He blinked once, twice, but the rough, uneven thatch overhead refused to resolve into the smooth, plastered white he expected.
There were no recessed lights humming softly, no faint scent of lavender oil lingering in the air—just the dry, earthy smell of straw and something faintly medicinal. His fingers twitched against a coarse blanket, the texture all wrong against his skin.
Then—
The pain came like a blade splitting his skull—sharp, sudden, and utterly merciless.
Lin Fang's back arched off the pallet as images that weren't his own flooded his mind in a violent tide.
A boy kneeling in the snow, blood dripping from split knuckles as elders watched with cold eyes. The bitter taste of medicinal broth forced down his throat after a failed breakthrough. The crushing weight of a sect elder's palm against his dantian, shattering what little cultivation he'd scraped together.
Each memory carved itself into his thoughts with jagged precision, and he choked on a scream that wouldn't come.
His hands clawed at his temples, nails biting into skin as if he could physically tear the invasion out. But the memories didn't stop.
They twisted deeper, settling into the marrow of his being like roots seeking water.
A name surfaced—his name, but not his—Lin Fang, discarded disciple of the Seven Sutra Sect. The boy who'd been thrown out like broken pottery, left to rot in this drafty hut at the edge of the sect's territory. The boy who had, until very recently, still been breathing.
Sweat slicked his skin as the last of the memories clicked into place. The body he wore wasn't his. The life tangled in his thoughts wasn't his. And yet, when he gasped for air, the ache in his ribs was real.
The dull throb where his dantian had been ruined was real. The anger—gods, the anger—burning through his veins was sharper than any blade.
He forced himself to sit up, muscles trembling with the effort. The movement sent a fresh wave of nausea through him, but he gritted his teeth until it passed.
The hut was small, barely more than four walls and a roof, with a single oil lamp guttering on a wooden stool. Outside, the wind hissed through bamboo groves, a sound that, in another life, might have been soothing. Here, it felt like mockery.
Slowly, deliberately, he pressed a hand to his abdomen. The emptiness there was worse than pain. Cultivation had been this Lin Fang's last hope, and now it was gone.
But the man who wore his skin—the man who'd woken up in this broken body—wasn't the same. He exhaled, long and slow, and something dark curled in his chest.
Not despair. Calculation.
At that moment, the air before his eyes shimmered like heat rising from desert sands, then gathered itself into words that hung suspended—translucent, yet sharper than any blade he had ever wielded.
[Pleasure and Breeding System Fully Awakened]
The characters pulsed faintly, an otherworldly gold against the hut's dim light.
He didn't startle this time. The strange calm that had settled over him since the memories fused held firm, even as another wave of knowledge seeped into his mind—gentle as a lover's sigh, insistent as a tide.
It wasn't cultivation technique. Not in the way the Seven Sutra Sect understood it.
Lin Fang's fingers traced the shimmering characters in the air, feeling nothing but a faint, tingling warmth against his skin.
The words dissolved like mist, leaving behind an echo—a whisper of silk sliding over bare flesh—that coiled low in his stomach.
Satisfy. Breed. Ascend.
The simplicity of it should have been absurd. Yet the emptiness where his dantian had been throbbed in dull agreement.
A slow breath escaped him, fogging the cold air. Outside, the bamboo groaned under a gust of wind, the sound almost like a woman's sigh.
His lips twitched.
Irony, perhaps, that the path to power here didn't lie in austerity or meditation, but in something far more... primal.
The original Lin Fang had spent years starving himself of all but the barest necessities, chasing enlightenment through deprivation. And where had that gotten him? A broken body in a forgotten hut.
He flexed his hands, studying the calluses—some from training, others from scrubbing floors as an outer disciple.
The System's implications settled into him with unsettling ease. He'd never been a saint in his past life. Hadn't the world rewarded those who took what they wanted? Here, it seemed, the rules were merely more explicit.
The oil lamp flickered, casting long shadows across the dirt floor. Lin Fang reached for the ragged robe draped over the stool, his movements deliberate. The fabric was rough against his skin, but the sensation grounded him.
First, he needed to survive. Then he would unravel the mystery of how he had come to inhabit this body.
And if pleasure was the currency of his rebirth… well, he had always been very good at providing that particular service to his clientele. It would not be a problem.
But then a sudden knock broke the silence—soft, hesitant, yet jarring enough to cut through his thoughts.
The scent of jasmine and damp earth drifted through the cracks in the wood. Lin Fang stilled.
No one came to visit outcast disciples. Not unless they wanted something.
Or someone.
"Who?" Lin Fang asked, his fingers curling into fists before he forced them to relax.
The worst possibilities flickered through his mind—sect enforcers coming to finish the job, scavengers hoping to pick clean the bones of a discarded disciple, or worse, pity disguised as kindness.
He knew his place now: a servant disciple, barely a step above the dirt beneath his feet. No one knocked politely for trash like him unless they wanted something painful.
The door creaked inward before he could rise, revealing a figure silhouetted against the twilight. Not an enforcer's rigid posture, nor a scavenger's hunched greed.
The scent of jasmine intensified, mingling with something warmer—sandalwood, perhaps—as the visitor stepped into the lamplight. Silk whispered against skin, the deep indigo of her robes catching the flame's glow like still water.
Lin Fang's breath hitched.
"Su Mei," he said, the name surfacing from stolen memories.
Inner disciple. Alchemy pavilion. Her hands were always stained with herbs, her laughter too bright for the sect's grim halls.
The original Lin Fang had watched her from a distance. Now, she stood in his ruin of a hut, her almond eyes wide with—what? Concern? Curiosity?
Her fingers twisted in her sleeves. "You're alive," she murmured, as if she hadn't believed it until this moment.
"They said you wouldn't last the night after—" Her gaze dropped to his abdomen, where his shattered dantian lay like a buried blade.
Lin Fang's lips twitched. "Disappointed?"
Su Mei's fingers tightened in her sleeves, knuckles whitening against the indigo silk.
"Don't be stupid," she said, but her voice lacked its usual brightness. Instead, it wavered, like a leaf caught in a breeze too weak to tear it from the branch.
The lamplight caught the sheen of moisture in her eyes—not tears, not yet, but something perilously close. "I brought you medicine."
Lin Fang watched her, the ghost of a smirk playing at the corner of his mouth.
Interesting.
The original Lin Fang's memories painted her as untouchable, a distant star burning just beyond his reach.
Yet here she stood, clutching a lacquered box to her chest like an offering. The scent of bitter herbs seeped through the polished wood, unmistakable even unopened. Ginseng. Snow lotus. Things an outcast had no right to possess.
"Stealing from the alchemy pavilion now?" He leaned back against the wall, though the motion sent a dull ache radiating from his ruined core. "What would your precious Elder Kun say?"
Her nostrils flared.
"Elder Kun is the one who ordered your dantian shattered. Do you really think I care what he says?" The words tumbled out in a rush, as if she'd been holding them back for years. The confession hung between them, raw and unexpected.
Lin Fang studied her—the way her lower lip trembled ever so slightly, the flush creeping up her neck.
Not pity, then. Something far more dangerous.
The System's presence pulsed in his mind, a slow, insistent throb that had nothing to do with pain.
Satisfy. Breed. Ascend.
His fingers twitched.
----
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