The cold seeped into Lu Chen's bones first, a damp, rotting chill that smelled of wet earth and copper.
He tried to pull his duvet tighter around his shoulders, to burrow deeper into the mattress he had bought just three weeks ago, but his fingers scraped against something coarse and brittle. It felt like dried reeds.
*Where am I?*
He opened his eyes, and a spike of blinding agony immediately drove itself through his temples. It wasn't the dull, familiar ache of a hangover or the strain of staring at spreadsheets under fluorescent office lights for twelve hours. This was a sharp, tearing sensation, as if someone were violently shoving a rusted iron wedge directly into the center of his brain, splitting his consciousness in two.
Lu Chen let out a raw, hoarse scream, but the sound that left his throat was frail, broken, and completely unfamiliar.
He doubled over, clutching his head as a violent torrent of images, sounds, and sensations flooded his mind.
*Fields of glowing, azure stalks of rice swaying under a crimson moon.*
*A whip cracking against a muddy back, the stinging spray of blood.*
*A monstrous wolf with fur like steel wire tearing through a man's throat just feet away.*
*A glowing stone, warm and humming with energy, held tightly in calloused, dirt-stained hands.*
*"Pay the rent by the end of the month, Lu Chen, or the Black Tiger Gang will feed you to the Blood-Winged Bats in the Miasma Woods! We don't run a charity for useless trash!"*
The memories crashed against his own—memories of subways, coffee cups, crowded city streets, and the quiet, mundane loneliness of a twenty-six-year-old accountant whose biggest daily worry was making rent on a tiny studio apartment.
The two lives collided, tangled, and violently fused. Lu Chen rolled onto his side, his stomach heaving. He retched violently onto the hard, packed-dirt floor, bringing up nothing but a mouthful of bitter, yellow bile. He lay there, panting, the sour taste of stomach acid burning his throat, tears streaming down his face as the agonizing pain in his head finally began to subside into a dull, rhythmic throb.
He forced his eyes open again, blinking away the tears.
He was not in his apartment. He was lying on a thin, rotting straw mat in the corner of a dimly lit, dilapidated shack. The walls were made of uneven wooden planks, patched with dried mud that was crumbling away to reveal the encroaching darkness outside. The roof above him was a patchwork of overlapping bark and dried spirit-reed leaves, leaking a slow, steady drip of rainwater into a cracked ceramic bowl near his feet.
"I... I crossed over," Lu Chen whispered, his voice trembling. The words sounded absurd, a trope from the web novels he used to read on his commute to kill time. But the cold dirt against his cheek, the smell of his own vomit, and the sheer, undeniable reality of the memories in his head left no room for denial.
He was Lu Chen. But he was also Lu Chen of the Azure Ridge Market, a twenty-year-old loose cultivator scraping by at the very bottom of the cultivation world.
He pushed himself up into a sitting position, his arms shaking under his own meager weight. He looked at his hands. They were thin, gaunt, and covered in deep, ugly callouses and small, unhealed cuts. The fingernails were chipped and packed with dark soil. He touched his face, feeling hollow cheeks and sharp cheekbones. The original owner of this body was severely malnourished, practically starving to death.
Drawing upon the merged memories, the bleak reality of his situation washed over him like a bucket of ice water.
This was not a glorious world of immortals soaring on flying swords, drinking divine wine, and discussing the Dao under peach blossoms. That world might exist somewhere, high above the clouds in the great sects, but down here, in the dirt, the cultivation world was a brutal, unforgiving slum.
Azure Ridge Market was a shantytown built on the fringes of the grand Flowing Cloud Sect's territory. It was populated by thousands of desperate loose cultivators—those with miserable spiritual roots, discarded sect disciples, and opportunistic scavengers. They huddled together for safety against the demonic beasts in the surrounding wilderness, but that safety came at a steep, often fatal, price.
The original Lu Chen possessed a Five-Element Mixed Spiritual Root. In the eyes of the great sects, it was a talent so abysmal it was practically an insult to the heavens. It meant his body was a sieve; no matter how hard he meditated, the spiritual energy of heaven and earth would just leak out, leaving him stuck at the pitiful Second Layer of Qi Condensation for six years.
He survived by renting a tiny, half-acre plot of low-grade spiritual soil from the local enforcers, the Black Tiger Gang, growing Spirit Rice. It was backbreaking, soul-crushing labor. After paying the exorbitant taxes to the Flowing Cloud Sect, the protection fees to the Black Tiger Gang, and buying seeds, he barely had enough rice left over to keep himself alive, let alone purchase spirit stones, pills, or talismans to advance his cultivation.
Three days ago, the original Lu Chen had gone out to the edges of the Miasma Woods to forage for wild herbs, hoping to sell them for a fraction of a spirit stone to make his upcoming rent. He had encountered a low-level demonic beast—a Scavenger Rat. He had managed to kill it, but not before it bit deeply into his calf.
Unable to afford a detoxification pill, he had dragged himself back to his shack, bandaged the wound with dirty rags, and fallen into a feverish sleep. The infection, laced with the rat's mild necrotic venom, had quietly and efficiently stopped his heart in the middle of the night.
And then, the modern Lu Chen had woken up in his place.
Lu Chen reached down and gingerly unwrapped the filthy, blood-crusted cloth around his right calf. The smell was horrendous. The flesh around the bite marks was swollen, purple, and weeping yellowish pus. However, as he watched, a faint, almost imperceptible warmth seemed to pulse through his veins, a residual side effect of his soul's sudden transmigration. The angry purple hue seemed to recede just a fraction. He wasn't going to die of the infection right this second, but he was incredibly weak.
"Okay," Lu Chen muttered, his breath hitching. He ran a trembling hand through his greasy, unkempt hair. "Okay. Don't panic. Panic gets you killed. Just... assess the situation."
He was an ordinary guy. He didn't have a genius IQ. He couldn't recite the recipes for gunpowder or glass from memory. He didn't know the first thing about military tactics or political scheming. In his previous life, his greatest achievement was figuring out how to fix the office printer when paper jammed in the back roller.
He just wanted to live. He wanted to feel safe. He wanted a warm bed, a full stomach, and to not wake up terrified that a gang of thugs was going to drag him into the woods to be eaten alive.
*Rent.* The thought struck him with the force of a physical blow.
According to the memories, the rent for this miserable shack and the half-acre of exhausted soil was due in two days. Three low-grade spirit stones.
He scrambled across the dirt floor, ignoring the throbbing pain in his leg, and dug his hands into a small hollow carved out beneath a loose floorboard near the wall. His fingers closed around a small cloth pouch. He pulled it out, his heart hammering in his chest, and dumped the contents onto the straw mat.
A few dull, grey rocks clattered out, along with a single, semi-translucent stone about the size of his thumb that emitted a very faint, white glow.
One low-grade spirit stone. And seven spirit fragments (ten fragments made a whole stone).
He was short. He was desperately, fatally short.
"No, no, no..." Lu Chen whispered, a cold sweat breaking out on his forehead.
The Black Tiger Gang didn't do extensions. They didn't care if you were sick, bitten, or dying. If you didn't pay the rent, they stripped you of your robes, took your farming tools, and threw you past the market's protective array into the wilderness. For a weak, injured cultivator at the Second Layer of Qi Condensation, it was a guaranteed death sentence.
He sat back on his heels, the crushing weight of despair settling heavily onto his shoulders. He had survived a mysterious transmigration only to find himself on death row with a two-day countdown. He couldn't fight. His only spell was a clumsy, slow 'Spiritual Rain Technique' used for watering crops. He couldn't run; his leg was injured, and the wilderness was teeming with horrors.
*Am I just going to die here again?* Just as the bleak thought threatened to consume him entirely, a sharp, buzzing sound echoed inside his skull. It wasn't painful like the memory merge, but rather like the hum of a high-voltage wire.
Suddenly, a pale, translucent blue screen materialized in the air directly in front of his eyes.
Lu Chen flinched violently, throwing his hands up to protect his face, but his fingers passed right through the floating text. He blinked rapidly, his breathing shallow and fast. The screen remained, tethered to his field of vision.
He lowered his hands, his eyes wide with a mixture of terror and budding, desperate hope. He had read enough novels to know what this might be. A golden finger. A system. A cheat.
He focused his eyes on the glowing text. It was simple, lacking any ornate borders or decorations, just stark white characters against a blue background.
**Name:** Lu Chen
**Lifespan:** 20 / 41 Years
**Cultivation:** Qi Condensation Layer 2 (89/100)
**Spiritual Root:** Five-Element Mixed (Metal, Wood, Water, Fire, Earth)
**Spells:** - Spiritual Rain Technique (Proficient: 12/100)
**Professions:** - Spirit Farmer (Novice: 45/100)
**Unique Ability:** Corpse Devourer (Active)
*Description: The Heavenly Dao is ruthless, treating all living things as straw dogs. In death, all returns to the earth. The host may extract the lingering essence of the recently deceased. By devouring a corpse, the host may randomly obtain portions of the deceased's remaining unlived lifespan, cultivation base, spell proficiencies, or professional knowledge. The fresher the corpse, the higher the extraction yield.*
*Note: Target must be dead. Cannot be used on the living.*
Lu Chen stared at the panel. He read it once. He read it twice. He read it a third time, mouthing the words silently in the gloom of his shack.
His lifespan was only forty-one years. The malnutrition, the grueling labor, the poor environment—they had all ravaged this body. He was already halfway to his grave. His cultivation was pitifully close to a breakthrough, yet stuck entirely due to his terrible spiritual roots and lack of resources.
But it was the bottom section that made his breath catch in his throat.
*Corpse Devourer.* A wave of profound revulsion washed over him. The very words sounded evil, demonic. In the memories of the original Lu Chen, demonic cultivators were the most hated and feared beings in the world. They slaughtered mortals by the millions to refine blood pills, they trapped souls in banners, they desecrated graves. If anyone in the Flowing Cloud Sect caught wind of someone practicing an art related to corpses, they wouldn't just kill them; they would burn their soul in azure fire for a century.
"Devour corpses..." Lu Chen muttered, his stomach churning at the thought. He was an accountant. He got queasy looking at raw chicken in the supermarket. The idea of finding a dead human body and... and doing *what* to it exactly? Eating it? The panel said 'extract the lingering essence', but the word 'devour' hung heavily in his mind.
He shook his head vigorously. "No. No way. I can't do that. That's insane. I'm a civilized person. There has to be another way. I can explain things to the gang. I can offer them my harvest early. I can beg."
But as he said the words, the memories of the original owner surfaced, stark and unforgiving. He remembered Old Ma, a crippled cultivator two shacks down, who begged the Black Tiger Gang on his hands and knees for an extra week. They had laughed, crushed his hands under their boots so he could never form a spell seal again, and kicked him out of the market. Old Ma's screams as the wolves found him just beyond the array boundary had echoed through the shantytown all night.
There was no mercy here. There was no civilization. There was only the strong eating the weak.
Lu Chen sat in silence for a long time, the dripping of the leaky roof the only sound in the room. The cold reality of his impending death warred with his modern, deeply ingrained moral compass. He looked at his shaking, dirt-stained hands. He looked at the single spirit stone and the fragments.
"I just want to live," he whispered to the empty room. "I didn't ask to come here. I just want to survive."
Suddenly, a violent, hacking cough shattered the quiet of the night.
Lu Chen jumped, his heart leaping into his throat. The sound came from right next door. The walls of the shacks in the Azure Ridge Market were notoriously thin, offering no privacy and barely any protection from the elements.
The coughing was brutal, wet, and tearing. It sounded like someone was trying to expel their own lungs.
Through the merged memories, Lu Chen immediately knew who it was. Old Sun.
Old Sun lived in the adjoining shack. He was a man in his late fifties, a low-tier talisman maker stuck at the Third Layer of Qi Condensation. He was a grumpy, reclusive man who rarely spoke to anyone, spending his days hunched over yellow paper, drawing low-grade warding and fire talismans to sell at the market stalls.
Yesterday evening, before the original Lu Chen had succumbed to his fever, he had seen Old Sun stumble back into the alleyway. The old man had looked ghastly. His face was a sickly shade of grey, and his lips were stained black. He had been clutching his chest, gasping for air. The rumor in the alley was that Old Sun, desperate for rare beast blood for a high-grade ink, had ventured too deep into a damp ravine and encountered a Black-Mouth Toad. Its poisonous gas was notorious for rotting a cultivator's internal organs from the inside out.
The coughing next door reached a terrifying crescendo. It was a desperate, gurgling sound, followed by a heavy, wet *thud* as if something—or someone—had collapsed onto the wooden floorboards.
Then, silence.
A heavy, absolute silence settled over the two shacks, broken only by the distant, mournful howl of a beast far out in the woods.
Lu Chen froze. He sat completely still, not even daring to breathe loudly. He waited for the sound of groaning, for the shuffling of Old Sun getting back to his feet.
One minute passed. Then five. Then ten.
Nothing.
Lu Chen swallowed hard. His throat felt like sandpaper. He knew what that silence meant. In the Azure Ridge Market, when the terrible coughing stopped and the silence lingered, it meant another loose cultivator's journey had come to a quiet, miserable end.
His eyes flicked back to the blue panel still floating in his peripheral vision.
*The fresher the corpse, the higher the extraction yield.*
The words seemed to burn into his retinas.
A violent shiver ran down his spine. The thought of going into the dead man's room was terrifying. It was morbid. It was everything his twenty-six years of modern, sheltered life rebelled against.
*But Old Sun is a Third Layer Qi Condensation cultivator,* a treacherous, pragmatic voice whispered in the back of his mind. *He knows how to make talismans. Talismans sell for spirit stones. Spirit stones pay rent. Spirit stones buy food. Spirit stones keep you from being thrown to the bats.*
Lu Chen clutched his hair, his breath coming in ragged gasps. "He's dead," he rationalized in a frantic whisper, trying to convince himself. "He's already dead. I didn't kill him. The toad killed him. Leaving his body there is just going to attract plague rats or corpse-eaters. I'm... I'm just recycling. It's survival. God forgive me, it's just survival."
He forced himself to stand. His injured leg flared with pain, and he almost buckled, but the sheer adrenaline coursing through his veins kept him upright.
He didn't have shoes. He wrapped a relatively clean piece of cloth tightly around his bandaged calf to muffle any blood dripping and walked barefoot toward the flimsy wooden door of his shack.
He slowly lifted the wooden latch. It let out a soft *clack*. To Lu Chen, it sounded like a thunderclap. He winced, holding his breath, listening for any patrols from the Black Tiger Gang. He heard nothing but the wind whistling through the narrow, muddy alleyways.
He pushed the door open just enough to slip through.
The night air was freezing, biting at his thin, ragged clothes. The alleyway was pitch black, lit only by the faint, eerie glow of the array barrier high above the market, which kept the worst of the miasma out. The ground was slick with mud and foul-smelling refuse.
He took a step toward Old Sun's door, which was only three feet away. His heart was hammering so hard against his ribs he thought it might bruise them. Every instinct he had screamed at him to go back inside, to hide under his blanket, to pretend none of this was happening.
*If you go back inside, you die in two days,* he reminded himself brutally.
He reached Old Sun's door. It was slightly ajar, hanging crookedly on broken leather hinges.
Lu Chen gently pushed it open. The smell hit him instantly, almost knocking him backward. It was a suffocating stench of voided bowels, sweet, sickly rotting flesh, and a sharp, acrid chemical smell that burned his nostrils—the signature scent of the Black-Mouth Toad's venom.
He raised a hand to cover his nose and mouth, fighting the urge to gag. He peered into the gloom.
Unlike Lu Chen's bare shack, Old Sun's room was cluttered. There was a sturdy wooden table covered in scattered talismans, pots of dried, crusty ink, and ruined, blackened talisman paper.
And on the floor, beside the table, lay a crumpled shape.
Lu Chen stepped inside, his bare feet silent on the floorboards. He approached the body, his entire body trembling violently.
It was Old Sun. He was lying on his back, his eyes wide open, staring sightlessly at the leaking ceiling. His face was a horrific portrait of agony. Black veins spiderwebbed across his skin, and a thick, dark sludge had dried around his lips and nose. His hands were curled into rigid claws, locked in a final spasm of pain.
Lu Chen stopped three feet away. The sheer reality of a dead human body—not on a screen, not in a morgue, but right here, reeking and fresh in a dingy shack—was paralyzing. The fear was a physical weight, pressing down on his chest, making it impossible to draw a full breath.
"I'm sorry," Lu Chen whispered into the dark, his voice cracking. "I'm so sorry, Old Sun. I didn't want this. But I have to live."
He took a deep breath, fighting down the nausea, and forced himself to kneel beside the corpse. He hesitated for a long moment, his hand hovering over the dead man's chest. What if the ability was a lie? What if it triggered some demonic backlash? What if he was caught?
He closed his eyes, thinking of the impending rent, the monstrous wolves, the agonizing death of infection.
He slapped his right palm flat against Old Sun's cold, stiffening chest.
"Devour," he whispered, willing the panel to respond.
For a terrifying second, nothing happened. The body just felt like cold meat.
Then, the blue panel flashed violently in his vision.
**[Target Acquired: Deceased Human Cultivator (Time of Death: 14 Minutes)]**
**[Target Status: Fresh. Poisoned (Venom filtered by System). Extraction Yield: Optimal.]**
**[Initiating Devour Process...]**
Lu Chen gasped as a sudden, intense suction force erupted from the palm of his hand. It wasn't a physical pull, but a spiritual one. He felt a bizarre, numbing vibration travel up his arm.
Before his wide, terrified eyes, a faint, swirling mist of grey and white energy began to seep out of Old Sun's pores, out of his open mouth, out of his staring eyes. The mist twisted into a vortex, channeling directly into Lu Chen's palm.
It wasn't bloody. It wasn't gory. But it was profoundly eerie. It felt as though he was drinking from a freezing cold, invisible river.
As the energy flooded into his body, the agonizing ache in his muscles began to ease. A rush of pure, unadulterated vitality surged through his meridians, scouring away the exhaustion and the lingering lethargy of his fever.
He watched in awe and horror as Old Sun's body began to rapidly wither. The skin desiccated, pulling tight against the bones. The dark black veins faded, turning into a dusty grey. The flesh seemed to lose all its moisture, turning brittle and dry in a matter of seconds.
Simultaneously, a searing heat exploded in his brain. It was a completely different pain from the memory merge—this was an influx of foreign, structured knowledge.
He saw flashes of a brush moving across yellow paper. He felt the specific, delicate flow of spiritual energy required to draw a line without breaking it. He saw the structure of a 'Fireball Talisman' and a 'Lesser Warding Talisman'. He felt the repetitive, frustrating failures and the sudden, triumphant successes of decades of talisman crafting.
The process lasted no more than ten seconds, but to Lu Chen, it felt like an eternity.
With a final, silent rush of energy, the suction stopped.
Lu Chen fell backward onto his hands, panting heavily, his chest heaving as if he had just run a marathon. He looked at his hand. It looked normal.
He looked back at the floor.
Old Sun was gone. In his place was a pile of fine, grey, odorless ash, mixed with the tattered remnants of his roughspun robes. It was as if the man had been dead for a thousand years and had simply crumbled into dust.
"Oh my god," Lu Chen breathed, terrified by the sheer efficiency and finality of the act. He had completely erased a human being from existence. If the Black Tiger Gang came looking, they would just assume Old Sun had fled into the night to escape rent, leaving his clothes behind in a hurry. Loose cultivators disappeared all the time.
A soft chime sounded in his head, pulling his attention away from the ash. The blue panel updated, glowing brightly in the dark room.
**[Devour Complete!]**
**[Extraction Results:]**
* **Cultivation:** + 11 Months of refined Qi. (Host breakthrough conditions met!)
* **Lifespan:** + 2 Years (Extracted from residual vital essence).
* **Spells Obtained:** Fireball Technique (Novice: 10/100).
* **Professions Obtained:** Talisman Maker (Apprentice: 25/100).
Suddenly, the spiritual energy he had absorbed violently expanded within his dantian, the spiritual center in his lower abdomen. The sheer volume of the refined Qi from a Third Layer cultivator crashing into a weak Second Layer body was overwhelming.
Lu Chen gritted his teeth, suppressing a scream as a popping sound echoed within his body. It felt like a blocked pipe had suddenly burst open. The spiritual energy, previously stagnant and leaking, roared through his narrow meridians, widening them painfully but effectively.
He felt a profound lightness wash over him. The festering wound on his leg throbbed with a hot, itching sensation as the increased flow of Qi actively accelerated his body's natural healing, fighting back the remnants of the rat venom.
He opened his eyes. The gloom of the shack seemed slightly less oppressive. His vision was sharper; he could see the individual grains of dust settling on the floorboards. His hearing was more acute; he could hear the scuttling of insects beneath the floor.
He brought up his status panel.
**Name:** Lu Chen
**Lifespan:** 20 / 43 Years
**Cultivation:** Qi Condensation Layer 3 (4/100)
**Spiritual Root:** Five-Element Mixed
**Spells:** - Spiritual Rain Technique (Proficient: 12/100)
* Fireball Technique (Novice: 10/100)
**Professions:** - Spirit Farmer (Novice: 45/100)
* Talisman Maker (Apprentice: 25/100)
He had broken through. After six years of desperate, stagnant suffering by the original owner, he had reached the Third Layer of Qi Condensation in ten seconds. He had gained two years of life. He knew how to make talismans. He knew a combat spell.
He raised his right hand, extending his index finger. He tapped into the newly acquired knowledge, visualizing the precise flow of Qi required. He pushed a fraction of his spiritual energy up his arm and out through his fingertip.
*Whoosh.*
A ball of orange flame, about the size of an apple, ignited at the tip of his finger. It crackled softly, casting dancing, warm shadows across the dingy room. He could feel the intense heat radiating from it. It wasn't a world-destroying spell, but to Lu Chen, it was the most beautiful, terrifying thing he had ever seen.
He closed his hand, extinguishing the flame immediately. He didn't want to waste his precious Qi, nor did he want to draw attention with the light.
He sat there in the dark, next to the pile of ash, his emotions in absolute turmoil. The guilt and revulsion of desecrating a corpse warred violently with the intoxicating, undeniable relief of newfound power.
He looked at the table. Old Sun's talisman-making tools were still there. A cheap Langhao brush, a half-empty pot of low-grade cinnabar ink, and a stack of blank, yellow talisman paper. To the original Lu Chen, these were useless trash. To the current Lu Chen, with the newly injected muscle memory and knowledge, they were a goldmine. They were his ticket to paying rent.
Lu Chen hurriedly gathered the brush, the ink, and the blank paper, stuffing them into the front of his robes. He looked down at the ash one last time.
"Thank you, Old Sun," Lu Chen whispered, his voice steadying, hardening just a fraction. "I promise I won't waste what you gave me. I will survive."
He turned and slipped back out the door, carefully pulling it shut behind him. The alleyway was still empty, cold, and dark. He crept back into his own shack, sliding the wooden latch firmly into place.
He sat down on his ratty straw mat, his heart finally beginning to slow to a normal rhythm. His leg still hurt, but the feverish haze was gone. He felt clear-headed. He felt alive.
He knew exactly what this ability meant. It meant he didn't need profound comprehension of the heavens. He didn't need heaven-defying spiritual roots or the backing of a massive sect. He didn't need to fight over heavenly treasures or delve into dangerous ancient ruins.
He just needed to wait.
In a world as brutal and violent as the cultivation world, where loose cultivators died every day like weeds cut down by a scythe, death was the only constant. And as long as there was death, Lu Chen had a path forward.
He would hide. He would farm his spirit rice. He would quietly make talismans in the dead of night to sell for spirit stones. He would act like the same coward, the same useless, mixed-root trash everyone thought he was. He would keep his head down, draw no attention to himself, and never, ever reveal the terrifying, heaven-defying nature of his panel.
And when the violence of the world inevitably left bodies in its wake, he would be there in the shadows, quietly scavenging, quietly devouring, and slowly, imperceptibly, growing stronger.
Lu Chen pulled his thin blanket up to his chin. For the first time since waking up in this terrifying new reality, a small, genuine spark of hope ignited in his chest.
He closed his eyes, preparing to rest and let his body adapt to the breakthrough. Tomorrow, he had talismans to draw, and rent to pay.