The energy drink had gone flat hours ago, and it still tasted like batteries and cheap sugar when Yan Fan forced down the last warm mouthful.
He set the can on the desk without looking. It clinked against three others. The room smelled of them, sweet and metallic, and of old instant noodles, unwashed sheets and the stale salt of his own sweat. The only light came from the monitor. It turned the walls of the rented apartment a cold blue and lit the dust on the windowsill, the pile of unopened mail by the door and the dark shape of a jacket he hadn't worn outside in weeks.
Eleven tabs were open across the top of the browser. He knew every thumbnail by heart.
His right hand was already moving.
He had been at it for a long time, far too long. The chair creaked in a steady rhythm. His bare chest was slick, sweat cooling into a clammy film whenever the ancient air conditioner coughed out a weak breath. His heart pounded. It had been pounding for a while, hard and fast, a drum that wouldn't slow down. He told himself it was excitement.
One more.
That was what he always said. One more video. One more edge, holding off right at the brink until his thighs shook, then backing away so the next climb would be sharper. One more frantic stroke toward a climax that never quite delivered what it promised. Every night ended the same way: a few seconds of white noise, then the long grey fall into the same small room, the same blue light, the same silence of a phone nobody called.
Twenty-six years old. He had never touched a real woman. He'd never held a hand that wasn't a doctor's or a cashier's passing back change. He had watched more beautiful bodies than any emperor in history and been seen by none of them.
One more. Then sleep.
The woman on the screen arched her back, and he leaned in closer until the glow painted his face, his grip tightening around himself as the scene climbed toward a climax he would never finish.
Then his heart stopped agreeing with him.
It started as pressure, as if someone had laid a palm flat on his sternum and begun to push. He frowned and kept going for another two strokes out of pure stupid momentum. Then the palm closed into a fist inside his ribs and squeezed, and pain went through him so bright and total that the monitor seemed to flare white.
He gasped. No air came. His left arm went heavy and then distant, as if it belonged to someone in another room. The fingers of his right hand, still wrapped around his shaft, went numb. The chair tipped under him — or the floor tilted; in that white, airless moment it was hard to tell which — and the ceiling swam sideways across his vision.
No. No, wait, not like this, not like—
The ceiling swam above him, stained and cracked. Somewhere a woman was still moaning through cheap laptop speakers, a looped clip, the same three seconds again and again. He tried to move his mouth. Nothing worked anymore.
In the thinning dark, the things he had never done drifted past him like fish under ice. He'd never kissed anyone. Never left this city. Never been brave, never been wanted, never been anyone a stranger would remember a day later. He thought, absurdly, that they would find him like this: pants around his ankles, eleven tabs still glowing on the dead screen, the half-empty can still sweating on the desk as if nothing in the room had noticed that its owner was gone.
Then even shame dissolved, and the blue light went out.
***
Sandalwood.
That was the first thing. A warm, resinous sweetness, layered over something floral and faintly bitter like crushed herbs, and under it the clean dry scent of expensive cloth. It filled his nose and throat so completely that for one long, floating moment Yan Fan thought this must be what death smelled like. A temple. A funeral. Incense burned for someone nobody had liked very much.
Then he felt silk.
It lay against his cheek, cool and impossibly smooth, and stretched under his back and between his fingers. He moved his hand and the fabric slid with a whisper. His sheets at home had been a polyester blend, washed until they pilled.
He opened his eyes.
The ceiling was wrong.
Heavy wooden beams crossed overhead, carved along their edges with twisting clouds and the long coiled bodies of something that might have been a dragon or a serpent. The wood was lacquered so dark it was almost black, and it gleamed with dull gold where lamplight touched it. Silk curtains the color of dried wine hung in thick folds around him. The bed was enormous, big enough for three people to sleep without touching. Beyond the gap in the curtains, oil lamps burned in bronze holders shaped like cranes, their flames steady in still air.
There was no hum. No air conditioner, no refrigerator, no distant traffic. Only quiet, and a faint chime of wind against something metal far away.
Hospital, he thought stupidly. Rich people's hospital.
He tried to sit up.
His body moved wrong. Not badly, just differently. His arms were lighter than they should have been and his shoulders narrower. His spine bent at a different place. When he pushed himself up on his elbows, his weight settled in unfamiliar spots, as if someone had rearranged the furniture of his bones while he slept and hadn't bothered to tell him where anything was now. He raised a hand in front of his face. The fingers were long and pale, with clean trimmed nails. There was no callus on the side of the middle finger from years of mouse-clicking. There was a thin white scar across the back of the knuckles that he had never seen before.
He stared at that scar, and it was like pulling a thread.
Memory came loose and poured into him.
It wasn't gentle. It was a dam breaking, a second death in the opposite direction. Images, voices, smells and pain flooded through his skull so fast and so heavy that he fell back onto the silk with a choked sound, both hands clamped against his temples: a courtyard of grey stone under a teacher's bamboo rod, the bitter taste of medicine forced past clenched teeth, and laughter — a lot of laughter, and none of it kind — crashing over him in wave after wave of borrowed shame.
None of it was his.
All of it belonged to Yan Chi.
Yan Chi. The name settled in his mouth as if he'd always known it. Young master of the Yan family. Not the main family, which lived somewhere in the high mountains of the demonic sect, ancient and terrible, but a branch, the Yan branch that ruled its corner of Jinling City and the territory around it. The Yan name carried weight across the demonic cultivation world. It carried almost none on Yan Chi's own shoulders.
He had been useless. Not cruel and not wicked, which in this world might at least have earned him some respect, just useless, gentle in a way this world mistook for weakness, with a talent for cultivation so poor that tutors had stopped pretending to be patient by the time he was twelve. He was the kind of young master other young masters pointed at across banquet halls and laughed about behind their fans. At nineteen he was still stuck at the third stage of Body Refining, the very bottom of the ladder, a level that sharp-eyed servants' children sometimes reached before they could write their own names.
The memories gave him his father next, and even second-hand the man made Yan Fan's new stomach clench.
Yan Tian. Clan leader of the Yan branch. Tall, broad through the shoulders, his face carved from something colder than stone. His eyes were like polished knives, and they had never once, in nineteen years of memory, rested on his son with anything warmer than mild disappointment. Yan Tian did not waste affection on weakness. He had never cast Yan Chi out either. His son still slept in a room like this one and ate at the family table, still wore silk and still had servants to bring his tea.
That mercy, if it could be called mercy, didn't belong to Yan Tian.
It belonged to Yan Chi's mother.
Yan Mei.
Even in borrowed memory, she burned. The image came with warmth attached, the warmth of a child's love, but Yan Fan's own eyes were seeing it now, and they saw something else. A woman so beautiful that clan leaders from other territories had envied Yan Tian for twenty years. They envied him not for his power or his land, but for the woman who shared his bed and had given him children. Her voice had soothed Yan Chi through fevers. Her hands had pressed cool cloths to his forehead. Her quiet word in her husband's ear was the only reason the useless son had never been sent to some distant estate to rot. Yan Chi had worshipped her the way a child worships the sun.
Then came his sister.
Yan Ling. Older than him, and beautiful in a sharper, colder way, the kind of beauty that made elders pause in the middle of a sentence and forget what they had been saying. She had always looked after her frail younger brother with a fierceness that bordered on violence. Yan Chi remembered her standing in front of him in a corridor years ago, her small fists clenched, staring down two boys twice her size until they slunk away. More importantly, far more importantly in a world like this, she had been accepted as a disciple by Grand Elder Lan of the main sect.
Grand Elder Lan. Even the memory of the name brought a chill. An old devilish powerhouse whose real age nobody spoke aloud. His moods could raise or ruin entire families. Because Yan Ling stood at his side, the Yan branch walked under a borrowed shadow of protection. Enemies thought twice. Allies stayed polite. And a weakling young master who should have been crushed years ago was merely mocked.
Then a different face rose out of the flood, and Yan Fan's chest tightened in a way that had nothing to do with his own heart.
Cao Ning.
His childhood friend. She was the only daughter of the Cao family, a smaller house that had lived under the Yan branch's wing for three generations. In almost every memory, she was there. A girl with silver hair, a year younger than Yan Chi, leading him by the hand down the mansion's long corridors when he was too small and too timid to go alone. Kneeling beside him in the dirt of a training yard with a handkerchief, wiping blood from his split lip and scolding him in a fierce little voice while he cried. Standing between him and whoever had decided that afternoon that the Yan family's useless son was fair game. She had never once laughed at him. Those memories were clean and bright and painfully innocent, and they hurt to hold.
The girl had grown up. Now she was eighteen, a young woman who had come into her beauty and her talent at the same time. People across the demonic territories agreed that she was the most beautiful of her generation. That beauty had made other men hate Yan Chi just for standing near her. He had never deserved their jealousy. He had never deserved her kindness. He had known both of those things, and the knowing had sat in his chest like a stone.
The last face that rose from the flood was the one that made the borrowed body flinch on the bed.
Yan Jing.
Son of Grand Elder Yan Li, one of the most powerful elders in the branch. He was a cousin of sorts, close enough to share a surname and far enough apart to share nothing else. He was stronger and meaner than Yan Chi, gifted with a real talent for cultivation and an even greater talent for cruelty. He was a lifelong tormentor. Yan Chi remembered tea that tasted wrong, and nights curled on the floor of his room shaking and vomiting while the physicians muttered about bad food. He remembered Yan Jing's smirk at the next morning's breakfast. Poison, more than once, slipped in when nobody was watching, never enough to kill and always enough to remind him. And beneath all of that ran a jealousy that had never cooled: that Cao Ning, the jewel of the generation, walked beside a weakling and not beside him.
Yan Fan lay on the silk sheets and let the memories settle.
They sank slowly, like sediment in disturbed water, and found their places. His and not his. He knew the names of the servants. He knew which corridor led to the kitchens and which floorboard on the eastern veranda creaked. He knew the taste of the cook's sweet lotus soup and the exact shade of his father's displeasure. He knew too that he had died. Yan Fan had died alone in that blue-lit room, and Yan Chi, poor useless Yan Chi, had died too, somewhere in the dark between one fever dream and the next. Two candles had gone out, and one flame had been relit in the borrowed wax.
Transmigration.
The word arrived from Yan Fan's old life, from a thousand web novels read at three in the morning. He almost laughed. It came out as a croak.
I got transmigrated. Into a cultivation world. Into a young master's body.
Then the grin started.
It began somewhere in his stomach and spread upward until it pulled at the corners of a mouth that wasn't used to smiling. He couldn't stop it. He didn't want to. He lay there in the sandalwood dark grinning like an idiot at the carved dragons on the ceiling.
Because think about it. Think about it.
A mansion of dark lacquer and mountain views, silk sheets under his bare back, servants somewhere beyond the screens, and a cultivation world where strength could be climbed like a ladder. And the women: a mother whose beauty made clan leaders jealous, a sister whom elders stammered in front of, a childhood friend who was the most beautiful girl of her generation and who had spent her whole life being kind to him. He had died in an apartment that smelled of energy drinks, with his pants around his ankles, and heaven had dropped him straight into the kind of story every lonely shut-in fantasized about. Surrounded by women who looked as if they'd stepped off the cover of the filthiest novels he had ever read. A second life, with warm bodies and power waiting just beyond the door.
His cock should have been hard just from thinking about it.
He felt for the familiar heat, the stir of interest that had followed him every waking hour of his old life.
Nothing.
He frowned and looked down.
Under the thin silk of his inner trousers, the flesh between his legs lay limp, not resting but dead, a slack, heavy weight that didn't answer the thought of tits and thighs and his mother's red silk at all.
The grin slid off his face.
He shoved a hand down the front of his trousers and grabbed himself. Warm skin, slack flesh, perfectly ordinary in shape. He squeezed. He stroked once, twice, roughly, the way he'd done ten thousand times before, chasing the spark.
There was nothing under his fingers — no heat, no pulse, no answering twitch — as if he had reached down and touched a stranger's hand instead of his own cock.
Panic clawed up his throat, and with it came a memory, a sharp, bright, ugly one that didn't belong to him.
A courtyard in early summer, a year ago, a few months after Yan Chi had turned eighteen. He had come out to the practice ground because Cao Ning had promised to show him a new sword form. Yan Jing got there first, with three of his hangers-on, and he laughed when Yan Chi tried to walk around them. Hands seized his arms. Then came Yan Jing's boot, swung up between his legs with the cold precision of someone who had thought about the kick for a long time and wanted it to count.
The pain had been so enormous that Yan Chi didn't even scream. He folded around it and lay curled on the hot stone while the laughter washed over him, and when the physicians came they examined him with careful faces and spoke in low voices to his mother. The swelling went down eventually. The bruises faded from black to yellow to nothing.
The function never came back.
A year of nothing. A year of waking without heat, of looking at beautiful women and feeling only a hollow ache where hunger should have been. He was a young master in name and a eunuch in function, walking around with a cock that wouldn't rise no matter how many beauties passed him in the halls. Yan Jing had known exactly what he was doing, and every time their paths crossed afterward, his eyes had dropped to Yan Chi's crotch and his mouth had curled.
Yan Fan, in Yan Chi's skin, pulled his hand out of his trousers and stared at the ceiling.
"Fuck," he whispered.
His voice cracked between two lives, half the hoarse rasp of a dead man, half a younger, softer tenor he didn't recognize.
"Fuck. Fuck heaven." He sat up so fast the silk slid off his chest. "You reincarnate me into a dickless body? In a world full of women like that? And you don't even give me a cheat?" His voice rose, thin and furious in the quiet room. "What kind of trash transmigration is this? Even the worst web novel gives the protagonist something—"
Ding!
He froze.
It wasn't a sound from outside. It didn't come from the hall, the window or the wind chimes. It arrived inside his skull, clean and bright and perfectly clear, exactly like a phone notification. For half a second Yan Fan's old reflexes jerked his hand toward a pocket that wasn't there.
Then light unfolded in front of his eyes.
It was a translucent panel, blue-white and faintly glowing, hanging in the air an arm's length from his face. Through it he could still see the curtains, the lamps and the carved screen beyond, blurred as if through frosted glass. Letters formed across its surface one at a time, as if someone on the other side were typing.
[Pervert System]
Yan Fan stopped breathing.
The letters dissolved and new ones replaced them.
[Connecting with your Dick... 69%]
He stared. He read it again. Then a third time, mouth slowly falling open, because no matter how many times he read it the words stayed exactly the same.
Is this real? Is this a joke? Am I still dying on the floor of my apartment, and this is what my brain decided to show me on the way out?
The number changed.
[Connecting with your Dick... 88%]
Something stirred between his legs. Not an erection, not yet, just a faint warmth, like a hand held near a stove. His heart slammed against his ribs. Yan Chi's heart, Yan Fan's hope.
Come on. Come on, come on, come on—
[Connecting with your Dick... 99%]
The warmth sharpened into a tingle, and the tingle spread down through his groin and into his thighs, and up his belly into his chest. It was as if something long frozen were being thawed from the inside.
[Connecting with your Dick... 100%]
[Connection Complete]
The first panel slid aside and a second one unfolded over it, crisper and brighter, its letters arranged in neat lines.
[Name: Yan Chi]
[Status: Weak]
[Cultivation: Body Refining, 3rd Stage]
[Pervert Points: 0]
Before he could take that in, a third panel scrolled up beneath it, the letters glowing in the same luminous blue.
[Welcome, Host]
[Gain Pervert Points by performing perverted acts]
[Exchange points for skills, weapons and cultivation resources]
[The more perverted you become, the stronger you grow]
Yan Chi read it once. Then he read it again, slowly, his lips moving over each word.
Then he laughed.
It came out of him quiet and shaky and disbelieving, the laugh of a man who had been told the lottery ticket in his hand was real. His eyes stung. He pressed the back of his wrist against his mouth to muffle the sound, and his shoulders shook, and he couldn't stop.
A system. An actual cheat. He had a golden finger exactly like the protagonists in the stories he'd read, except it wasn't some righteous sword-dao inheritance, or the spirit of an ancient grandmaster living in a ring, or a cold emotionless voice talking about missions and the fate of the world.
It was a Pervert System.
Heaven had looked down at the man who died with porn on his screen and his cock in his fist, and instead of punishing him, it had given him a cheat custom-made for exactly what he was.
He couldn't help it. He reached out with both arms to grab the glowing panel and hug it.
His hands passed straight through the light. The panel didn't even flicker.
He didn't care. He let his arms fall and sat there grinning at it, at the words Pervert Points: 0, which suddenly looked like the most beautiful thing in two lifetimes. It was the first real thing either life had given him in years.