Kenneth's consciousness slowly returned, shrouded in a haze of grogginess. As he blinked away the fog, he became acutely aware of a stark contrast. Instead of the comforting embrace of his hospital bed's warm fabric, his senses registered a foreign cool, smooth surface beneath him. His face twisted into a scowl as he processed everything, and his right hand instinctively moved to soothe his aching forehead.

"What happened to you?" A male voice asked.

Startled by the abruptness of the voice, his eyes snapped open. Above him stood three people: a man and two women. However, what struck him most, aside from their bewildered expressions, was the fact that they were all naked.

The young man, with his tousled ebony hair cascading just below his ears, framed a face marked by high cheekbones and a strong jawline. His piercing black abyss eyes, set beneath furrowed neat brows, betrayed a hint of confusion as he gestured with a casual wave before resuming his line of questioning. "Do you need me to take you to the medical hall?"

'Am I still under?' The fallen young man whose hair was equally dark but shorter thought with a faint smile tugging at his lips. He sprung up to his feet, and ignoring what he deemed the gibberish of an imaginary character, he moved in the two women's directions with a wide grin, and eyes shining.

One of them was around his height and had long cascading brown hair and an impressive figure, and the other had a skinnier build with short dark hair and was a head shorter than the other one.

Not registering the women's uncomfortable expressions, he approached them and began nonchalantly fondling their ample breasts. The more his hands moved, the more shocked he became.

'My god!!!' He thought with wide eyes. 'Lucid dreams under heavy anesthesia are mind-blowing. This feels too real...'

In amazement, he glanced around the room, taking in its details. The chamber was constructed of plain dark brown wooden walls, with two beds situated behind him, small windows to his right separated by a wide door, and a simple clothes rack on his left, adorned with several loose-hanging robes of different colors.

His gaze shifted back to the women before him, their unnervingly realistic expressions and emotive eyes giving him pause. However, he quickly dismissed his unease as nothing more than a product of his dream-like state and pressed on.

Just as the women were about to push the brazen guy away due to how sudden and uncomfortable everything was for them, they noticed that the other man behind him was also approaching, so they just awkwardly smiled and stood there unmoving.

As he indulged in the lifelike sensation of touching the breasts before him, a sudden hand caressing his buttocks jolted him. Knowing the identity of the person behind him, his expression shifted abruptly from contentment to wariness.

'It's one of those dreams,' he mused with a wry smile, turning his head to confront the intruding figure, he began silently willing him to disappear. Yet, will as he might, his efforts proved to be unproductive as the unwelcomed young man's presence persisted, his hands growing bolder by the second.

He was no stranger to lucid dreams; they offered him a fleeting sense of normalcy and freedom in an otherwise bleak and monotonous existence defined by the severe spinal cord injury that crippled him. His health was volatile, and his body fragile, a grey and depressingly bland hospital room had become his house for the last five years.

A dream filled with attractive women interrupted by the sudden appearance of an extra penis owner wasn't an uncommon occurrence for him. As always, he faced a decision: continue playing with the women while tolerating the unwanted presence of the male intruder, or choose to shift away from the dream entirely.

In most instances, he would have chosen the second option because the existence of a dangerous party member from behind always proved to be a severe distraction, but this time was different. Just a few hours ago, he was preparing himself for the most dangerous surgery of his life, and so he desperately needed relief to take his mind off things.

'Moreover, surely it's not gay if it's an imaginary person?' He sarcastically thought in his mind with a wide smile, but just as he was about to turn around and resume his nipple inspection, a change occurred.

Memory Integration... 3%

Golden bold characters appeared before him, and following that, a vast amount of knowledge that he had never seen, heard, or read about before exploded inside of his mind.

His hands swiftly moved to grab his head as he began stumbling backward, feeling as if a sharp knife was smoothly cutting through his brain. A groan of pain couldn't help but escape his dry lips, and as he retreated, he tripped on the ankle of the person behind him and fell backward. The jolt of pain his brain sent him only confirmed the knowledge he had just absorbed out of nowhere.

This wasn't a lucid dream, but actual reality!

."I am dead?" He mumbled to himself. A mixture of fear and disbelief assaulted him, and tears welled up in his eyes at the realization. He quickly stopped himself from letting them flow by pressing his lips and scrunching his nose high.

"Xie Jing, you need to go to the medical hall. We'll do this some other time, now you're only ruining it for me." The dark-haired youth who crouched down beside him with his genitalia on full display ordered with a stern tone as he stealthily gestured with his eyes.

It was then that another realization hit him square in the face, everything that had happened thus far was real. This thought petrified him, and the fact that he was a stranger to all of these people and he had no clue who they were made it all the more complicated. However, grasping the young man's last words as if his life depended on them, he quickly stood up!

The person who had been talking to him spoke in a language he had never heard of before, and yet as strange as those sounds he was making, Kenneth, or rather now Xie Jing was able to completely understand everything. And so, uttering sounds that he would have previously deemed as gibberish, he agreed with a stupefied blank face, "I will go."

He walked toward the clothes rack to his left. Feeling the slight breeze coming from under the doors over his private parts, he quickened his pace as three pairs of eyes watched everything he was doing in an uncomfortable silence.

He grabbed the first piece of clothing he found, a white thin Daoist robe. Just as he was about to put it on, the dark-haired youth whose name he didn't know, spoke once again, "Your undergarments are above the bed."

Following where his finger was pointing, Xie Jing approached the bed and saw two simple boxer briefs and grabbed one of them.

Chuckling to himself, the dark-haired youth approached and whispered, "That's mine."

Without another word or so much as a glance, Jing swiftly donned the other undergarment, tossed the white robe over him, and headed for the door. There, he found a pair of wooden sandals with leather straps, slipped one of them on, and stepped outside with a heart overwhelmed with a myriad of inexplicable emotions.

However, the scene he was greeted with outside made him pause. Blood drained out from his face as his mouth unconsciously parted open in shock.

"What the hell is that?!" He quietly mumbled to himself as he leaned against the now-shut door with a terrified expression.

He found himself standing under a wooden archway, and beyond it was a dark world with a dirt path in the middle that led somewhere. However, the thing that stood out to him was the giant two-meter-tall black beetle following a middle-aged man who wore a dark cloak. To him, this was a scene straight out of a nightmare.

As he stood there taking everything in, he heard a few hushed sounds from the room he had just exited.

"This Xie Jing is really strange," One of the two women inside said with a disapproving tone.

The other one immediately agreed with her, and said, "Shen Yun, don't ever bring him with you again..."

What followed shortly after were short giggles interrupted by rasped breaths and soft moans of pleasure.

Feeling that he had been humiliated enough, Jing finally advanced as he climbed down the small wooden steps at the edge of the wooden porch, and landed on the dirt path.

His eyes reflexively glanced up as he continued studying everything. Originally, he thought that the darkness was the result of the time of the day, but as he gazed at the faraway ceiling jutted with long brown rocks that threatened to fall at any moment, he knew that this wasn't the case.

From the random memories that he received, he knew that he was underground in a sect called, The Wandering Abyss Demonic Sect. What was that supposed to mean, he didn't know, but from the demonic part, he knew it wasn't anything good.

His right hand trembled with nerves as he surveyed his surroundings, unsure of which direction to take. However, when he saw the left path teeming with menacing fantastical beasts and unknown black figures, he knew where he needed to go: towards the deserted path to the right.

As he continued advancing, his eyes darted from one side to the next, absorbing everything that he could. To his right was the same residential area that he was in previously. A long wooden archway that covered the door's front steps, and identical rooms that flowed from one end to the next. Along the way, he witnessed an unusually large number of couples sitting in front of their rooms barely dressed in anything as they talked with one another.

'Is this some sort of brothel?' He thought in passing because it was indeed an unreasonably large number of couples who were flirtatiously teasing each other with barely any clothes on. But he quickly dismissed such a ridiculous thought, this was a sect, and a brothel had no business being there, clearly something else.

Taking advantage of his directionless walk, he began to sort out his memories.

The body's original owner was a slightly above-average-looking teen with soft short black hair and deep green emerald eyes, and his name was Xie Jing. He used to live in a small village in the Southern part of the Dragon's Tail continent before something happened and now he was here, in an underground demonic sect. However, there was something very interesting about some of the memories from the new owner's perspective.

Xie Jing was a cultivator, an existence akin to deities, someone who had begun shedding his mortal bounds and embarked on the path of immortality. When he was fourteen years old, shortly before his mother's death, she gave him a simple wooden box. Fortunately, his mother had stressed the importance of being able to read, and so when he opened the box and found dozens of old parchments he quickly began to read through them, and the more he read, the more joyous he became.

Turned out, his absentee father was a cultivator. In that box, he wrote some notes for his son explaining to him what cultivation was, and of course, how to do it. There was also a simple cultivation manual with some resources that enabled the previously weak and scrawny village bastard to transform himself into a dragon among men, at least among the men that he knew. The demonic beasts that used to terrorize his village, the bandits, and everything in between became things that he hunted for fun.

Going through all of those memories, and especially some battles, the new Xie Jing was stunned!

It was even more so when he closed his eyes and began feeling the unimaginable power that coursed through his body like a docile liquidized juggernaut. Tears began to swell up in his eyes once again, and unlike last time when he held it in, they gently streamed down his face as he took everything in.

For a weak crippled person who hadn't left his hospital bed for more than five years, the feeling of power and agency he was feeling at that moment could be summed up in three words for him. A dream come true. Just the fact that his legs were horse-healthy, sturdy, and strong, and he was using them to walk brought him a life-changing amount of joy. At the same time, his actual death brought him immense relief.

Only he understood how much suffering he went through. Just as he was about to go to college, a drunk driver hit him, changing the course of his life for the worse. If he had died, things would have been much, much simpler for him. However, fate had other things in store, things that were infinitely worse than death.

Growing up in a very traditional household, he understood from a very young age what a man was, what he should aspire to be, and most importantly, what his duties were. And so when he found himself a weak mess that couldn't even wipe his own arse, an emotional and financial burden to his already struggling family, he wanted to end it all. Unfortunately, things proved to be even more complicated.

On one hand, he hated himself and the cards he had been dealt with, and he didn't want to continue being a burden on anyone. And on the other, he knew how much his suicide would wreck his family, especially his mom. With every passing month and year, he grew more and more jaded, cold, and angry for that excruciating situation he found himself in. And yet, as deep as his rage was at everything, life still held into him, unwilling to let go of its cruel and hurtful grasp.

To finally witness the end of his five-year-long torture, he broke down crying like a small child, something he had done only after he woke up from the accident. A dam of emotions burst out within him. The range of what he was feeling was so vast and far-reaching that in one second he would cry tears of joy and in the other tears of despair at how difficult everything was for him.

After a few minutes of that, he finally began composing himself as he warily looked left and right, afraid someone might've witnessed his moment of vulnerability.

All of a sudden, he heard a male voice screaming, "Cuuuuut!! Perrrfecct!" Followed by joyous laughter.

Before he could even pinpoint the source of the voice, a series of words began to appear before him. Just this time they were longer, more meaningful, and more complex.

Welcome to the Nexus Realm's #1 Game: The Realm's Champion!
Introducing the new series: Worldbound Warriors: The Great Reincarnation. Created by the one and only, The Immortal Emperor Kathur'Ta.
You're among the lucky one thousand competing for the final prize: The Champion's Throne.
The system is now officially activated. For further queries, reach out to your representative.
Your representative's name: Aukhman Goldstead.