Chapter

4

A Cosmic Joke

I

Lei Shan awoke with a groan. He scowled. His whole body hurt, and he didn’t remember his bed being this hard—or this prickly. Prickly. Like grass. He blinked, and his gaze focused. Branches and leaves hung above him. A canopy. He was … under a tree?

He shakily stood up. His body protested—for some reason he felt really tired—but he wasn’t about to sleep in this unfamiliar place. He was in a forest, he quickly determined. A moment later it came to him—the mission. Right. He had left the sect on a mission.

While thinking, he kept looking around, and as he did, he caught sight of a blue something. He blinked. Not something—someone.

A body wearing the blue robe of an outer disciple.

His drowsiness fled him. Without a second thought, he ran over, and upon getting closer, he saw the outer disciple’s face.

It was Song Tian.

He froze, and yesterday’s events, which had been trying to recall, rushed through his mind. Finding Song Tian and Yang Yi, becoming unable to move, being struck by Song Tian’s palm, and feeling that mind-breaking pain…

And then it struck—he was alive. Wide-eyed, he looked down at his chest. There was a big gap in his robe, as if it had been torn, but his chest was fine—unharmed. The same went for his back, as far as he could tell. Although his body hurt, he could tell it had more to do with the less-than-ideal environment he had slept in than with what had happened yesterday.

It wasn’t only his condition that surprised him. Song Tian’s was also a surprise. The taller boy was alive—his chest slowly rising and falling. After a moment’s hesitation, Lei Shan knelt down and inspected the wound on the left side of Song Tian’s waist. The clothes around it were covered in dried blood, but when Lei Shan softly prodded the area, he found that the skin there was unharmed. There wasn’t even a scar.

Seeing this, Lei Shan had a feeling that Song Tian was somehow involved in his own miraculous recovery. Most likely it had something to do with the heat he felt last night before passing out.

Lei Shan slowly breathed out, thoughts churning in his head. He doubted Yang Yi would have left without ensuring that Song Tian was dead. This could only mean that the inner disciple had failed. So what happened to him?

Lei Shan’s eyes fell on a tree on the opposite side of the clearing. Held up against its bark was a corpse, the hilt of a sword sticking out of his chest—the rest of it no doubt buried into the bark of the tree. The corpse’s head was hanging down, so he couldn’t see its face, but Lei Shan recognized the robe it wore.

That answered his question. Lei Shan looked away; it wasn’t a pretty sight to behold.

Song Tian had, somehow, turned the tables on Yang Yi and killed him. But how? Lei Shan groaned. The mission had really gone south, hadn’t it? In hindsight, he should have expected this. Song Tian’s presence was already a major red flag. How that hadn’t occurred to him, he had no—

Lei Shan blinked. Red flag? What did that even mean?

A sign that something bad was about to happen.

Right. He nodded to himself. That was what it meant. So why— No. Wait. How did he know what it meant? He didn’t remember ever hearing that term before. And then he remembered: he hadn’t heard it; he had come across it while browsing the…

Internet.

He had found it on the internet. The internet. His eyes widened. He didn’t know that term—or did he?

His vision swam. He felt his thoughts slow to a crawl, and then…

Memories. Memories flooded into his head, tearing through his thoughts, piercing his mind like ice-cold needles, fighting for relevance. He stumbled backward and fell onto the ground, clutching his head. There was no room in his head for thinking; his mind was filled with this storm of alien memories burrowing into him.

It ended as abruptly as it began. Lei Shan gasped as the swirl of memories in his mind subsided. He closed his eyes and tried to understand what had just happened. He felt his mind slowly rearrange itself, adapting to the new memories he had just received. As he reviewed these memories, he soon found the centerpiece that held them together.

Emrys Ashworth.

A name. His name. Somehow.

Lei Shan took in a deep breath and tried his best not to panic. These memories he had just received weren’t new, but old—the oldest memories he had. Although they seemed foreign at first, the deeper he looked, the more he absorbed, the more he felt himself resonate with them.

Earth. Transmigration. Another world.

Those were the words at the forefront of his mind. They echoed throughout his thoughts, guiding him from memory to memory, from thought to thought. He just stood there, thinking, recalling, adapting. With every memory he assimilated, the faster he assimilated the new ones, and before long, he was taking in one memory after the other without stop.

After a while, Lei Shan opened his eyes. He was still in the forest, it was still morning, but nothing looked the same. More questions than he could count plagued him. There was just too much he wanted—needed—to know.

Transmigration. Although he had never heard of that word before as Lei Shan, he was familiar with reincarnation, which could be considered a type of transmigration. Cultivators were taught about the Plane of Reincarnation, where all souls went to when their physical vessels died. There, their memories were erased, and they were sent to inhabit new bodies. The Cycle of Reincarnation.

As far as he could tell, these memories belonged to his previous incarnation. He couldn’t think of a way to confirm it, but they at least felt like they were his. If they were, then something had happened and he had somehow managed to recover the memories of his previous incarnation. He couldn’t tell what had caused it, but he wasn’t worried about it at the moment.

He reviewed what he remembered about his previous incarnation. Emrys. Emrys Ashworth. That was his name—or at least it used to be. He could remember almost everything—his family, his friends, his brother—but only until a certain day. He had been at home, talking with his brother in his room, and then… And then his life as Lei Shan began. From his childhood to the death of his parents, running away from home, and joining the Eternal Will Sect.

He couldn’t remember how, exactly, he had wound up in this world. Did he die and somehow reincarnate? Was there … a way to go back to Earth? He paused. Did he even want to go back? And … who was he? Moments ago this would have been a stupid question, but as the memories of what he believed to be his previous incarnation burrowed into him and took root, he couldn’t help but ask himself … Was he Emrys Ashworth or Lei Shan?

He groaned. Great. Just what he needed—an identity crisis. Yet another thing he would have to worry about later.

And there was an even bigger problem: Where the hell was he?

He set his previous life and his transmigration aside for the moment. After receiving these new memories, Lei Shan was forced to reevaluate the world he had grown up and spent the last sixteen years in.

Absurd. That was the only word he could use to describe it. He had never thought he’d see the world this way, but he had no choice after remembering his previous life. He found himself questioning many of the things he took for granted. The word itself, the people, the powers they had… Particularly the people, including him.

The elders, for example. Why did they do nothing about Dao Lin’s tyranny? Maybe the outer elders couldn’t do anything, as his father was the chief outer elder, but that was nothing to an inner elder. The Eternal Will Sect was a righteous sect; the elders shouldn’t simply let a disciple flaunt the rules and run amok.

The elders weren't stupid, either—or at least they weren’t supposed to be. They had no doubt heard of the feud between Dao Lin and Song Tian, and knowing Dao Lin’s reputation for erasing his enemies, shouldn’t they have taken measures to stop something like this from happening? Song Tian was hailed as a genius—his aptitude was supposedly on the same level as that of a core disciple; he could have directly entered the inner sect had he wanted to but chose not to do so. By all rights, the sect should have been paying a lot of attention to him.

Lei Shan frowned. In the first place, how had Song Tian even managed to offend Dao Lin? He had arrived in the sect less than two months ago. How come Dao Lin already hated him enough to plot his death? Were righteous cultivators supposed to treat murder so lightly?

It was all so … contrived. Ham-fisted. Convenient.

How had he not noticed any of this before? Everything else aside, he should have turned around and left the moment he learned that Song Tian was his teammate. Everyone knew what Dao Lin did to the people who opposed him, and this wouldn’t have been the first time someone Dao Lin disliked ended up dying on a mission under suspicious circumstances. He couldn’t understand how someone as careful as him had missed all of that.

On top of that, he could recall countless other instances of strange, absurd behavior, both from his part and from others'. Nothing made sense anymore. He felt as if a fog had lifted from his mind, allowing him to see, for the first time, the world for what it truly was.

Perhaps the most alarming thing to him was that the world he lived now lived in closely resembled that of some of the Chinese novels he had read in his previous life. Xianxia novels.

Immortals, magic, cultivation sects, and clans—didn’t that perfectly describe the world he lived in? Although there were a few differences, mostly as far as the terminology was concerned, the world he now lived in was eerily similar to the setting of those novels. Even the Common Tongue, the only language spoken in this world as far as he knew, closely resembled the Chinese language from Earth.

But that wasn’t all. How he used to behave, and how the people around him acted … He felt a shiver run down his spine— No. He shook his head. No way. That was too much. The implications…

Yet it was right in front of his eyes. He couldn’t deny it. It fit perfectly. The world resembled the setting of xianxia novels, and the people resembled the characters. It was like some sort of cosmic joke.

The more he thought about it, the more similarities—the more proof—he found. He slowly exhaled. So he was inside a novel? He had transmigrated into a fictional world?

No. He shook his head. That wasn’t necessarily the case. This world had magic and had magical creatures. People could grow stronger seemingly infinitely. Clearly, it followed different rules, and these rules affected how people behaved. That it resembled Chinese novels so much could very likely be a simple coincidence. Weren’t there theories about parallel universes?

Parallel universes. Alternate realities. That could explain everything. It was an easier pill to swallow than “being inside a novel.” He had simply somehow wound up in a different universe—one that operated based on different rules. Yes. Lei Shan nodded to himself. That was it. By remembering his previous life, he must have had somehow “broken” those rules—or at least become an exception to them.

Mental crisis averted for now, Lei Shan turned around. He could think about the rest later. He had to wake up Song Tian and figure out what to do. His eyes fell on Song Tian, and just as he was about to walk over to the unconscious boy, he froze in place.

Song Tian. Song Tian. He had entered the sect one and a half months ago—forty-six days, to be exact—and had claimed the first place in the entrance examination. Nobody knew his background or where he was from. He was devilishly handsome, supremely talented, had caught the eye of several elders, and had somehow managed to offend the top dog of the Outer Sect within days of entering the sect, who had schemed to kill him on his first mission outside of the sect. Somehow, however, he had managed to triumph over an inner disciple, who was stronger by an entire stage, despite having been in a seemingly hopeless situation, and seemed to have a mysterious power that had healed both his and Lei Shan’s wounds overnight.

Lei Shan faltered. He missed his next step and almost fell to the ground.

No way. No. Nope. Nah. Uh-uh.

Then and there, Lei Shan came dangerously close to having a mental breakdown. He was on the verge of tears.

He had just dismissed the possibility of being inside a novel—he had just managed to convince himself that he was simply in another world instead and that all similarities were simply coincidences—and yet…

No matter how he looked at it, Song Tian’s trajectory so far, not to mention his appearance, behavior, and history, were just like those of the generic xianxia protagonist. Song Tian literally ticked all the boxes.

No. This wasn’t a novel. He couldn’t accept that. There was no way Song Tian was this world’s “protagonist.” This was an alternate reality, and everything could be attributed to coincidences.

Parallel universes. Infinite possibilities.

Right. There was no doubt about it. He could accept the world and the people resembling the setting and characters of xianxia novels, so why couldn’t the events of the world resemble the plot? Evens were, after all, what happened when people and the world interacted with each other, so it only made sense that the product of two things would result in something of a similar nature.

Lei Shan decided to leave it at that for the time being. He’d have plenty of time to theorize and agonize over the world in the future. Right now, there were other things he had to take care of. He looked at Song Tian, whom he had been about to awaken, and reconsidered his course of action in light of his new conclusions.

After a moment’s hesitation, he turned around again, ignoring Song Tian for the moment, and made his way over to Yang Yi’s corpse.

As he walked, he reviewed what he knew of the plot of xianxia novels. Usually, there was something on the corpse of enemies that would be useful in some way. That wasn’t always the case, but it happened more often than not. It was particularly common at the beginning of novels, which Lei Shan believed, based on what he knew of Song Tian, to be where the trajectory of the world was currently at, analogously.

He couldn’t act as if every event would develop according to the plot of Chinese novels—that would be a highly reckless and dangerous assumption—but it was an avenue he had to at least consider and explore. At the very least, there was a good chance that there was something on Yang Yi’s corpse that would point to his relationship with Dao Lin, and that would come in handy later on.

Now that he was closer to the corpse, he avoided looking at the sword—as Lei Shan, he had already seen corpses before, some in an even worse state, but it didn’t mean that he liked the sight, and his memories as Emrys, a modern person from Earth, weren’t helping—and tentatively reached forward and began to search through the folds in the robe. Moments later he retrieved his hand, and in his grasp was a small pouch.

He stepped away from the corpse and sent his spiritual essence inside the pouch. He smiled upon finding no obstruction. He had heard that some split-space pouches were keyed to their owners and couldn’t be used by other people, but it seemed like not even inner disciples had access to that kind of stuff.

He wrapped his spiritual essence around the items contained inside the pouch, and soon he found himself staring at a small pile of weapons, glass flasks, paper talismans, essence crystals, and record crystals. He had heard that some of the early prototypes of split-space pouches required you to stick your hand inside and fish out what they wanted, but nowadays you could retrieve something by wrapping your spiritual essence around it.

He focused on the record crystals. He picked up the first one and browsed through it. When he saw that it was a cultivation method, he set it aside. The same went for the next five ones. Useful stuff, but not exactly what he had been looking for. He was looking for instructions from Dao Lin—something incriminating.

One of the record crystals contained a message from Yang Yi’s master, an inner elder. Not all inner disciples had a master, but many did. And the message was about … looking after Song Tian?

He blinked. There was no doubt about it. His master was telling Yang Yi, in no uncertain terms, that he should be kind to Song Tian in this mission and leave a good impression on him. Yang Yi’s master … an inner elder …. He frowned.

He knew of several inner elders who were interested in Song Tian—they had all offered him discipleship after the entrance exam—but one of them was particularly interested in him. Elder Bei. He was one of the elders that had watched this year’s entrance examination. Rumor had it that, after the examination was over, like many other inner elders, he had offered to take Song Tian as his disciple, but that Song Tian had politely declined. The other elders accepted the refusal and moved on, but Elder Bei, in order to leave a good impression on Song Tian, gave him a second-realm spiritual item—the golden bracelet Song Tian wore on his wrist.

He recalled what Yang Yi had said. He had claimed that he was only targeting Song Tian because Dao Lin had asked him to, but it looked like that was either a lie or only part of the story. Lei Shan didn’t know what he could do with this information, but it was a start. He inspected the other record crystals, and eventually, he found what he was looking for—a record crystal that contained Dao Lin’s request to kill Song Tian and a promise of a reward. It seemed like they hadn’t met in person.

He stored everything back into Yang Yi’s split-space pouch, tucked it away next to his own pouch, and organized his thoughts before turning around.

There was only one thing left to do now.

He made his way over to Song Tian, who was still asleep. As he walked, he was suddenly struck by the feeling that he was forgetting something, but quickly dismissed it. If it was important, he wouldn’t have forgotten it.

And then he froze.

He felt like he was forgetting something, and he had just decided to ignore it.

His instincts as Lei Shan were telling him to just move on and that it wasn’t important, whereas his newfound instincts as Emrys … Lei Shan decided that he had already raised enough red flags.

He was forgetting something, and it was probably important. Something that would probably become a problem later on. He recalled the recent event: waking up, struggling with his memories, and searching Yang Yi’s corpse. Nothing wrong so far. He went further back. He had arrived at the clearing, at the fight scene… No, still nothing. Further back, then. He had arrived at the meet-up location but found nobody there. No sign of Yang Yi, Song Tian, or… Duo Lan.

Duo Lan.

He felt as if a shock had run through him.

Right. She was what he had forgotten. Was she in on Yang Yi’s plot? She certainly didn’t seem like she had any goodwill toward Song Tian. However, she had yet to appear, so that was unlikely. But if she had nothing to do with this, where was she? And why hadn’t she been at the meet-up location last night?

He had no time to lose. He hurriedly walked over to Song Tian. He had to wake him up and get the situation in order before Duo Lan came back. She had taken second place in the entrance examination and also offered discipleship under some inner elders. He wasn’t sure he would be able to handle her if she turned out to be an enemy.

He first tried to call out to Song Tian, but he seemed to be in deep sleep. Only after he started shaking him did the taller boy stir. Lei Shan took a step back and collected himself, carefully considering what he was about to say.

Song Tian opened his eyes.