spiritual power that cultivators used to perform spiritual techniques, power magical artifacts, and do all sorts of other magical things.

Cultivation, spiritual energy, magical powers, and sects—all of these elements were common both to the world he had been born in as Hao Zhen and to cultivation novels. Although there were a few differences, mostly with regard to the terminology, this world was eerily similar to the setting of those novels. Even the Common Tongue, the only language spoken in this world as far as he knew, closely resembled the Chinese language from Earth, in which most cultivation novels were written.

Hao Zhen felt a shiver run down his spine— No. He shook his head. No way. That was too much. The implications…

Yet it was right in front of his eyes. He couldn’t deny it. It fit perfectly. The world resembled the setting of cultivation novels, and the people resembled the characters. It was like some sort of cosmic joke.

The more he thought about it, the more similarities—the more proof—he found. He slowly exhaled. Did that mean that he was inside a novel, then? Had he into a ?

No. He shook his head. That wasn’t necessarily the case. This world had magic and monsters. People could grow almost infinitely stronger through cultivation. Clearly, this world followed different rules, and these rules affected how people behaved. That it resembled cultivation novels so much could very likely be a simple coincidence. Weren’t there theories about parallel universes back in his old world?

Parallel universes. Alternate realities. That could explain everything. It was an easier pill to swallow than being inside a novel. He had simply somehow wound up in a different universe—one that operated based on different rules. Yes. Hao Zhen nodded to himself. That was it. By remembering his previous life, he must have somehow “broken” those rules—or at least become an exception to them.

Mental crisis averted, Hao Zhen turned around. He could think about the rest later. He had to wake up Tian Jin and figure out what to do. His eyes fell on Tian Jin, and just as he was about to walk over to the unconscious boy, he froze in place.

Tian Jin. He had entered the sect two months ago, getting first place in the entrance examination. Nobody knew his background or where he was from. He was devilishly handsome, supremely talented, and had caught the eye of several elders. On top of the had, he had somehow managed to get on the bad side of a prime disciple—an existence that an outer disciple would usually never have any contact with—who had then schemed to have Tian Jin killed. Somehow, however, Tian Jin had managed to triumph over an inner disciple, who was stronger by at least an entire level, despite having been in a seemingly hopeless situation.

Hao Zhen faltered. He missed his next step and almost fell to the ground.

No way. No. Nope. Nah. Uh-uh.

Then and there, Hao Zhen came dangerously close to having a mental breakdown.