Lin Tian gagged violently.
His dirty hands flew to his throat as a wave of nausea hit him. The heavy, metallic tang of rust and dried blood coated the inside of his dry mouth like paint.
"Fuck..." he choked out, turning his head sharply.
He spat onto the jagged ground, trying to clear the awful taste from his tongue. Before he could catch his breath, a spike of agony tore straight through his brain without warning.
"Argh! Dammit! My head!" he screamed into the empty air.
He grabbed his own hair, curling inward on the hard, uneven ground. It felt like a rusted iron spike had been driven through his temples, twisted, and left there to rot.
He tried to shift his weight to push himself up.
"Ouch! Motherfucker!" He yanked his right hand back to his chest. His bare palm had scraped against a mountain of jagged metal.
He was lying flat on his back atop a mound of scrap.
He forced his aching, undernourished muscles to drag his frail body upright. He looked down at his surroundings, and his eyes widened in shock.
He was perched on a heap of broken, discarded magical equipment. To his left lay the shattered hilt of a ruined weapon, its finely engraved spiritual arrays still flickering with a dying, unstable glow.
Is that... a flying sword? He stared at the glowing metal, unable to process it. What kind of place is this?
He looked down the slope of trash he was perched on. A purple, polluted swamp churned in the valley below, and the stench rising off the bubbling sludge hit him like a wall.
"That stench is actually lethal," he wheezed, covering his nose with his sleeve. "I’m going to throw up my own organs."
Before he could try to stand, a second wave of agony crashed into him.
"No! Please, not again!"
He fell hard onto the metal as a tearing pain ripped through his skull. A flood of foreign memories smashed into his mind like a runaway freight train — two entirely different lives, forced into one.
Get out of my head. What are these pictures?
He grabbed for something solid to hold on to. "I am Lin Tian. I’m a software engineer from Earth," he said aloud, fighting to keep his voice steady.
But another set of memories forced their way in regardless — rawer, harder, soaked in hunger.
Wait. Who is this kid? He’s also named Lin Tian? Eighteen years old. A scavenger.
The boy’s life had been pure misery — scraping by at the bottom of a brutal, unforgiving cultivation world. He ate trash. He fought stray dogs over moldy bread. He had never once, in eighteen years, gone to sleep with a full stomach.
Slowly, the pain faded, leaving Lin Tian gasping on the metal.
"Holy shit... I am him. I’m actually him now."
A harsh, half-hysterical laugh escaped his cracked lips. He stared up at the toxic yellow sky as the weight of it settled over him.
"I transmigrated. I actually transmigrated into a cultivation world," he said, rubbing his face hard, as if he could scrub the disbelief off his skin.
First level of the Qi Gathering Realm. He almost laughed again. Of course.
It was the lowest rank in existence. His meridians felt like dried, cracked riverbeds — not a single drop of spiritual energy stirred inside this wasted body.
"I’m a trash mob," he muttered. "A background NPC destined to die in a ditch."
He tore through the boy’s memories, hunting for any hidden advantage — a bloodline, a cheat, anything.
Where’s my heavenly root? My overpowered system? Nothing. There was nothing.
He looked out over the mountains of scrap again. This place had a name buried in the boy’s memory: the Artifact Graveyard — a lawless dumping ground where the major sects threw their broken castoffs, and scavengers like him fought over the scraps like rats.
He held up his own thin hands, studying them — malnourished, caked in years of grime, scraped raw and bleeding fresh.
Look at these twigs. I couldn’t punch my way out of a wet paper bag.
Every day here was a scramble for survival, digging bare-handed through the hazardous leftovers of wealthy inner-sect disciples — all that risk for one intact spirit stone, or a scrap of metal worth a heel of stale bread.
He coughed, lungs burning against air thick with spiritual residue and industrial rot.
"Even the air is poison," he wheezed, pounding his chest. "It’s rotting my lungs."
He stared up at the sky — a shifting canvas of dead grey bleeding into red.
How am I supposed to survive here? People in this world fly on swords. They shatter mountains with a flick of the wrist. I don’t know any martial arts. I know how to write server scripts.
He slapped his own cheeks, hard, and the sting yanked him back to the present. He took a slow breath, forcing his hammering heart to steady. Panic would get him killed. Whatever else he was now, he was still a problem solver. He needed to think like one.
Then a high-pitched, erratic whine cut through the silence.
He snapped his head around, instantly on edge. About twenty feet away, half-buried in a mound of discarded armor plates, a shattered array disc vibrated with rising intensity, its carved lines pulsing a deep, unstable crimson.
Why is that thing humming?
The air around it began to crackle. Static built until the hairs on his arms stood on end. The scavenger boy’s memories surged forward, and understanding hit him like a slap.
Spiritual energy imbalance. It’s a bomb.
He ignored the burning ache in his starved legs and scrambled backward, kicking up rust and gravel, pushing his failing body to its limit. He scanned for cover and found it — the ruined hull of a destroyed crystal tank, half-buried in scrap to his left.
He threw himself toward it and dove behind the steel plating just as the whine climbed to an unbearable pitch.
He slammed his back against the metal, pulled his knees to his chest, and covered his head, mouth open, bracing for what was coming.
BOOM!
The explosion tore through the Artifact Graveyard. Heat rolled over his hiding place in a wall, singeing the edges of his ragged clothes. Thousands of razor shards of metal and shattered, still-glowing spirit crystal launched skyward, then rained back down across the trash mountains like gunfire.
Clang. Shriek. Smash.
Lin Tian pressed himself flat against the dirt, barely breathing as the storm hammered his cover. Something heavy slammed into the hull above his head.
Smash!
He flinched, cold sweat cutting through the grime on his face. A jagged shard of a shattered flying sword had buried itself three inches into the steel — inches from his left eye, still humming with leftover force.
"Holy shit," he breathed, staring at the trembling blade. "That almost took my head off."
He coughed as a cloud of dust and pulverized rust rolled over him, his lungs rejecting the haze. His whole body shook with the adrenaline still flooding his veins.
Slowly, the rain of shrapnel tapered off, leaving only the crackle of scattered fires and the hiss of cooling, slagged metal.
Is it over? Am I still alive?
He peeked out from behind the steel. Where the artifact had detonated, there was now only a smoking, blackened crater, wide and merciless.
Look at that crater. That thing wiped out everything in its path.
He pushed himself up, legs trembling, and looked at the sword still lodged in the hull beside where his head had been.
One stray piece of garbage. That was all it would have taken to end him. No safety nets. No respawns. One life, and he’d nearly lost it in his first five minutes of consciousness.
He forced his shaking fists closed, willing the tremor out of them through stubbornness alone.
Then, past the twisted ridgeline of scrap beyond the crater, he heard it — a low growl, deliberate and hungry, and the unmistakable scrape of claws dragging over metal.
Lin Tian froze.
Whatever was coming toward him had smelled the fresh blood on his hands.