I'll probably never stop being amazed at how fairy-tale-like the nature here is. It soothed the soul and helped suppress my heart demons whenever they raised their ugly heads yet again.
Now that was a fancy way to put it. Not suppressing depression, but suppressing heart demons. I'm allowed. I'm in a xianxia world. A transmigrator, damn it. I don't even have a willy anymore, only a jade rod, if you want to know. For seventeen whole years now.
At first, when I'd just been born in another world, I went through everything. Denial, anger, and all the other crap. Then I came to terms with it.
And then—when I was a year and a half old—after I finally learned the local language and at last understood where I'd ended up...
It all started over again. Denial, anger, more anger, then even more anger... Something had clearly gone wrong. But you'd be seething too if you were in my place. I had good reason.
I hated everything. Starting with this vile world, where one bastard sits on another bastard and drives a third bastard before him, and ending with this world's protagonist, who was simply a lucky bastard. That was the only difference. I'll give you a hint. My surname is Feng. I live in a tiny village in the Ten Thousand Beast Mountain Range. Since birth, I've had a curse-seal on my forehead from some fried chicken.
If you still haven't figured it out, I was reincarnated into the novel Against the Gods. Lovely, isn't it? A story about how an unscrupulous con man who was fortune's darling first wormed his way into various women's trust, then, when they were wounded protecting him, raped them and became stronger.
Here's another piece of local magic mechanics that makes this world so lovable: women's virgin yin energy. Meaning, if some girl is talented enough, every damn cultivator will consider it his duty to fuck her so he can steal her talent.
This world wasn't created by gods. It was created by people with some very wrong moral values. That's what I'm telling you.
And then there was my situation. What a lovely place I'd been born in! Being born with a curse that keeps you from climbing the local ladder of power—isn't that the dream?
I was absolutely seething. Seething and rejoicing. Bipolar disorder is like that.
Let's be honest: after all the things we'd done for our beloved motherland, all of us expected higher temperatures and hornier-looking guards nearby, not all this. So there was plenty of joy in it too.
And again, if I couldn't cultivate, then so what? A village at the edge of the world. Nobody gave a damn about us. I could have lived here quietly. Married some girl, calmly raised children, and then even grandchildren if I lived that long. I actually liked the quiet local life quite a lot.
Of course, it was hard. My parents, for one, left me an orphan when I was only eight. Hunting isn't exactly easy when the beasts can cultivate too. There are even Sky Profound beasts in the mountains. Not many, but they're there. And there isn't much fertile land inside the Phoenix's protection, either. Making ends meet isn't easy. But I still liked it. An honest life, far away from the bastardry of the outside world.
Could I have stayed here and not interfered with canon at all? Not really, of course, unless I wanted to die. Trash Che didn't give a damn about anyone but himself, despite all his grand declarations. And his hypocritical wifey destroyed the planet with one strike in canon. Maybe in later chapters the author reveals that Xia Qingyue actually fooled everyone and the planet went on living peacefully and minding its own business. Maybe. But I never got that far. Bet my life on it? No, thank you.
I had to get stronger: either get the hell off the planet, or become completely OP and prevent all the coming horror. The only question was how to do that when you'd been cursed by a damn chicken and couldn't rise above the tenth level of the Elementary Profound Realm.
I reached that tenth level when I was only ten. There was nothing difficult about it.
And no, I'm not some genius or cultivation monster. I do not possess some sacred holy body of the mighty primordial gray-brown-crimson dragon of nine voids and ten yang. Absolutely not. It's simpler than that.
I can just think. A little. I wouldn't say I'm particularly good at it, but at least I try to think sometimes. And I like reading old dusty books nobody cares about. I also like listening to old men's ramblings. They can tell you a lot.
So, back when I was six, I decided I needed to get stronger instead of waiting for the great and mighty Trash Che to come and save us all.
At the time, I didn't even know what point in the timeline I'd landed in. Maybe I'd have to wait another hundred years for the great Trash to be born, which, as far as I was concerned, would have been pretty nice. But four years later, the tribe chief had twins, and I realized I was only a couple years older than the lucky Trash.
Could've been better, but this would do. And I had no hope of killing the guy ahead of time. His backers up at the very top are so ridiculous that killing him might be possible, but there's no guarantee he'll actually die. You, on the other hand, definitely will.
And I'm not talking about his pocket-sized god of slaughter. Jasmine is still a long way off. But the guy has an aunt who isn't an aunt—she's the reincarnation of the Ancestral Goddess.
And yes, Xiao Lingxi is the last of her thousand reincarnations. After that, the woman wakes up and starts putting things in order. And if you kill Trash Che, Xiao Lingxi dies of grief. That's the kind of clown show we're dealing with, complete with plot armor.
Fun? Very. But what was a poor transmigrator supposed to do when every path upward had been cut off? All I could do was use my head and take risks.
I started reading all those novels after the war. I needed something to occupy my head, something dumb and light enough for that garbage to push out any heavy thoughts. Chinese novels with a hundred billion chapters were perfect for the job. And when those ended, there were fanfics of those novels with another couple trillion chapters.
Why, out of all these treasures of world literature, did I remember this particular work best? I'm not going into my family history—it's too personal, and you wouldn't care anyway—but I hate rapists with a burning hatred.
No, I'm not senile, and I understand that there are different situations. There are plenty of nuances. You can get a girl drunk and drag her into bed, and it can look very different depending on the circumstances. Sometimes it really is vile, and sometimes the girl came to drink precisely because she wanted to jump into someone's bed. I'm not talking about those moral dilemmas. I mean outright rapists.
And in this world, the protagonist was exactly that. And the most interesting part? Those poor rape victims would then straight-up fall in love with that trash instead of hating him and hunting him to the ends of the earth.
Miracles!
Sure, there are all kinds of pathologies, like the overhyped Stockholm syndrome, but everywhere, all the time? It also doesn't inspire much confidence that Trash Che just happens to have a pearl that can play around with chemistry, and Trash Che himself is supposedly a doctor. See where I'm going with this?
And the whole thing is painfully obvious. He couldn't save the ice chick during the dragon trial because her channels were damaged. Yet in the first chapters, he himself asked his wife for treasures he planned to use to restore his own channels, which were damaged in exactly the same way.
Then he couldn't save his teacher without fucking her because she'd been poisoned. And we conveniently forgot that he has a poison pearl capable of curing any poison. Oh dear, what a shame.
Those are the most blatant examples, but far from the only immoral things that trash did. And every time I saw the author justify that bastard, I got unbelievably pissed.
When the bastard finally got swatted in the Star God Realm, I was literally laughing with joy and shouting, "Finally!" I only felt sorry for the little girl. Her sister, though...
Again, maybe I just have a different mentality? But since when do we sympathize with genocidal maniacs? She herself bragged that she was supposedly drenched in the blood of millions of victims. And she has killing intent after that—no shit. What the fuck, people?! Rabid dogs like that should be put down on the spot, not treated as cool. What is wrong with you? What's with the sympathy for Hitler-like monsters?
I'm no saint myself. Not even close. More than that, I was certain that after death I'd meet plenty of guys with horns and pitchforks standing beside nice burning frying pans. I've done plenty of bad things, and I'm preparing to do plenty more. But sink that low?
Aaaand there we go! My ass is on fire again. How did this even start? With me explaining why I remember canon so well.
So yes, I remember canon, just like I remember plenty of similar stories. They're all very alike in a lot of places. One of the most common clichés? Training the body instead of profound energy.
The locals train the body only at the Elementary Profound Realm. After that, nothing. That was how I figured out the concept behind developing the first level. How? Trial and error. I simply had to burn more calories. All that arm-and-leg flailing barely helped, when you got down to it. Not terrible exercise, but not good exercise either. And good exercise was something I actually knew.
I also knew a thing or two about calories, and sugarcane happened to grow nearby.
Sugar gave fast carbs, which I used to run my marathons—within the Phoenix's protective perimeter, naturally.
I won't even bother mentioning push-ups and burpees. Either way, they developed the body far better than all that arm-and-leg flailing.
But after that I hit a dead end, with only six or seven years to find a way out of it.
So I started studying my body and my channels. Fortunately, the damn chicken had left me an excellent tool. Just a wonderful tool for studying profound veins.
Pain! Exactly that, and nothing else. Very quickly, helped along by mule-like stubbornness, I realized that attempts to break through led to pain. My profound veins hurt. And little by little, I mapped the veins that hurt. By looking for patterns, I even managed to determine the locations of forty acupoints where profound energy entered the body. But this was no time to think about those gates that were closed or clogged with garbage.
I knew the next stage of strengthening the body was to pour profound energy not merely into the profound veins, but directly into the body. The problem was, how do you lure that energy in without using the points? How do you control it inside the body, never mind outside it?
After half a year of hard thinking, I found the answer to that riddle in canon yet again.
Trash Che progressed faster in his technique when he was injured, didn't he?
My sensitivity wasn't anything to brag about, so I had to spend another year cutting myself and meditating before I finally felt profound energy from the atmosphere being drawn toward the wound.
I never found a sensible explanation for the phenomenon. Did the world itself see the wound as a bug and try to patch it? Like I said, nothing sensible came to mind.
I wasn't on bad terms with the locals. Quite the opposite: everyone respected me because I'd lived alone from early childhood and never asked anyone for anything. I gained levels quickly and even hunted on my own. I fished, gathered fruit, tended my vegetable garden. In short, I was a perfectly respectable member of society. Not to mention that I always treated my elders with respect and looked after the children.
But I also behaved strangely. Strangely by local standards. And people are afraid of people like that. That was why nobody paid much attention to my wounds, which I didn't flaunt. Nobody bothered me, so I could meditate and comprehend things in peace.
And progress was slow. Profound energy gathered toward the wound, entered the body, surrounded the body, but how was I supposed to make it saturate the body's cells?
The moment I tried to do anything, the damned acupoints of my profound veins kicked in, and then came the pain. Damn fried chicken. May Colonel Sanders catch you.
The only instruction that worked? "Feel the Force, Luke."
And it worked. I can hardly believe it myself, but I managed to catch a tiny piece of profound energy, apparently with my soul, and leave it inside my body.
And what happened? I won't even give you a hint; it's obvious enough. It hurt. It hurt horribly. The Phoenix's curse didn't come close. The arm the atmospheric energy entered burned mercilessly.
And that was when my damned inheritance helped me for the first time. When I released some energy from my veins, it quite cheerfully burned away the foreign energy inside my body. Yes, my profound energy was as weak as it gets. You could say it wasn't even profound energy at all. But it contained an element of Phoenix fire.
Maybe I'm an idiot, or maybe I'm just a masochist, but ten days later I repeated the experiment. And three days after that, I did it again.
Why? Because I noticed that my energy hadn't burned away all of the profound energy. A part of it had become part of my own energy and remained in my body. A microscopic part, impossible to see, but I saw it. And the wound in that spot healed faster. Just a little faster.
Maybe I'm no genius, but I couldn't help noticing the pattern. That was more than enough for me to keep experimenting.