Darkness.
An endless, crushing darkness enveloped his consciousness.
Shen Jietian felt as though his very soul was sinking weightlessly into a bottomless, silent abyss, stripped of all physical anchors.
His spectral body felt immensely heavy, and his cognitive pathways were sluggish, moving like thick sludge.
Somewhere far off in the distant periphery of his awareness, the searing, tearing agony of his failed breakthrough and the catastrophic cultivation deviation still lingered like a fading echo.
He assumed this was the prelude to true death—the final dissolution of a failed rogue cultivator.
Then, quite abruptly, a sharp, dissonant sound cut through the absolute stillness of the void.
“Jiang!” The voice sounded distinctly annoyed, cutting through the fog of his mind like a blunt instrument.
“Hey, Jiang Wei!
Wake up!”
Before he could process the foreign name, a heavy hand slammed firmly onto his shoulder, shaking him with aggressive familiarity.
“What the hell are you doing sleeping at your desk like a corpse?
Do you want the department head to catch us and give us another sermon on productivity?
Wake up!”
Shen Jietian’s eyelids snapped open instantly, his survival instincts forcing his consciousness back to reality.
However, instead of the dim, shadow-drenched interior of his rented cave dwelling, a barrage of harsh, artificial white light violently assaulted his vision.
He instinctively raised a trembling hand to shield his eyes, his pupils contracting against the intense glare.
When his vision finally cleared, he found himself staring at a ceiling that was perfectly smooth, synthetic, and spotless.
It wasn’t constructed from the rough-hewn cedar wood or weathered granite common in Black Mist City; it was made of an entirely unknown, polished material.
Standing right beside him was a young man wearing tight black trousers, a crisp white shirt, and a strange, laminated plastic badge hanging from a lanyard around his neck.
The man was frowning down at him with an expression of pure irritation.
“Did you seriously manage to fall asleep right before the morning briefing?”
Shen Jietian stared blankly at the stranger, his throat entirely dry.
Sleep?
his mind echoed, a profound sense of disorientation washing over him.
Where exactly was he?
Where was Moonleaf Valley?
What had happened to the white wolf king?
Where was the excruciating pain of his disrupted meridians?
None of it felt real anymore, dissolving like smoke in the wind.
The young man rolled his eyes, letting out a sharp, envious snort.
“Honestly, everyone in the department is jealous of you, kid.
You can sleep so deeply in the middle of a high-pressure corporate office that you literally forget who you are.”
He reached out a finger, tapping forcefully against Shen Jietian’s chest.
“Look at your own ID badge if you don’t believe me.”
Mechanically, Shen Jietian lowered his gaze, his eyes landing on a small rectangular card dangling from his own neck.
The neat, printed characters emblazoned across the plastic surface caused his thoughts to grind to an absolute halt:
Jiang Wei
Employee No.
17342
For a long, agonizing moment, his cognitive faculties completely froze.
Jiang Wei…
The linguistic structure of the name felt intensely, unreasonably familiar.
It wasn’t an alien phrase; rather, it felt like an ancient, vital memory that had been buried beneath countless layers of historical dust, suddenly unearthed by a sudden tremor.
“Oh…” The syllable escaped his parched lips completely automatically, a subconscious reaction.
“Right…”
The coworker let out a short, amused laugh, shaking his head at the display.
“Look at you, you really did forget your own name for a second there.
I swear, I barely manage to scrape together three hours of sleep a night because of these project deadlines, and here you are taking power naps right at your cubicle.
Go wash your face and pull yourself together.
The big boss is scheduled to arrive on the floor in exactly ten minutes.”
Without waiting for a formal response, the man turned on his heel and walked away, disappearing into a maze of partitions.
Left entirely alone, Shen Jietian sat motionless in his swivel chair.
The foreign moniker continued to echo repeatedly inside the chambers of his mind like a continuous mantra: Jiang Wei.
Jiang Wei.
Jiang Wei.
Why on earth did an entirely different identity possess such an unshakeable, visceral familiarity within his soul?
Slowly, his legs moved entirely on their own, guided by a deep-seated physical muscle memory that had been executed thousands of times prior.
As he stood up, he took a proper look at the sprawling environment around him.
The chamber was utterly bizarre.
Rows upon rows of uniform grey desks stretched across the floor, each one occupied by a strange, glowing glass screen displaying intricate arrays of letters and symbols.
People were furiously typing away on plastic boards, conversing rapidly on small handheld bricks, and moving with frantic corporate urgency.
Shen Jietian instinctively attempted to draw upon his cultivation foundation, only for his heart to violently tighten in sudden panic.
The spiritual energy of heaven and earth was completely gone.
It wasn’t merely thin or depleted; it was absolutely, entirely non-existent.
There were no natural elemental currents, no traces of lingering Qi, and no spiritual pressure whatsoever.
There were no grand cultivators flying on swords, no predatory beasts lurking in the shadows, and absolutely no concept of immortality.
What kind of bizarre, godforsaken mortal realm is this?
he thought, a cold sweat breaking out across his neck.
Driven by a subconscious map embedded deep within his brain, his steps naturally guided him toward a nearby tiled washroom.
The chamber was blindingly bright and pristine, the walls lined with smooth, reflective materials.
He watched with a trace of deep shock as clear, unpolluted water flowed endlessly from polished silver pipes at the turn of a handle.
In the resource-starved, primitive slums of Black Mist City, such refined metal craftsmanship and seamless water-shifting arrays would be considered a luxury worth a fortune in spirit stones.
Yet here, the people treated it as an ordinary, mundane baseline of life.
Stepping up to the porcelain basin, he lifted his head to look into the large mirror hanging on the wall.
The moment his eyes registered the reflection, his entire body froze rigidly in place.
A complete stranger was staring back at him through the glass.
The reflection possessed short, neatly trimmed black hair, sharp but distinctly exhausted features, and deep, dark circles under a pair of incredibly tired eyes.
It was explicitly not the rugged, weathered face of Shen Jietian.
It wasn’t even remotely similar.
The very instant his consciousness fully parsed that foreign face, a sudden, blinding explosion of agony detonated inside his skull.
“AHHH!”
Shen Jietian clutched his temples, his vision blurring violently as the entire tiled world began to spin out of control.
And then, mid-rotation, a completely different face materialized over the glass reflection: his own face.
The familiar, dirt-streaked, and slightly scarred countenance he had worn for twenty-two years as a struggling independent gatherer.
As quickly as it had arrived, the blinding headache vanished, leaving him gasping for air.
Shen Jietian staggered backward several paces, his boots squeaking against the wet tiles as his breathing turned frantic and uneven.
The modern washroom, the silver pipes, the strange, form-fitting corporate clothing—everything felt profoundly wrong, a complete distortion of reality.
Yet, contradiction reigned supreme within his chest; despite the wrongness, it also felt intensely, terrifyingly familiar, as if he had experienced this exact lifestyle somewhere long ago in a past existence.
Before he could stabilize his thoughts, the neurological agony returned with twice the intensity.
The mirror image shifted violently once more, locking back onto the face of Jiang Wei.
The unfamiliar mortal visage stared back at him, wide-eyed with confusion and terror.
“What is happening to me…” Jiang Wei whispered, his hand shaking as he extended a finger to touch the cool surface of the mirror.
The reflection replicated the movement with flawless precision.
His heart raced like a runaway carriage.
Suddenly, a dam broke within his subconscious, and a massive flood of contextual knowledge poured naturally into his active mind, requiring no explanation.
He knew exactly what this chamber was: a corporate bathroom.
He knew the structural purpose of the company office, the mechanics of salary-earning employees, the existence of internal computers, the function of combustion cars, and the reality of cellular phones.
The terminology appeared seamlessly, as if it had simply been lying dormant within his soul all along.
His gaze fell down to a sleek, black rectangular object gripped firmly in his right palm—a smartphone.
The moment his eyes processed the device, another catastrophic flood of repressed memories erupted within his brain, hitting him with the force of a high-tier spiritual spell.
Images flashed in rapid succession: a suffocatingly crowded morning subway carriage, roaring highways clogged with metal traffic, glittering skyscrapers piercing a smoggy sky, neon-drenched modern cities that never slept, the vast, invisible web of the internet, cinematic movies, roaring commercial airplanes, white-tiled modern hospitals, structured public schools…
Earth.
The sheer volume of information became completely unbearable.
Shen Jietian—or rather, Jiang Wei—fell heavily to his knees on the hard tile floor, clutching his head as if his skull was physically being split apart down the middle by an executioner’s axe.
Two entirely complete lifetimes, two distinct identities, and two completely different cosmic worlds were violently colliding within the architecture of a single soul, attempting to merge into a singular narrative.
Jiang Wei.
Born on the mundane planet known as Earth.
He had been an entirely ordinary man, a nameless, caking cog in a vast corporate machinery.
His existence had been defined by a repetitive, soul-crushing loop: wake up under an alarm, endure a gruelling commute, slave away at a desk for pennies, sleep for a few hours, and repeat.
Every day was a carbon copy of the last, every month yielded the same financial anxiety, and every passing year brought him closer to decay.
Deep down, he had passionately dreamed of escaping the matrix, dreaming of true freedom and grand adventure beyond the concrete walls.
Then, one ordinary evening, his physical vessel finally collapsed under the unyielding strain of corporate overwork and chronic exhaustion.
Death had claimed him.
Shen Jietian.
Born into the brutal, competitive reality of the cultivation world.
He was a low-tier loose cultivator, perpetually impoverished, structurally powerless, and utterly ordinary.
His existence followed a similarly gruelling, repetitive survival loop: wake up in a damp cave, desperately circulate a mediocre manual, harvest dangerous herbs in the wild to pay rent, survive the machinations of peers, and repeat.
Every day was a gamble with mortality, every month was a struggle for resources, and every year left him stuck at the exact same pathetic bottleneck.
He had dreamed of soaring through the heavens, dreaming of absolute strength and the ultimate freedom of immortality.
Then, the terrifying white wolf king had manifested from the mists, and the cold hand of death had closed around his throat during a failed breakthrough.
The memories of the corporate slave and the rogue gatherer collided with explosive force, twisting and braiding together in an intricate dance of consciousness.
Jiang Wei.
Shen Jietian.
Jiang Wei.
Which existence was the objective reality, and which one was merely a transient, feverish dream born of a dying mind?
Suddenly, the modern office building began to dissolve into static, and the tiled bathroom faded into a grey mist.
The large mirror shattered into countless, glittering fragments that floated weightlessly through the void.
And within the reflective surface of every single flying shard, a completely different memory slice from both worlds manifested simultaneously:
A roaring sedan, a blood-stained iron sword, an electronic computer screen, a glowing low-grade spirit stone, a steel skyscraper, a majestic mountain sect floating in the clouds, a plastic mobile phone, and the cold, intelligent blue eyes of the white wolf king.
Two separate lives.
Two entirely different worlds.
One singular, re-forged soul.
Then, with the suddenness of a lightning strike, the chaotic storm of memories completely ceased, and an absolute, ringing silence settled over his consciousness.
A sudden, familiar warmth began to blossom within the centre of his stomach—a soothing, rhythmic vibration that he recognized instantly.
It was the distinct sensation of pure, unadulterated spiritual energy.
The feeling rapidly expanded outward from his lower abdomen, surging like a revitalizing river through his damaged meridians and flowing neatly back into his central dantian.
The localized warmth grew steadily stronger, denser, and more refined with every passing microsecond, repairing the internal lacerations left behind by his previous cultivation deviation.
Boom.
Shen Jietian’s eyes snapped open instantly.
He sat violently upright in his bed, his chest heaving as he gasped for air, his hand instinctively reaching for the hilt of his sword.
The harsh, artificial white lights of the corporate office were completely gone.
Instead, the familiar, dim wooden architecture of his rented South District cave dwelling greeted his vision.
He looked at the cracked mud walls, the sparse, weather-beaten wooden furniture, and smelled the faint, lingering aroma of boiled yellow rice.
He was back in his true home within Black Mist City.
A thick droplet of dark, coppery blood dripped slowly from the corner of his mouth, and his entire physical frame ached with profound soreness, his pathways still raw from the near-fatal shockwave of the failed breakthrough.
Yet, none of that physical discomfort mattered in the slightest compared to the mental paradigm shift taking place within his brain.
His breathing remained exceptionally rapid as he systematically verified his cognitive faculties.
The foreign memories of Earth hadn’t vanished upon waking up.
Every single detail remained perfectly intact, etched permanently into the grey matter of his mind with absolute, razor-sharp clarity.
The combustion cars, the global internet network, the massive modern cities, the endless corporate offices…
he remembered all of it.
It hadn’t been a transient hallucination or a demonic illusion brought on by the Qi-Breaking Pill; they were genuine, authentic historical memories belonging to his own soul.
Slowly, his hand trembling slightly, Shen Jietian placed his palm flat against his chest, feeling the rapid, steady beating of his heart.
“I…” His voice shook with a complex cocktail of emotions as he spoke to the empty room.
“I was…
Jiang Wei.”
The silent room offered no response to his grand declaration.
For a long moment, Shen Jietian simply sat in the darkness, processing the cosmic irony of his existence.
Then, a low, breathy chuckle escaped his lips.
The chuckle rapidly evolved into a soft laugh, which then transformed into a loud, uncontrollable burst of raw laughter that echoed off the cracked walls.
It was a laugh completely filled with sheer disbelief, profound confusion, existential shock, and a deep trace of generational bitterness.
A mundane corporate worker from a world devoid of magic, reincarnated into a ruthless cultivation realm, living twenty-two full years as an ignorant, desperate loose cultivator, only to recover his sovereign past-life memories after nearly destroying his own soul in a squalid slum.
What kind of absurd, malicious destiny was this?
The heavens were truly playing a magnificent joke on him.
Then, quite suddenly, his laughter cut off mid-breath.
His eyes widened significantly as a strange, deeply profound sensation suddenly rippled inward from his lower dantian.
Shen Jietian immediately closed his eyes, sinking his consciousness inward to inspect his internal cultivation foundation.
A mere moment later, a look of absolute, unbridled disbelief plastered itself across his features.
The iron-like, immovable bottleneck that had structurally paralyzed his advancement for seven agonizing years was completely, cleanly gone.
The thick, viscous spiritual energy within his channels was now flowing with a refined, deep resonance that was twice as potent as his previous baseline.
The Fourth Layer of Qi Refinement.
Middle Qi Refinement.
Against all mathematical and alchemical odds, he had successfully broken through.
The sudden, violent fusion of his two vast souls and the massive expansion of his cognitive awareness had generated a surge of mental power so immense that it had forcefully overridden the chemical errors of the low-grade pill, cleanly re-aligning his rampaging meridians and violently blasting open his choked spiritual pathways while he was unconscious.
Not only had he miraculously survived a fatal cultivation deviation, and not only had he successfully reclaimed his past-life identity, but he had seamlessly stepped into the middle stages of the Qi Refinement realm.
Shen Jietian slowly shifted his legs, stepping off the bed to look out through the narrow cracks of his window shutters toward the vast, starlit night sky hanging over Black Mist City.
His expression became intensely complicated, his eyes reflecting a depth of wisdom that far exceeded his twenty-two years of age.
Jiang Wei.
Shen Jietian.
Earth.
The cultivation world.
For the first time in his entire conscious existence, he truly did not know which identity defined the core of his soul.
Yet, as he clenched his fist, feeling the dense, refined water-attribute Qi coursing through his fingers, one singular reality remained absolutely certain: his path through this immortal world would never, ever be the same again.
End of Chapter 7
I’m a reader trying to become a writer.
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