One moment, there was nothing. The next, it felt like a heavy truck had parked on his chest.
He tried to gasp—a reflex from a life that ended seconds ago—but his lungs refused to expand. They felt stiff, like old leather left out in the sun. Instead of a deep, satisfying breath, a dry, rattling wheeze scraped its way out of his throat.
Hkkk—
Dust. His mouth tasted of ancient, settled dust.
"Water..."
The word barely made a sound. The voice wasn't his. It didn't belong to the twenty-year-old engineer who had fallen asleep with a phone in his hand. This voice sounded like grinding stones. Crushed, heavy, and old.
Panic spiked in his chest.
He tried to scramble up, reaching blindly for a bedframe, a wall, anything. He expected the heavy, groggy weakness of sleep paralysis.
CRACK.
His hand didn't just touch the floor; it went through it.
Stone shattered. Solid rock pulverized into powder under his palm.
He froze, crouching in the debris, staring at the destruction his own hand had caused. The dust settled on his skin.
He looked at the hand.
It was hideous.
The skin was loose, draped over the bone like wet parchment, mottled with dark liver spots. The knuckles were swollen, twisted like the roots of a dying tree.
"Wake up," he hissed.
He raised the withered hand and slapped his own face.
SMACK.
It wasn't the stinging slap of flesh on flesh. It was a heavy, dull impact, like dropping a sandbag on concrete. His head snapped back violently. His neck creaked.
"Wake up!"
He grabbed the skin of his forearm. He pinched it hard, trying to trigger pain, trying to jolt his brain out of the nightmare.
The skin didn't bounce back. It stayed tented, gray and lifeless.
He dug his fingernails in. He pulled.
Riiiip.
A strip of skin peeled away from his forearm. It came off easily, too easily, like the skin of an overripe peach.
He stared at the raw patch underneath. There was barely any blood. Just dark, sluggish fluid oozing from muscle that looked too dense, too dark, to be human.
"Not a dream," he whispered, the horror settling in his gut like lead.
He stood up. His knees popped. He took a step back, and his heel crushed a fist-sized rock into gravel without even feeling resistance.
Then, the pain hit.
It wasn't a headache. It was a drill, boring directly into the center of his skull.
He staggered, dropping to one knee. He wanted to scream, but he slammed his jaw shut. Click.
He didn't know where he was. Screaming could attract things. Predators. Enemies.
He bit his tongue until he tasted copper, forcing the sound down, turning it into a ragged hiss between his teeth. He clutched his head, his fingers digging into his scalp, tearing out clumps of brittle white hair.
ZZZT.
Static exploded behind his eyes. Not a sound, but a jagged, white-hot pressure.
Something was forcing its way in. It felt physical—like cold fingers rummaging through his brain tissue, indifferent to the damage they caused.
Red text started to bleed into his vision, shaky and glitching.
[...Anomaly Detected...]
[...Scanning Host Structure...]
He squeezed his eyes shut, but the words were burned onto his retinas.
[Target Found: Human Cultivator.]
[...Synchronizing...]
The pain spiked. He felt his heartbeat falter, skipping a beat, then thumping wildly against his ribs. The intruder was hooking into his nervous system, syncing with the dying electrical signals of this ancient body.
He breathed through his nose, short and sharp. Don't pass out. Don't pass out.
[Identity Confirmed: Ancestor Li Yun]
[Cultivation: Earth King Realm - Collapsed]
[Current State: Qi Deviation. Meridian Rupture.]
[Vitality: 0.01%]
Li Yun stared at the floating blue window that replaced the red static.
Earth King.
The realization cut through the pain. In the stories, that was a disaster-class monster. That explained the strength. That explained why he could crush stone like tofu. He was piloting a nuclear tank that was leaking radiation.
The text scrolled down.
[Lifespan Remaining: 71 Hours, 59 Minutes.]
The number blinked.
71:58...71:57...
[Binding Complete.]
[Disciple Rebate System Online.]
The pain receded as quickly as it had arrived, leaving a dull, heavy throb in his temples.
Li Yun slowly unclamped his jaw. He wiped the blood from his lip with a shaking, withered hand. He didn't speak. He didn't curse the heavens. He just knelt there in the dark, watching the timer count down, his eyes narrowing.
Scene 3: The Ruined Skyscraper
The blue light of the System faded, leaving him in the suffocating darkness of the cave.
Li Yun didn't move. He sat cross-legged, breathing in the stale air. In. Out. In. Out.
The pain in his skull had stopped drilling and settled into a dull, rhythmic throb, like a bruise being pressed. With the pain gone, the memories that had been violently shoved into his brain began to settle, sinking into the cracks of his consciousness like silt in a river.
He wasn't just a visitor anymore. He remembered.
He remembered sitting on this cold stone floor for five hundred years. The dampness seeping into his bones until it became part of him.
He remembered the feeling of Qi—vast, thundering rivers of energy coursing through his meridians. He remembered the ambition. The desperate, arrogant attempt to shatter the ceiling of the Earth King realm and ascend to the Heaven King.
He closed his eyes and looked inside.
It was a ruin.
His foundation—the spiritual pillar that held up his existence—was massive. It felt like a skyscraper in his chest.
But it was a skyscraper that had been hit by an earthquake. Cracks ran deep through his dantian. The Qi that should have been a roaring river was a dried-up creek, leaking away through the shattered walls of his meridians.
"Failed," he rasped. The word tasted bitter.
He was an Earth King. In this world, that meant he could flatten a city with a palm strike. He was a monster.
But he was a dying monster.
He looked at his withered hands again. The vitality was gone. The failed breakthrough hadn't just broken his power; it had burned his life force as fuel. The System wasn't lying. He was a hollow shell holding a bomb, and the timer was ticking down.
He looked around the cave. He remembered the sect outside. The Heavenly Ancient Sect. Once, it had ruled the world. Now? It was a rotting carcass, feasted on by neighbors, clinging to the name of its founder to survive.
"Ren Huang..." he whispered.
The name floated up from the old man's memories. The Great Emperor. The founder. The god who walked the earth.
Li Yun frowned. The memory of the sect was fading, but the name... the name stuck.
"Ren Huang..."
He repeated it. The syllables felt strange on his tongue, but familiar in his mind. Not Li Yun's mind. His mind.
He rubbed his temples, his brittle fingernails scraping against dry skin.
"Ren Huang. The Heavenly Ancient Sect. The Nine Worlds."
He froze.
The headache flared again, sharp and sudden. A different kind of memory surfaced. Not of cultivation or meditation, but of... blue light. A scrolling finger. A cracked phone screen.
He started to laugh.
It was a dry, hacking sound that scraped his throat raw.
"You have to be kidding me."
He knew this world. He hadn't just lived in it for five minutes; he had spent three months reading about it.
Desolate Emperor's Counterattack.
It was a trashy web novel. A generic power fantasy about a village boy named Wang Teng who stumbles upon a dying sect, finds a token on a dead body, and rises to become the new legend.
Li Yun stopped laughing. The cold reality washed over him.
He frantically searched the "wiki" in his brain, trying to find "Ancestor Li Yun."
Nothing.
He wasn't the villain. He wasn't the wise grandpa in the ring. He wasn't even the sect master.
"I'm background texture," he realized, his stomach dropping. "I'm the explanation for why the sect has no experts left. 'The old ancestor died in seclusion due to Qi deviation.' One line. I'm one line of text in Chapter 1."
He looked at the darkness of the cave. In the story, nobody ever came here. He died alone. He rotted alone.
But then, another detail clicked.
Chapter 1.
The protagonist, Wang Teng. The inciting incident.
Wang didn't come to the cave. Wang found a body outside the sect. A messenger carrying the Heavenly Ancient Order.
That token was the key to join the sect without any text
Li Yun's eyes narrowed in the dark.
"The messenger..."
If he was here... and he was still alive... then Wang Teng hadn't arrived yet. The plot hadn't started.
The token was still out there. Lying in the dirt. Waiting for a lucky kid to pick it up.
Li Yun grabbed the rusted iron stick leaning against the wall. He used it to leverage himself up. His joints popped like gunshots.
"To hell with the script," he hissed.
He wasn't going to wait here to die off-screen. If there was a destiny waiting outside the sect gates, he was going to intercept it.
He took a step toward the light.