CHAPTER

2

A Cosmic Joke

I

Transmigration. 

In his current life, as Hao Zhen, he had never heard that 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. From his birth, to his childhood, to his teenage years. Most vivid were last year’s events: his mother dying, his father remarrying not even a month later, only for him to also die a month into his second marriage. Next came the abuse from his stepmother and stepbrother, which had driven him into running away from home, culminating with him joining the Blazing Light Sect.

He had absolutely no memories of how he had wound up in this world—of what happened between the end of his first life and the start of his current one. He couldn’t even remember how his first life had come to an end, for that matter. Did he suddenly die and somehow reincarnate in another world? 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.

After a moment of deliberation, he decided to set his previous life and his transmigration aside for the time being. There was something else he believed was more important to ponder. Having received these new memories, he 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. Particularly 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. Hao Zhen 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 the inner disciple had been visibly straining to keep Tian Jin under control. Sure, that could have been an act, but doing something would have still been better than absolute inaction. 

Hao Zhen 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 person. In fact, he had often been described, in both his previous life and in his current one, as overly cautious. So how come he had just rushed over without thinking twice when he saw the red cloud from Ke Li’s spiritual beacon? 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. He frowned, recalling that he had found Ke Li’s behavior odd. He remembered thinking about how Ke Li’s actions and demeanor were so unlike the kind of behavior usually expected from inner disciples. The problem was that, after coming to that realization, he had 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.

No matter how he looked a tit, he 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, most of them in the last year. 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.

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, red being the color of spiritual essence of the lowest 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 transmigrated into a fictional world?

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. 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 that, 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.