Liu Ming woke with a sharp pain in his back, sprawled in the middle of someone else's woods.
His shirt had already surrendered, sliding off one shoulder like it was auditioning for tragic backstory. He pushed himself up, swayed, and immediately discovered that his new legs had all the loyalty of corrupt officials.
He looked down.
"Huh."
He hooked a finger into the waistband of his pants. There was enough empty fabric in there to hide a roasted duck, two steamed buns, and his remaining dignity.
"Kid size. Of course it is."
Daoist Black Calamity had warned him. Youth restored. Body reset. Memories retained. Power not included. It had all sounded very clean and mystical at the time.
In practice, it meant waking up as legal tender for child labor.
He looked eleven. Maybe twelve if the light was generous and the examiner corrupt. His hands were small. His limbs were skinny. His clothes fit like he had robbed a scarecrow and lost the negotiation.
Still, one sentence refused to come out of his mouth.
I want to grow up quickly.
No. Absolutely not. He had already done adulthood. Adulthood was just childhood with worse Wi-Fi and more existential debt.
"System!"
Nothing.
"Status!"
Silence.
"Arise!"
The trees remained employed elsewhere.
"Henshin!"
A bird laughed. Or maybe coughed. Either way, the spirit of mockery was alive and well in this world.
Liu Ming tried a few more options. Cheat codes. dramatic keywords. old game commands. A whispered Konami code offered to the heavens with full sincerity.
The heavens had the customer service standards of a bankruptcy notice.
At last he gave up, straightened his oversized collar with all the dignity available to a stranded child, turned toward the nearest tree, and bowed properly.
"Senior," he said in a solemn voice, "this junior shall now begin his cultivation journey. Please watch over this one from afar."
If Daoist Black Calamity was watching, he was probably enjoying this.
That thought alone was enough to get Liu Ming moving.
He picked a direction and walked.
When a man was lost, he should trust instinct.
Unfortunately, Liu Ming's instinct had been trained by half-remembered survival videos, comment-section experts, and one cartoon sponge. After a minute of serious reflection, he fixed his gaze on a patch of moss.
"Follow the moss," he muttered.
Did moss grow on the north side of trees? South side? Sideways? He didn't know. The point was not accuracy. The point was commitment.
So he committed.
For the next few hours, Liu Ming followed moss with the confidence of a man placing his life in the hands of malicious landscaping.
One hour passed.
Still forest.
Two hours.
More forest.
Three.
The trees had reached a level of repetition that felt personal.
By the fourth hour, his legs shook like chopsticks in an earthquake. He dropped onto damp ground, breathing hard, stomach gnawing itself like a rat in a grain jar.
"Ancestor," he whispered hoarsely, "the moss lied."
He looked at the deepening dusk and felt a profound, reasonable urge to curse everyone involved in this situation. Daoist Black Calamity. The wager. Cultivation novels. Moss. Especially moss.
Then he saw it.
A flicker of orange in the distance.
Liu Ming sat up so fast he almost blacked out.
"A light."
His legs, which had already resigned from their posts, were forced back into service. He stumbled forward, then ran. Badly. Like a child escaping taxes.
The light grew brighter.
Warmer.
Closer.
His heart started to beat faster with the kind of hope that usually preceded disappointment.
For once, he thought, maybe something had gone right.
It had not.
The orange glow came from a village, yes.
A village on fire.
Liu Ming stopped so suddenly he nearly ate dirt.
The first thing he smelled was smoke.
The second was blood.
Not much of the village remained whole. One roof had already collapsed. Another was burning from the inside out. Grain lay scattered in the mud. A smashed door hung from one hinge. Somewhere nearby, a pig screamed with the raw outrage of a creature discovering history.
There were bodies.
Not many close enough for him to count clearly in the dark. Enough.
Men in armor moved through the wreckage with torches and sacks, dragging out whatever hadn't already been taken. One laughed. Another kicked something over. A woman's crying rose once, thin and breaking, then stopped so abruptly that Liu Ming's scalp tightened.
He backed up at once.
No heroics.
No righteous anger.
No sudden awakening of moral backbone.
He had thirty years of death immunity, not thirty years of pain immunity. That was not plot armor. That was an extended warranty on suffering.
Liu Ming turned and started creeping away through the brush with the reverence of a man leaving a tiger's den after realizing the tiger had guests.
He made it perhaps twenty steps.
A horse snorted behind him.
Cold shot down his spine.
He turned and found three mounted soldiers on the road, dark shapes against firelight. One lowered a spear until its tip hovered a finger from his throat.
The lead rider looked him up and down.
"Well. Another one."
Liu Ming dropped to his knees so fast it would have impressed his ancestors.
"Honored military uncles," he said immediately, palms pressed together, voice trembling with sincere self-preservation, "this small one is poor, weak, and of very disappointing market value."
The soldier barked a laugh.
"Disappointing?"
"Yes," Liu Ming said earnestly. "Bones light, appetite large, no useful skills except obedience."
The man leaned down in the saddle and pinched Liu Ming's arm through the oversized sleeve.
"Wrong. This one's got meat. Take him."
Liu Ming was lifted like discounted poultry and thrown into a wooden cage strapped to a wagon.
Inside were seven villagers.
Or what was left of them.
Two women. Three children younger than him. An old man with blood dried across one sleeve. A teenage boy with a swollen jaw and the flat, stunned eyes of someone whose life had just ended but whose body had not yet been informed.
No one welcomed him. It was not that kind of room.
The wagon jolted forward.
When the old man tried once to shake the bars and shout, a guard cracked him across the fingers with a spear shaft. The shouting stopped. So did any serious discussion of escape.
Liu Ming kept his head down after that.
He made himself small. Quiet. Forgettable.
His strange suppressed aura helped. People's eyes slid off him if he didn't force himself into notice. It did not make him invisible. It just made him easy to leave in the corner, like a broom or an unpaid debt.
For once, that felt like a blessing.
By dawn, the column had joined a larger road. They marched for half a day and reached a market town with walls, mud, and the kind of activity that said people here had seen pillage before and were committed to monetizing it.
The villagers were sold.
Not all at once. In batches.
A farm steward bought two. A butcher-looking man bought the swollen-jaw teenager. One woman was led away by a matron in silks without ever lifting her head.
Then a narrow-eyed steward from the Shen Merchant Clan stopped in front of Liu Ming.
He examined him like a buyer testing melons. Teeth. Arms. Posture.
"Can you count?" he asked.
Liu Ming looked up with just the right amount of fear and humility.
"A little, honored steward. This small one learns quickly and speaks little."
The steward grunted. "Can you read?"
"Not well. But this small one will study hard."
This was a lie. He would study hard only if beaten, starved, or strategically incentivized. Fortunately, the world specialized in all three.
The steward considered, pinched Liu Ming's sleeve, and nodded.
"This one for the house. Better than wasting him in the fields."
That was how Liu Ming entered the Shen Merchant Clan, purchased like cabbage, appraised like timber, and assigned a future in retail.
It could have been worse.
It was, in fact, worse in many places nearby.
The Shen clan trained him as a store clerk apprentice.
He learned the sacred mortal arts of commerce:
how to bow lower to richer customers,
how to smile while being insulted,
how to calculate grain weights quickly enough to prevent theft but not so quickly that senior clerks felt challenged,
how to write neat characters with an aching wrist,
how to memorize prices for salt, oil, cloth, tea, vinegar, medicinal roots, lamp wicks, and seventeen other things Liu Ming had once purchased thoughtlessly in convenience stores while worrying about online bills.
Now each one had a ledger line. Civilization really was just organized suffering with ink.
His wages were tiny. Not low. Tiny. An amount so insulting arithmetic should have filed a complaint.
But he got meals.
And a room.
Calling it a room required optimism and poor lighting, but it was his. One narrow bed. One stool. One cracked basin. One window the size of a grudge. After a cage wagon, it felt almost aristocratic.
A few months passed.
Liu Ming survived by doing what he did best: reading hierarchy, avoiding attention, flattering upward, and never once mistaking resentment for courage.
He called senior clerks "elder brother."
He called the head steward "honored steward."
He called the cook "auntie" and got larger ladles of porridge for it.
He made himself useful and harmless. The kind of person people forgot to kick unless they needed something carried.
All the while, he waited for the cultivation part.
It stubbornly refused to appear.
No immortal masters descended from the clouds.
No jade beauties stumbled into his path.
No mysterious herbs glowed in the cellar.
No one shouted about meridians, spirit roots, secret realms, or heaven-defying fortunes.
This world, so far, had given him warlord raids, child slavery, salary theft, and lamp oil bookkeeping.
No cultivation.
Just feudalism with stronger thighs.
More than once, while sorting dried goods or reciting inventory, Liu Ming mentally addressed Daoist Black Calamity with polite resentment.
"Senior," he thought, "if your purpose was to teach this junior the Dao of unpaid overtime, congratulations."
Then, on a hot afternoon while he was checking cloth tallies by the front courtyard, shouting erupted at the gate.
Not the usual shouting. Not delivery shouting. Not "someone shorted us two jars of vinegar" shouting.
This was younger. Rougher. Raw with desperation.
"I said I want to see Steward Shen!"
Liu Ming looked up.
A youth stood at the open gate, held back by two guards.
He looked about fifteen. Maybe less. Skinny enough that a stiff wind might have won an argument against him. His hemp clothes were patched so many times they had become a philosophy. One cheek was bruised. His knuckles were split. His face was sun-dark, sharp, and half-starved.
Weak-looking.
Poor-looking.
Absolutely standard background-extra material.
Then Liu Ming saw the eyes.
They were steady.
Too steady.
One guard shoved the youth hard. He stumbled, caught himself, and slapped something onto the stone threshold.
A wooden token.
Cracked. Dirty. Old.
As his sleeve slid back, a black ring showed on his thumb—dull, plain, and somehow wrong. The afternoon light seemed to touch it and then reconsider its life choices.
The youth lifted his chin.
"I heard the Shen Merchant Clan owes one recommendation for the Azure Mist Sect's entrance trial," he said, voice hoarse but unbending. "My father died escorting your mountain caravan. He left me this token. I've come to collect."
Silence dropped across the courtyard.
Servants stopped moving.
A clerk nearly spilled ink.
The head steward came out, saw the token, and his expression changed.
Liu Ming stared at the ring. The token. The sect name. The dead-father grievance. The starving teenager standing straight in front of a wealthy clan's gate like humiliation was a tax he had decided not to pay.
He had consumed enough trash fiction in his previous life to recognize the pattern.
Sect token. Hidden ring. Ragged youth. Grievance.
If the heavens sold protagonist starter packs, this boy had bought the deluxe edition.
Liu Ming slowly set down his brush.
At long last, the cultivation nonsense had arrived.
And plot had just kicked open the Shen clan's gate.