**Chapter 1: The Law of the Jungle and the Devourer's Awakening**
The cold was absolute. It did not merely touch the skin; it sank its jagged, icy teeth straight into the marrow of his bones.
Lu Chen gasped, his eyes flying open as a spasm of violent coughing tore through his frail chest. He tasted copper and ash. His vision swam in a sea of dizzying black spots before finally focusing on the rotting wooden beams of a low, sagging ceiling. A single, fist-sized hole in the thatched roof let in a slanted beam of pale, frigid moonlight, illuminating dust motes dancing in the dead air.
"Where... where am I?" he rasped. His throat felt as though it had been scoured with broken glass.
He tried to sit up, but a spike of agonizing pain hammered into his temples, forcing a groan from his chapped lips. Suddenly, a flood of foreign memories—fragmented, chaotic, and saturated with a lifetime of profound misery—crashed into his mind like a breaking dam.
He was Lu Chen. But he was also... Lu Chen.
The memories belonged to a nineteen-year-old youth of the same name, a lowly rogue cultivator eking out a pathetic, miserable existence in the Outer Slums of the Green Rock Cultivation Market. This Lu Chen was an orphan, possessing a wretched five-element mixed spirit root—the absolute worst aptitude for cultivation. Despite years of grueling, desperate meditation and consuming what little low-grade spirit stones he could scrape together, he was stuck at the pitiful second layer of Qi Condensation.
His life was a textbook example of the bitter reality faced by the lowest tier of the cultivation world. There were no soaring immortals here, no jade beauties, no grand pavilions floating in the clouds. There was only the dirt, the grinding poverty, and the constant, suffocating fear of the strong. To survive, the original owner rented three acres of impoverished spirit fields from the market's ruling faction, the Green Rock Sect, growing coarse Blood-Thread Rice. After paying the exorbitant rent and the monthly "protection fees" to the local slum gangs, he was left with barely enough to keep his mortal body from starving, let alone advance his cultivation.
Two days ago, a sudden, vicious winter chill had swept through the valley. Exhausted from overworking his meager spiritual energy to protect his crops from the frost, the original Lu Chen had collapsed. His severely damaged foundation and malnourished body simply gave out. He had died silently in the dark, frozen and alone.
Until an earthling soul had somehow been pulled across the void of the cosmos to inhabit this discarded vessel.
"Transmigration," Lu Chen muttered, finally managing to prop himself up against the moldy wall. He pulled the thin, rat-bitten quilt tighter around his shivering frame. "I actually transmigrated. And into the worst possible starting scenario."
He looked down at his hands—thin, calloused, scarred from farm work, and shaking uncontrollably. This was a brutal world. The memories painted a vivid, terrifying picture of the Green Rock Market. In the Inner City, protected by powerful array formations, high-ranking cultivators traded precious pills and magical artifacts, surrounded by dense spiritual energy. But here in the Outer Slums, spiritual energy was thinner than a beggar's gruel, and murder was a daily occurrence. Corpses were regularly thrown into the mass graves outside the valley, victims of robbery, revenge, or simply the boredom of a stronger cultivator.
"If I stay like this, I will die," Lu Chen concluded, his mind rapidly shifting from shock to cold, hard pragmatism. In his previous life on Earth, he had been a corporate liquidator—a man who analyzed dying companies, stripped them of their assets, and survived the cutthroat corporate world through ruthless efficiency. He was no stranger to harsh realities. But this was different. Here, bankruptcy meant your soul was extinguished.
He tried to circulate the paltry spiritual energy within his dantian, following the path of the basic *Green Wood Sutra* etched into his inherited memories.
*Cough! Cough!*
A sharp pain lanced through his meridians, followed by another fit of bloody coughing. His foundation was not just weak; it was actively crumbling.
As despair threatened to close its cold grip around his heart, a sudden, sharp hum resonated within his mind. It sounded like the striking of a massive, ancient bronze bell, sending ripples across his consciousness.
Before his widened eyes, the air shimmered. Tiny motes of blue light materialized out of nothingness, weaving themselves together into a translucent, floating rectangular panel. It hovered exactly three feet in front of his face, casting a ghostly luminescence in the dark, freezing hut.
Lu Chen held his breath. He reached out a trembling hand, but his fingers passed right through the incorporeal screen. It was projected directly onto his retinas.
Text began to scroll across the panel in elegant, glowing characters.
## **[Name]:** Lu Chen
**[Age]:** 19
**[Cultivation]:** Qi Condensation Level 2 (Unstable)
**[Spirit Root]:** Five Elements (Metal, Wood, Water, Fire, Earth - Inferior Grade)
**[Lifespan]:** 19 / 22 Years (Warning: Foundation severely damaged. Vitality rapidly leaking.)
**[Spells]:** Spirit Rain Art (Beginner), Earth Spike (Beginner)
**[Professions]:** None
**[Innate Talent]:** Corpse Devouring (Awakened)
Lu Chen stared at the panel, his heart hammering a frantic rhythm against his ribs.
"Twenty-two years..." he whispered, a cold sweat breaking out on his forehead despite the freezing temperature of the room. "I only have three years left to live? And that's if I don't freeze to death tonight."
The original host had overdrawn his life force to fuel his meager spells just to survive the winters and harvest the crops. His body was a crumbling ruin. Even if Lu Chen managed to find food and warmth, the internal decay would claim him before his twenty-third birthday.
But his eyes quickly snapped to the very bottom of the panel.
*Innate Talent: Corpse Devouring.*
He focused his mind on that specific line, and instantly, an expansion window slid open, filling his vision with a block of smaller, denser text.
**[Corpse Devouring]:** *The law of the heavens is to take from what has a surplus to replenish what is deficient. The user may devour the fresh remains of deceased cultivators. By stripping the residual Dao accumulation, spiritual essence, and soul fragments from the deceased, the user can randomly or entirely absorb the target's Cultivation Base, Remaining Lifespan, Spells, and Professional Knowledge. (Note: The freshness of the corpse, the disparity in realm, and the integrity of the body affect the absorption rate. The user cannot absorb cultivation beyond what their current physical foundation can endure without risking explosion.)*
Lu Chen read the description once. Then he read it again. And a third time.
Slowly, the trembling in his hands stopped. The freezing cold of the hut seemed to recede, replaced by a burning, terrifying heat building in the pit of his stomach.
"Take from the surplus to replenish the deficient..." he murmured, a harsh, humorless chuckle escaping his lips. "Devour the dead to feed the living. This isn't just a golden finger. This is a demonic path."
In the Orthodox cultivation world, demonic cultivators who practiced arts absorbing the blood and souls of others were universally hunted down and eradicated by the major sects. It was an anathema. But looking around his squalid, rat-infested hut, knowing he had three years of a miserable, painful existence left before he returned to dust... Lu Chen felt not a shred of moral hesitation.
What did the Orthodox path ever do for the original Lu Chen? It let him starve. It let him freeze. Heaven was unfeeling, treating all things as straw dogs. If the heavens wanted him to eat corpses to survive, then he would become the greatest vulture this world had ever seen.
*Boom!*
A sudden, violent explosion shattered the stillness of the winter night, shaking the dust from the ceiling of Lu Chen's hut.
Lu Chen instantly threw himself flat onto the dirt floor, his heart leaping into his throat. He held his breath, straining his ears. The explosion came from outside, not too far away—perhaps two alleys down in the labyrinthine slum district.
"Hand over the Spirit Gathering Pill, Zhou Ming! You are already poisoned; you can't outrun me!" a harsh, grating voice roared, carrying clearly through the thin, frosty air.
"Dream on, Wang Ba! I spent ten years of savings for this pill to break through to the fourth layer! I'd rather destroy it than give it to a scum like you!" a weaker, desperate voice screamed back.
*Clang! Crash!*
The unmistakable sounds of spiritual artifacts clashing rang out. Sharp bursts of light—the red of fireballs and the sickly green of poison needles—flashed through the cracks in Lu Chen's wooden walls, casting erratic, dancing shadows across the floor.
It was a classic slum murder. Two low-level loose cultivators fighting to the death over a meager resource. It happened every week. The unwritten rule of the Outer Slums was simple: when you hear a fight, you lock your door, hide under your bed, and pray they don't crash through your walls. Involvement meant death.
Lu Chen remained pressed against the freezing dirt, his mind racing. Fear, instinctual and primal, screamed at him to stay down, to hide.
But then he looked at the glowing blue panel still hovering at the edge of his vision.
*[Lifespan]: 19 / 22 Years.*
Three years. And right outside his door, fresh corpses were being minted.
"Opportunity," Lu Chen breathed. His eyes narrowed, the corporate shark from his past life fusing with the desperate survivor of the present. "A crisis is just an opportunity wrapped in danger. If I don't take a risk now, I'll be dead anyway."
He forced himself up. His legs felt like lead, his body weak from hunger and sickness, but a terrifying adrenaline fueled him. He moved silently to the wooden door, peering through a knot-hole into the winding, snow-dusted alleyway.
The battle was moving closer. He could see them now. Two figures darting back and forth in the gloom.
One was a burly man wielding a heavy, ghost-head broadsword that pulsed with a faint crimson light—Wang Ba. He was at the peak of Qi Condensation Level 3.
The other, Zhou Ming, was thinner, clutching his left arm where a black, necrotic stain was rapidly spreading across his robes. He held a shattered iron shield artifact in one hand and was desperately throwing talismans with the other. He was also Level 3, but his aura was rapidly fading.
"Die!" Wang Ba bellowed. He bit the tip of his tongue, spitting a mouthful of blood essence onto his broadsword. The crimson light flared violently, extending the blade's aura by two feet. He swung it in a brutal, downward arc.
Zhou Ming, pushed to the brink, screamed in despair. He threw his last talisman—a low-grade Golden Light Barrier. A thin, egg-shell-like dome of golden light erupted around him.
*CRACK!*
The broadsword cleaved through the golden barrier as if it were made of paper. The blade bit deeply into Zhou Ming's shoulder, slicing diagonally through his collarbone and deep into his chest cavity.
Zhou Ming's eyes widened in shock and agony. He dropped his shield, his right hand twitching. With his final ounce of strength, and a look of pure spite, he jammed his hand into his robe, retrieved a small jade bottle, and crushed it in his palm.
"If I can't have it... neither will you..." Zhou Ming gurgled, blood pouring from his mouth.
Wang Ba's eyes went wide with fury. "You bastard!" He kicked Zhou Ming off his blade, sending the dying man crashing into a pile of refuse just thirty feet from Lu Chen's door.
Wang Ba frantically dropped to his knees, sifting through the crushed jade and dirt, trying to salvage the Spirit Gathering Pill. But the pill had been completely pulverized, its spiritual essence rapidly evaporating into the ambient air.
"Dammit! Dammit all!" Wang Ba roared, slamming his fist into the frozen ground. He stood up, panting heavily. The blood-sacrifice technique he used had clearly drained him, and a nasty, festering gash on his thigh from one of Zhou Ming's earlier attacks was bleeding profusely.
Wang Ba spat on Zhou Ming's unmoving body, quickly rummaged through the dead man's robes, grabbed a small pouch—likely containing a few scattered spirit stones—and limped away into the darkness, eager to escape before the market's law enforcement patrols, who selectively cared about noise complaints, decided to investigate.
The alley fell silent, save for the howling wind.
Inside the hut, Lu Chen's heart was beating so fast he thought it might burst from his chest. He waited. Five minutes. Ten minutes. The biting cold seeped back into his bones, but he didn't move a muscle. He had to be sure Wang Ba wasn't laying an ambush, and that no other scavengers were lurking in the shadows.
After fifteen minutes of dead silence, Lu Chen slowly, agonizingly, eased the wooden door open. The rusted hinges let out a faint whine that sounded like a scream in the quiet night. He winced, pausing, before slipping out into the freezing alley.
The metallic tang of fresh blood hung heavy in the air, mixing with the smell of rotting garbage.
Lu Chen crouched low, using the shadows of the dilapidated huts for cover as he crept toward the refuse pile. There, sprawled awkwardly in the snow, lay Zhou Ming. The man's eyes were glassy, staring up at the cloudy night sky. A massive, horrific cleft split his chest, exposing severed ribs and pulverized organs. The snow beneath him was stained a deep, steaming crimson.
Lu Chen knelt beside the corpse. Up close, the reality of death was nauseating. His stomach heaved, but he forced the bile down. He had seen dead companies; now he was looking at a dead man. The principle was the same. Assets ready to be liquidated.
"I'm sorry, brother Zhou," Lu Chen whispered, his breath pluming in the cold air. "You're dead anyway. Your treasures are gone. Let your leftover essence serve a purpose. I'll make sure Wang Ba meets you in the underworld sooner rather than later."
He didn't know how to activate his talent. He simply brought up the blue panel in his vision, focused his intent entirely on the word 'Devour', and reached out, pressing his bare, trembling palm against Zhou Ming's blood-soaked forehead.
*Activate.*
For a split second, nothing happened.
Then, a sensation unlike anything Lu Chen had ever experienced erupted from his palm. It wasn't physical; it was deeply spiritual. A vortex of invisible, icy suction bloomed in the center of his hand.
*Whoosh!*
To Lu Chen's mystical senses, the world suddenly shifted. He could see faint, swirling tendrils of grey and gold light seeping out of Zhou Ming's corpse. The golden light was his residual cultivation and spiritual energy; the grey light felt heavy, ancient, and deeply connected to the concept of time—his remaining lifespan.
As the vortex in Lu Chen's palm spun, these tendrils were violently ripped from the corpse and sucked into his hand.
The physical effect on Zhou Ming's body was horrifying and immediate. The flesh, already pale from blood loss, began to rapidly desiccate. The skin pulled taut over the bones, turning the color of old parchment. The remaining blood in the snow turned to dry, brown dust. In the span of ten seconds, a freshly slain cultivator was reduced to a mummified husk that looked as though it had been dead for a century.
Simultaneously, a terrifying torrent of energy blasted up Lu Chen's arm and crashed into his dantian.
It was too much. The pure, unadulterated spiritual energy of a Level 3 Qi Condensation cultivator slamming into Lu Chen's frail, Level 2 foundation was like trying to pour a raging river into a cracked teacup.
Lu Chen fell backward onto the snow, biting down hard on his lip to stop himself from screaming as tearing agony ripped through his meridians. His skin turned bright red, steam radiating from his pores. He felt as though he was being cooked alive from the inside out.
*Refine! I have to refine it!* his mind screamed.
Drawing on the original host's memories, Lu Chen desperately forced his consciousness into his chaotic dantian. He seized the rampaging foreign energy and began to violently force it along the circulation path of the *Green Wood Sutra*.
One cycle. Two cycles. The pain was excruciating. His weak meridians bulged, feeling as though they were micro-tearing under the pressure. But as the energy completed its circuits, a miraculous thing happened. The foreign, aggressive qi began to soften, converting into his own mild, wood-attribute spiritual energy.
The cracked, dry riverbed of his dantian was suddenly flooded. The withered spiritual root within him drank greedily. The energy nourished his starved muscles, repaired the minor frostbite on his extremities, and washed away the lingering sickness in his lungs.
*Crack.*
A soft sound, like a breaking eggshell, echoed in his mind.
The invisible barrier holding him at the second layer of Qi Condensation shattered effortlessly. His aura flared, sweeping away the snow around him in a three-foot radius.
Qi Condensation, Level 3!
But it didn't stop there. The grey light—the lifespan—flowed into his bone marrow, bringing a profound sense of rejuvenation. The heavy, oppressive weight of his impending death, the sensation of his vitality constantly leaking away, vanished instantly. It was replaced by the vibrant, thrumming pulse of youth and extended life.
Finally, a flood of fragmented information and muscle memory injected itself directly into his brain. It wasn't memories of Zhou Ming's life, but pure, distilled knowledge and experience.
He suddenly knew the intricate finger signs for a spell he had never practiced. He knew how to channel spiritual energy to manifest a blazing sphere of heat. He also felt a strange, inherent understanding of cinnabar ink, spirit paper, and the flow of energy required to draw mystic runes.
Lu Chen lay in the snow for a full minute, panting, staring up at the moon. The freezing cold no longer bothered him. In fact, he felt incredibly warm, powerful, and alive.
Slowly, he sat up. He looked at the mummified husk of Zhou Ming, then looked at his own hands. The scars from farming were still there, but his skin had a subtle, healthy luster. The weakness was completely gone.
With a thought, he summoned the blue panel.
## **[Name]:** Lu Chen
**[Age]:** 19
**[Cultivation]:** Qi Condensation Level 3 (Solid)
**[Spirit Root]:** Five Elements (Inferior Grade)
**[Lifespan]:** 19 / 65 Years
**[Spells]:** Spirit Rain Art (Beginner), Earth Spike (Beginner), **Fireball Spell (Proficient)**
**[Professions]:** **Talisman Maker (Rank 1 - Low Grade)**
**[Innate Talent]:** Corpse Devouring
Lu Chen's eyes widened, a manic, disbelieving grin splitting his face.
"Forty-three years," he whispered, staring at the lifespan metric. He had gained forty-three years of life from a single corpse. His broken foundation wasn't just healed; it was fortified. He had broken through a bottleneck that had trapped the original host for years.
And the spells! *Fireball Spell (Proficient).* He raised his right hand, channeled a fraction of his newly abundant spiritual energy, and snapped his fingers.
*Fwoosh!*
A baseball-sized sphere of intense, crackling orange flame hovered an inch above his palm. It illuminated the dark alley with a warm, flickering light. It required almost no thought; the muscle memory was ingrained in his very soul, as if he had practiced the spell ten thousand times himself.
"And a profession..." Lu Chen extinguished the flame, his mind racing. Talisman Maker. In the cultivation world, the four great secondary professions were Alchemy, Forging, Array Formations, and Talismans. Talisman makers were incredibly wealthy. They could turn cheap spirit paper and monster blood into life-saving, single-use spells. The original Zhou Ming must have been a hidden talisman maker, trying to save enough money for that Spirit Gathering Pill to break through to Level 4.
Wang Ba had taken Zhou Ming's spirit stones, but Lu Chen had taken everything else. He had stolen the man's very legacy.
Lu Chen stood up. He felt completely reborn. The fear that had paralyzed him just an hour ago was entirely gone. He looked down at the mummified remains of Zhou Ming. If the market guards found a body completely drained of blood and essence, it would cause an uproar. The Demonic Sects would be suspected, and the Green Rock Sect would turn the slums upside down.
He needed to destroy the evidence.
Lu Chen raised his hand, pointing a finger at the dry husk. "Fireball."
A blast of flame shot from his hand, striking the mummy. Because the body was utterly completely devoid of moisture, it caught fire instantly, going up like a dry haystack. Within moments, there was nothing left but a pile of blackened, brittle ash that the winter wind quickly began to scatter across the alleyway.
Lu Chen turned around, his robes snapping in the freezing wind, and walked calmly back into his dilapidated hut. He closed the wooden door behind him, sealing out the cold night.
He sat cross-legged on his ragged bed, ignoring the squalor around him. His eyes burned with an intense, terrifying ambition.
In this ruthless world of immortals, where the strong devoured the weak, aptitude and background were everything. He had no background. He had the worst possible aptitude. But he had a panel that turned death into his personal cultivation resource.
The path to immortality was paved with millions of corpses.
Lu Chen smiled in the dark.
"Since the path is paved with corpses," he murmured, his voice cold and resolute, "I might as well make sure none of them go to waste. My path to immortality... begins in the graveyard."