Pain!
A bone-deep, agonizing pain!
It felt as if his body were being ripped apart, his internal organs devoured down to nothing by invisible insects!
This intense torment rivaled the most brutal tortures in human history; dismemberment by horses or death by a thousand cuts could hardly test the limits of human pain tolerance any more than this!
Yet—under such extreme agony, a normal person’s brain would trigger a protective mechanism, causing immediate loss of consciousness or shock.
But no matter how Ye Cang rolled on the floor or slammed his head against the wall, he could not lose consciousness.
Instead, as the pain deepened, he grew increasingly awake and hysterical!
“Aaagh!” He let out a bloodcurdling scream, his body suddenly tensing up and snapping into the air before crashing heavily onto the ground.
Right at that moment, the excruciating pain abruptly ceased, disappearing without a trace in an instant.
It was as though the lingering torture of a thousand cuts had been nothing more than a groundless hallucination, and the bone-deep agony merely a fleeting dream.
Just as he let out a long breath of relief, he vaguely heard what sounded like an ancient, timeless entity whispering in his ear.
The voice was long, low, and struck straight at the depths of his soul.
He couldn’t tell which era or region of human civilization its language belonged to.
It sounded like a prayer, a narration, or even the raspy, sinister whisper of a demon from hell, placing the most malevolent curse upon him!
Ye Cang felt a chill run down his spine, cold sweat pouring down his body.
The sensation of being stared down left him on pins and needles, but when he turned around to look, he saw no one else in the room.
All that met his eyes was a simple, narrow room.
On his right, set against the wall, was a single metal bed bolted to the floor.
In front of him was a rectangular metal desk, also fixed to the floor, and on his left was a built-in metal wardrobe flush against the wall…
Evidently, all the furniture in this room was made of metal and securely fastened down, seemingly to prevent them from shifting or flying around.
Ye Cang had only seen this kind of design in university dorms and train sleeper cabins, which indirectly proved that his current location was far from ordinary.
“Where…
am I?” He looked around blankly until his gaze landed on the only window in the room.
Then—through the thick glass porthole, he saw an entire starry sky!
Yes, an entire sea of stars unfolded before his eyes like a grand painting.
Unable to resist, he stepped forward and leaned over until his body was pressed against the glass window, eyes wide as he gazed upon a radiant, deep, magnificent, mysterious, and beautiful universe.
At the edge of his vision, the stars converged into a vortex.
Two massive spiral arms resembled the cosmic tentacles of an ancient god spanning the cosmos.
Where the starlight gathered, a glowing mass pulsed, brightening and dimming as if it were breathing.
If an eye were to suddenly pop open at the center of that shimmering light, Ye Cang’s SANity meter would undoubtedly drop straight to zero from sheer terror.
Fortunately, despite his bizarre situation, no such horrific event occurred.
Connecting this scene with the familiar style and design of the furniture, Ye Cang took a deep breath, realization dawning on him regarding his current plight.
“I remember buying a beta key for Star Rail’s third closed beta from a scalper for a thousand bucks, downloading the test client from the site they provided, entering the key…
a strange black light shot out of my monitor, and then I passed out?” “So…
did I just transmigrate into the world of *Honkai: Star Rail*?” Transmigration was a familiar concept to Ye Cang, a veteran web novel reader of ten years.
After all, due to certain uncontrollable forces, nine out of ten fantasy novels written by Chinese authors featured transmigration—either physical or soul transmigration—and the remaining one had to be set in an entirely fictional world.
What else could they do?
Criticizing real-world issues…
Did they want their books banned or were they just tired of keeping their pen names?
How did the saying go again?
“The gravity of reality is far too heavy, bending the spines of writers and scholars long ago.
As for the few whose spines didn’t break early on, others would just rush up to stomp on them twice.” Ahem, getting off topic…
Ye Cang looked down at his hands.
They didn’t look much different from usual, making it impossible to tell whether it was a physical transmigration or a soul transmigration.
But it didn’t matter—at least judging by his visible physique, he was still a guy with the right hardware.
Nothing else really mattered.
“Ooh, abs?
Tsk tsk tsk, look at those lines.
Unapologetically envious.” He lifted his shirt and pinched his abdomen a few times; the feel was extraordinarily good.
This was something he definitely hadn’t possessed before transmigrating.
It seemed soul transmigration was a lock.
He just wondered where the original owner of this body had gone.
If the guy was dead, Ye Cang would kindly erect a tombstone for him; if they swapped bodies, he could only wish the guy good luck.
Of course, there was also the most uncomfortable possibility: the original owner wasn’t dead, nor had they swapped bodies, but was still sleeping inside this very body—now *that* was eerie.
Ye Cang figured that with his “gacha luck”—even though he always hit hard pity, never won a beta access lottery, and got scammed out of a thousand bucks by a scalper for a beta key—such bad luck couldn’t possibly happen to him, right?
“Whatever, who cares.
We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.
Mirror, where’s a mirror?
Let me admire my stunning good looks!” Optimistic by nature, Ye Cang quickly tossed his worries to the back of his mind and began searching the room for something that could reflect his peerless countenance—a mirror, or any reflective surface.
After looking around round after round, he gave up in defeat.
Though it was a shame he couldn’t gaze upon his own breathtaking visuals, Ye Cang’s attention was quickly drawn to something else.
A pitch-black book, about two fingers thick, sat neatly on the bare metal desktop.
No matter how one looked at it, it was far too out of place.
“What’s this?
A diary?” Curious, Ye Cang leaned in and reached out to touch the book cover, which felt like animal hide.
Since the cover was completely black without a single word on it, he ruled out the possibility of it being a published book.
Instead, it looked like one of those common high-end business notebooks.
In a room bursting with futuristic technology, such a “retro” item felt truly discordant.
Moreover, he wasn’t sure if it was just his imagination…
but Ye Cang felt as though a pair of invisible eyes was staring at him from behind the moment he touched the leather notebook.
Yet when he instinctively turned around in terror, he saw nothing out of the ordinary.
“What’s going on?” Ye Cang took a deep breath, feeling his heartbeat quicken.
Suppressing his inexplicable fear, he opened the black leather-bound book.
What met his eyes were four large, dark-red characters on the title page— *Death Diary* It wasn’t Simplified Chinese, but rather a set of twisted, grotesque characters.
Yet the moment Ye Cang saw them, he instantly understood their meaning—as if the knowledge had resided in his mind all along, or as if the script itself was an absolute form of pictograph.
It really was a diary.
But that “Death” prefix and that color, like dried blood…
Ye Cang swallowed hard, the unease and strangeness in his heart growing ever heavier.
Whether out of curiosity or a desire to make sense of his current situation, he had no choice but to suppress the urge to slam the diary shut, licking his finger before turning to the first page.