Ugh!
Shen Tian coughed. A dark, viscous stain splattered across the rotting wooden floor.
The thick, weary blood of a dying old man marked it—the last residue of lungs that had breathed too much and too poorly.
One hundred and thirty-five years. He had lived one hundred and thirty-five years in total. One hundred and twenty of them he had wasted in this vast, cruel world of cultivation.
He looked at his hands.
His skin looked like wrinkled parchment, stained with the marks of age and the scars of a century of servile labor.
Dryness had claimed his meridians, once filled with a modest amount of Qi, withering them like rivers in a season of drought.
Death would take him as an unknown wretch.
Shen Tian came from Earth.
An ordinary office worker who, after a traffic accident, opened his eyes in the body of a fifteen-year-old orphan in Dust Border City, at the foot of the Iron Cloud Sect, where cultivators flew on swords above the clouds like proud comets.
In his early years, illusion kept him alive.
He believed himself the protagonist of his own novel.
He convinced himself his arrival heralded a legendary epic.
He searched for his "Golden Finger." Oh, how he searched.
He spent his first decade jumping off low cliffs, hoping to fall into the secret cave of a primordial expert.
He gained multiple fractures and a limp that lasted five years.
He spent the few spirit stones he earned sweeping the courtyards of the Iron Cloud Sect on rusted rings, broken vessels, and chipped swords in the outer sect markets.
He rubbed each object until he bled, hoping to awaken the soul of a mysterious grandfather who would take him as a disciple.
He once contracted tetanus, nearly dying of fever because a basic healing pill lay beyond his means.
He tried to provoke arrogant young masters. He sought out the heirs of the major clans, interfering in their abuses, hoping the system would activate at the imminent humiliation and grant him power enough to slap their faces.
The beating he received from the young master of the Lin Clan left him bedridden for eight months.
They shattered three of his ribs and permanently damaged his left meridian.
The sound of his own bones breaking and the cruel laughter of the lackeys echoed in his memory.
At thirty, Shen Tian stopped searching for cliffs and rusted rings.
He buried his dreams deep within his being, but a faint ember still smoldered inside him. He accepted the raw, freezing reality, though always with the bitter suspicion that the universe owed him something.
He settled into the role of a mere background figure destined to fill the ranks of low-level cultivators.
A fourth-grade spiritual root. Pure trash. So mediocre was his talent that even breathing the Qi of heaven and earth seemed an insult to the elements.
So he lowered his head. He stopped looking at the clouds and began looking at the ground.
He turned to spiritual farming. He grew iron-grain rice in the lowlands of the outer sect.
He spent ten hours a day with his feet sunk in spiritual mud, channeling his scant Qi to kill pests threatening the crops.
At fifty, he managed to reach the fifth level of Qi Condensation. A pathetic achievement for any cultivator, but for him it was the result of twenty years of strict saving, eating leftovers, and buying low-quality pills that inner disciples threw in the trash.
At sixty-five, after another decade and a half of slow progress with secondhand pills and breathing techniques stolen from broken manuals, he scratched his way to the ninth level of Qi Condensation. His body had reached its ceiling.
He watched others ascend. He watched fourteen-year-old geniuses form their Foundation Establishment and ride the skies on flying swords, leaving trails of light that cut through the clouds.
Shen Tian watched them from the mud, wiping sweat from his brow, feeling a deep, exhausting emptiness.
At eighty, the world reminded him of its cruelty. The Iron Cloud Sect went to war with Blood Demon Valley.
The war dragged on for five years.
As an outer disciple, Shen Tian was conscripted as cannon fodder. He was thrown into the trenches of flesh alongside thousands of other wretches.
The first year brought the worst. He survived by playing dead. He covered himself with the entrails of his sect supervisor, a man who had always stolen half his wages, and lay beneath a mountain of corpses for three days. He drank rainwater mixed with blood to keep from dehydrating.
He spent the remaining four years as a camp cook, far from the front, stealing food from the rations and pretending to be a simple mortal, his cultivation hidden. He became part of the camp’s background, an old man stirring the pots, faded into the scenery.
When the war ended, the victorious sect, desperate to replenish its decimated ranks, distributed rewards to all survivors. Even to the most useless ones like him.
Shen Tian received an Earth-grade cultivation manual (a badly bound copy with missing pages and blurry diagrams) and three hundred spirit stones from the war reserve.
For a brief moment, at eighty-five, hope burned again in his withered chest.
He shut himself away to cultivate. He spent fifteen years trying to break through the bottleneck toward Foundation Establishment.
He summoned every ounce of his will. He burned his life force. He spent all his spirit stones on Qi-gathering arrays.
He failed.
His spiritual root proved too poor. His meridians, damaged in his youth by the Lin Clan beating and by decades of hard labor, buckled under the pressure.
The backlash destroyed his cultivation base, dropping him from the ninth level of Qi Condensation to the third.
That day, at one hundred years old, Shen Tian wept.
He wept until his eyes bled. He wept for Earth, for his dead parents, whose faces time had worn thin. He wept for his useless life, for his dreams crushed beneath the boot of an indifferent reality.
After that, he aged quickly.
He left the sect. Like a glorified mortal, he wandered the lower world for a decade, subsisting on the few spirit stones he had left and selling his services as a healer of minor ailments. He settled in Black River City, a mortal place on the edges of the cultivation world.
He opened a small shop of defective talismans. His cultivation, reduced to the third level of Qi Condensation, still allowed him to channel small amounts of spiritual energy.
He made amulets to ward off bad luck, their power faint, selling them to gullible mortals for copper and silver coins.
He lived alone; his line ended with him.
The years turned into decades. The village children called him "Old Shen." His hair turned white, then thin, and his back bent under the silent weight of his failures.
And now the end had come.
Cold filled the hut. The winter wind howled through the cracks in the paper windows.
The candle on his table flickered, casting long, trembling shadows over the bare walls.
Shen Tian reclined on his straw cot. Every breath brought agony, a rasping sound like sandpaper against stone.
He felt the cold rising up his legs. Death Qi was gathering in his withered dantian. His lungs, punished by decades of dust and damp, were filling with fluid.
"What a life..." he murmured aloud. His voice came out as a fragile thread.
A weariness so deep it permeated his very soul swept over him.
He looked toward the ceiling, remembering his first days.
That fifteen-year-old boy, full of Earthly arrogance, thinking the universe revolved around him.
He closed his eyes.
The cold reached his chest. His heart gave one last weak, erratic beat.
His consciousness faded, sinking into a black, silent, comforting abyss.
He died.
The smell hit him first.
A pungent stench of damp, stale urine, and mold.
Then came the pain. A sharp, stabbing pain at the back of his head. A sharp, living pain.
Shen Tian’s eyes flew open, and he gasped for air like a drowning man.
He coughed violently, rolling onto his side.
Cold stone, damp and covered in dried mud, lay beneath him.
His eyes, blurry at first, focused quickly. Perfect vision returned to him.
He looked at his hands.
The breath caught in his throat.
Small, young hands, marked by a beggar’s calluses—from crawling on the ground, from climbing walls, from fighting over scraps.
The skin felt smooth, youthful, with the deep wrinkles of time erased. The war’s scars had vanished from his skin.
The meridian in his left arm pulsed with the normalcy of an intact body.
He sat up abruptly, his head spinning.
He looked around. A narrow alley surrounded him.
Gray stone walls rose on both sides.
A few meters away, a splintered wooden bowl rested on the ground, with two miserable copper coins inside.
He knew this alley.
He recognized Broken Dog Alley, in Dust Border City.
The very place where he had first awakened in this world, in a life that had once belonged to another, after the accident on Earth and the assimilation of the young beggar’s body.
"What...?" Shen Tian whispered. His voice came out high-pitched. The voice belonged to a teenager just beginning to change.
He grabbed a puddle of dirty water beside him and tried to look at his reflection. A young, malnourished, dirty face stared back. Fifteen years old.
A cold panic seized him.
He clenched his fists. His nails dug into his palms, drawing drops of fresh blood.
Suddenly, time seemed to stop.
The sound of water dripping from the rooftops froze in the air. The wind stopped. A sepulchral, unnatural silence bathed the entire alley.
A semi-transparent blue screen flickered before his eyes, illuminating the filth of the alley with an eerie light.
An interface panel, with crisp lines and neat text floating in the motionless air.
A genderless voice, perfectly neutral and mechanical, resonated directly inside his mind, making his skull vibrate.
[Hidden Activation Condition Met.]
Shen Tian stopped breathing.
[Criterion: Survive a complete mortal lifetime (over 100 years) in the cultivation plane, relying solely on your own efforts, and die of natural causes.]
[Will Evaluation: SSS-rank.]
[Resilience Evaluation: SSS-rank.]
[Initiating temporal rewind protocol.]
[Temporal anchor successful. Year 1 of transmigration.]
The screen shone brighter, forcing Shen Tian to squint.
[Heaven Suppression System, online.]
[Host Shen Tian, welcome. Your Golden Finger has arrived.]
Shen Tian stared at the glowing words.
He burst out laughing.
A hoarse, broken laugh escaped him. Tears traced lines through the dirt on his youthful cheeks, mixing with the blood on his palms.
"You’re... late," he whispered between choked laughter in the alley’s gloom.
"You’re late."
He wiped the tears with the back of his filthy hand. His eyes gleamed with a sharpness far beyond his fifteen years.
A sharpness forged in a century of humiliation.
He stood up, his young body creaking with stiffness, yet filled with a forgotten vitality.
The blue screen still floated before him, waiting for his command.
Shen Tian spat a clot of blood onto the ground, stretched his neck, and looked up at the cloudy sky of Dust Border City.