Chapter 2: The Embers of Life
The fire in the small hearth had burned down to a dull, glowing red, casting long, wavering shadows across the cracked mud-brick walls of the hut.
Lin Yuan sat cross-legged on the compacted earth floor, staring into the dying coals. The piece of feral dog meat rested heavily in his stomach. It was the first solid meal this body had consumed in over a week. Rather than immediate vitality, the sudden influx of rich, greasy protein had triggered a violent rebellion within his starved digestive system. He spent the next hour doubled over, clutching his abdomen as agonizing cramps ripped through him, his forehead pressed against the freezing dirt floor while he broke out in a cold, clammy sweat.
Don't throw it up. Whatever you do, do not throw it up, he chanted mentally, clamping his jaw shut until his teeth ached. He knew the biology of starvation from late-night documentaries in his past life. Refeeding syndrome was a real danger, though he doubted he had eaten enough to trigger a fatal case. Still, his stomach, shrunken to the size of a fist, protested violently against the intrusion of actual food.
Slowly, agonizingly, the cramps began to subside, replaced by a deep, lethargic heaviness.
With the physical crisis passing, the psychological dam broke.
The adrenaline that had kept him moving, fighting, and acting throughout the day finally evaporated, leaving behind a profound, terrifying emptiness. Lin Yuan drew his knees to his chest and buried his face in his grimy, blood-stained sleeves.
He began to weep.
He didn't wail or scream; he cried with the silent, gasping sobs of a man trying not to be heard. He cried for the twenty-five-year-old architect who had died on a rainy asphalt road, surrounded by the blinding lights of a city he would never see again. He cried for his mother, who would receive the devastating phone call from the police. He cried for his father, whose stoic silence would inevitably break. He mourned the life he had lost—the warm showers, the soft bed, the mundane safety of a world governed by laws and civility, not by swords and starvation.
And then, he cried for the seventeen-year-old boy whose memories now lived inside his head. A boy who had watched his father rot from a beast's venom, who had watched his village descend into cannibalistic madness, and who had quietly surrendered to the cold dark of an empty hut.
"I'm sorry," Lin Yuan whispered to the empty room, his voice a hoarse, broken rasp. He didn't know if he was apologizing to his parents, to the original Lin Yuan, or to the feral dog whose blood was still crusted beneath his fingernails. "I'm so sorry."
He was not a cold-blooded killer. He was not a sociopathic transmigrator who viewed this world as a video game. The feeling of the knife plunging into the dog's throat, the hot spray of blood across his face, the desperate thrashing of a dying creature—it made him deeply, viscerally sick. He squeezed his eyes shut, but the image of the beast's yellow eyes dimming remained burned into his retinas.
Yet, beneath the grief and the horror, there was something else. A quiet, undeniable thrum of energy coursing through his veins.
The Feedback.
It wasn't a glowing screen or a mechanical voice in his head. It was an innate, bodily understanding. When he focused his mind inward, he could feel it. The six months of lifespan he had stolen wasn't a numerical counter; it was a profound sensation of temporal relief. The suffocating feeling of his biological clock winding down, the ever-present shadow of the Reaper hovering over his emaciated frame, had receded by a fraction. He felt marginally less fragile.
More prominent, however, was the raw Qi and Blood. In the memories of the original Lin Yuan, his father had spoken of Qi and Blood as the foundation of all martial arts. It was the life force, the vital energy that separated ordinary mortals from those who could shatter stone.
The feral dog had not been a demonic beast or a spirit creature, just a starving scavenger. But it was wild, and it had clung to life with fierce vitality. Half of that vitality now resided in Lin Yuan's chest. It felt like a small, warm ember glowing right beneath his sternum. Every time his heart beat, this ember pulsed, sending a microscopic wave of warmth through his withered veins, slowly fortifying his organs and muscles.
Then there was the skill fragment: Heightened Olfactory Senses.
Lin Yuan lifted his head, wiping his eyes. The world smelled overwhelmingly complex. He could smell the stale, metallic scent of his own dried tears. He could smell the decaying wood of the roof beams. Most dangerously, he could smell the faint, coppery tang of the raw dog meat hidden beneath the floorboards, wrapped in its bloody hide.
Panic suddenly spiked through his chest.
If I can smell it, others can smell it. Not necessarily other humans—starvation dulled the senses of the ordinary villagers—but other scavengers. The Black Mountain was full of desperate beasts. And if the Black Tiger Gang happened to have a tracker or a martial artist with refined senses, they would find it instantly. In a famine, a stash of meat was enough to get an entire family slaughtered.
Fear, cold and sharp, cut through his lingering grief. He had to be careful. He had to be smarter than this.
He scrambled to his feet, ignoring the lingering soreness in his muscles. He moved to the corner of the room where he had hidden the meat. The original owner's father had dug a small root cellar beneath the floorboards, no deeper than a foot, originally used for storing dried tubers. Lin Yuan pulled back the loose planks.
The smell of raw flesh hit him, much stronger now. He couldn't leave it like this. He needed to cure it, to mask the scent.
He searched the small hut frantically. His predecessor's father had been a hunter; there had to be something. On a high shelf, covered in an inch of dust and cobwebs, he found a small, cracked clay jar. He opened it and practically wept with relief.
Salt.
It was coarse, grey, and filled with impurities—the cheapest rock salt available in Qingshui Town—but there was about a handful left. It was worth its weight in gold right now. Next to it was a small pouch of pungent, dried ash-leaves, typically used to ward off insects.
Working quietly by the dim light of the embers, Lin Yuan took the strips of raw dog meat. He used his rusted hunting knife to slice them thinner, his hands trembling slightly, not from weakness, but from the lingering trauma of the kill. He forced himself to focus on the task. He rubbed the coarse rock salt generously into the meat, wincing at the squelching sound it made. Then, he crushed the dried ash-leaves and coated the strips. The pungent, sharp aroma of the leaves immediately overpowered the scent of blood.
He didn't have enough wood to smoke the meat properly, nor could he risk the smell of a large fire drawing attention. He would have to air-dry it inside the freezing hut and hope the salt and ash-leaves kept the rot and the scent at bay. He hung the strips from a fraying rope strung across the darkest corner of the ceiling, well away from the windows.
By the time he finished, he was exhausted. The warm ember of Qi and Blood in his chest was still there, but it was passive, doing nothing to alleviate his mental fatigue.
He dragged his weary body back to the straw bed. He didn't take off his clothes; it was far too cold, and he needed the layers for warmth. He lay down, pulling a moth-eaten woolen blanket up to his chin.
Outside, the wind howled through the Black Mountain Village, a mournful, shrieking sound that rattled the wooden shutters. Beneath the wind, Lin Yuan's heightened hearing picked up other sounds. A faint, distant wailing from another hut. The sound of something heavy dragging across the frozen dirt paths. A harsh, barking laugh that cut off abruptly.
He squeezed his eyes shut, pulling the blanket over his ears. He missed his apartment. He missed the hum of the refrigerator. He missed the safety of locking his deadbolt and knowing no one would break in to steal his food or his life.
I am not a hero, he thought, curling into a tight ball. I'm just a guy who draws floor plans. I don't want to fight. I don't want to kill.
But as sleep finally began to pull him under, the image of the Black Tiger Gang member, Zhao San, sneering down at him, flashed in his mind. Useless trash. Not even a copper coin to squeeze out of you ghosts.
Lin Yuan's jaw tightened in the dark. He didn't want to be a hero, but he absolutely refused to be a victim again.
When Lin Yuan woke, the slivers of light piercing the cracks in the shutters were a pale, watery grey. The oppressive cold had seeped deep into the hut, turning his breath into thick white plumes.
He sat up slowly, taking stock of his body. The agonizing muscle soreness from drawing the bow and wrestling the feral dog was surprisingly muted. The wound on his left forearm, where the dog's fangs had torn through his thick sleeves and sunk into his flesh, was fully closed, leaving behind only a pale, raised scar.
The Feedback, he realized, pressing a thumb against the scar. The vitality he had absorbed hadn't just staved off starvation; it had accelerated his natural healing to an impossible degree.
He stood up and stretched. He felt incredibly stiff, but the profound, hollow weakness that had defined his existence yesterday was gone. He felt like a normal, albeit severely undernourished, human being.
His stomach rumbled, a low, demanding growl. It wasn't the agonizing scraping of starvation anymore, just regular, healthy hunger. He walked over to the hanging strips of meat. The salt and ash-leaves had done their job; the surface was already dry and leathery, and the smell was pungent but not bloody. He cut a small piece, no larger than his thumb, and chewed it slowly, forcing himself to savor the meager calories. He couldn't afford to eat much. He had to stretch this out as long as possible.
Once he finished eating, Lin Yuan faced his next problem.
He had Qi and Blood—the raw material of martial arts—accumulating in his body. But he had absolutely no idea how to use it.
In the memories of his predecessor, martial arts were tightly controlled. The Great Wu Dynasty strictly forbade the dissemination of advanced cultivation methods to the common populace. Even the lowest-tier body-tempering manuals were hoarded by gangs like the Black Tiger Gang, large merchant families, or proper martial arts dojos in the towns and cities. To learn, you had to pay exorbitant fees, sign away your freedom as a disciple, or be born into the right bloodline.
However, Lin Yuan's father had been a skilled hunter, a man who ventured deep into the outer rings of the Hundred Thousand Mountains. He had possessed a modicum of strength, enough to draw a hundred-pound bow and wrestle adult boars. He hadn't been a formal martial artist, but he had possessed a crude, unrefined method of training his body.
Lin Yuan closed his eyes, digging deep into the inherited memories. He saw flashes of his father, a burly man with a thick beard, standing in the small courtyard behind the hut at the crack of dawn. His father would adopt strange, unnatural postures, his face red, his breath coming in sharp, rhythmic hisses.
The Black Bear Forging Posture.
That was what his father had called it. It wasn't a profound cultivation technique that could allow one to fly on swords or command lightning. It was a crude, mortal-tier body-tempering method. Its sole purpose was to squeeze the body's latent potential, forcing the muscles and bones to absorb whatever meager nutrition was available to slowly build physical strength.
According to his father, he had looted it from the corpse of a dead mercenary he found in the mountains years ago. He had tried to teach it to the original Lin Yuan, but the boy had been too young, too impatient, and the famine had struck before he could build any real foundation.
Lin Yuan opened his eyes. He needed that manual. The memories of watching his father weren't enough; he needed the exact breathing cadences and muscle alignments.
He began to tear the hut apart, searching with methodical desperation. He checked the root cellar, beneath the straw bed, inside the cracked pottery. Nothing.
Think, he told himself, rubbing his temples. If I were a cautious man hiding something that could get my family killed by the Black Tiger Gang, where would I put it?
He looked up.
The roof of the hut was supported by thick, roughly hewn wooden beams. One of the crossbeams, positioned directly above the hearth where the smoke would naturally obscure it, had a slight irregularity. A small, almost imperceptible sliver of wood seemed to be wedged into a crack.
Lin Yuan dragged a rickety wooden stool over, his heart beginning to race. He climbed onto it, balancing precariously, and reached up. His fingers brushed against the sliver. He wedged his fingernails in and pulled.
It wasn't a sliver; it was a carefully carved wooden plug. As he pulled it free, a small, hollowed-out cavity in the beam was revealed. Inside, wrapped in a piece of oiled animal skin, was a thin, heavily worn booklet.
He stepped down from the stool, his hands trembling slightly as he unwrapped the skin.
The booklet was made of cheap, yellowing bamboo paper, bound together with twine. The cover was blank, stained with sweat and dirt. He opened it delicately. The pages were filled with crude, hand-drawn ink illustrations of a man adopting various stances, accompanied by dense, hastily written text detailing the specific ways to breathe, flex, and visualize.
This was it. The Black Bear Forging Posture.
Lin Yuan sat on the edge of his bed, devouring the text. His modern education, accustomed to deciphering complex architectural blueprints and building codes, made quick work of the crude anatomical diagrams.
The manual was shockingly brutal. It described the process of Body Tempering in its most rudimentary form: tearing the muscle fibers through unnatural strain, then using forced, rhythmic breathing to drive the body's Qi and Blood into the micro-tears to heal them denser and stronger.
Warning, the final page read in a scrawled handwriting that Lin Yuan recognized as his father's. Without sufficient meat and medicinal baths, forced practice will cannibalize the body's own foundation, leading to premature aging and sudden death.
That was why the original Lin Yuan hadn't practiced it during the famine. To practice martial arts while starving was literal suicide. You would burn your own organs for fuel.
But Lin Yuan was different. He pressed a hand to his chest. He could feel the stolen vitality of the feral dog sitting there, an untapped reservoir of raw, wild Qi and Blood.
He took a deep breath, steeling his nerves. He stood in the center of the small room, clearing away the stool and any debris.
He visualized the first illustration in the manual: The Bear Shoulders the Mountain.
He planted his feet slightly wider than shoulder-width apart, digging his toes into the compacted earth floor. He bent his knees deeply, dropping his center of gravity. He raised his arms, elbows bent at ninety degrees, palms facing upward as if he were physically trying to hold up the collapsing roof of the hut.
Instantly, his muscles screamed in protest. The posture was incredibly unnatural, forcing tension into muscle groups that were entirely unaccustomed to bearing weight. Within ten seconds, his thighs began to tremble violently.
Now, the breathing, he thought, gritting his teeth.
He inhaled sharply through his nose, a short, violent sniff that filled his lungs to bursting. He held it for three agonizing seconds, letting the pressure build in his chest, then exhaled slowly through pursed lips, producing a long, continuous hiss.
Inhale. Hold. Exhale.
With every breath, he focused his mind entirely on the warm ember in his chest. The manual stated that one had to use extreme physical exertion to 'wake up' the dormant Qi and Blood, drawing it out of the marrow and into the flesh.
The pain was excruciating. Sweat beaded on his forehead, stinging his eyes. His modern sensibilities screamed at him to stop, to lie down, to rest. Why put himself through this torture? But the memory of Zhao San's sneer, the image of the lifeless arm flopping from the corpse cart, silenced the complaints.
If I don't bleed in here, I will die out there, he told himself fiercely.
Ten minutes passed. To Lin Yuan, it felt like ten hours. His entire body was shaking uncontrollably. His vision was swimming with black spots. He was on the verge of collapsing.
Just as his legs were about to give out completely, something snapped.
It wasn't a bone or a tendon. It felt like a dam breaking open within his chest.
The warm ember of the feral dog's vitality suddenly flared into a roaring fire. The stolen Qi and Blood surged outward, traveling along the pathways forced open by the unnatural posture and the rhythmic breathing. It rushed into his trembling thighs, his screaming shoulders, his aching back.
The sensation was indescribable. The agonizing burn of lactic acid and tearing muscle fibers was instantly met with a cooling, soothing wave of pure vitality. It felt like cool water being poured over red-hot iron. The Qi and Blood sank into his muscles, aggressively repairing the micro-tears faster than the posture could create them.
Lin Yuan gasped, his eyes flying open.
The trembling stopped. The pain evaporated. He suddenly felt incredibly stable, as if his feet had literally taken root in the earth floor. He felt a profound sense of strength, a dense, wiry power coiling within his previously frail frame.
He held the posture for another thirty minutes without a single drop of sweat, entirely sustained by the foreign Qi and Blood burning through his system.
When the warmth in his chest finally began to wane, receding back into a tiny, dormant ember, Lin Yuan broke the stance. He stood up straight, letting out a long, shuddering breath.
He looked at his hands. They were still thin, still calloused, but when he clenched his fists, he could feel the tendons snapping taut with a force he had never possessed in either of his lives. He felt a profound sense of euphoria, the intoxicating rush of genuine progression.
He had taken his very first, tentative step onto the path of cultivation. He was no longer entirely powerless.
But the euphoria was short-lived. A sudden, sharp spike of paranoia pierced his joy.
Stay calm. Stay low-key, he reprimanded himself, slapping his own cheeks lightly to banish the triumphant smile from his face.
Strength in this world was a beacon. If he suddenly walked out of his hut radiating vitality and confidence, the Black Tiger Gang would notice immediately. They kept the village starved and weak for a reason. A strong villager was a threat, or worse, a resource to be harvested and sold to the fighting pits in Qingshui Town.
He needed to maintain his disguise. He was still the starving, pathetic orphan.
Lin Yuan quickly moved to the hearth and grabbed a handful of cold ash. He rubbed it into his face, dulling the healthy flush that the martial arts practice had brought to his cheeks. He rubbed some into his hair, making it look dull and unkempt. He stooped his shoulders, letting his chest cave in slightly, adopting the hollow, defeated posture of the famine-stricken.
He needed to go outside. Hiding in his hut all day would eventually draw suspicion. A starving man had to scrounge, to beg, to try and survive. If he stayed inside, people would assume he was either dead or hiding food.
He grabbed an empty, frayed burlap sack and slipped out of his door, pulling his ragged scarf over his nose and mouth to protect against the biting wind.
The village was just as desolate as the day before. The pale grey light of the morning did nothing to soften the grim reality of the Black Mountain Village. The frozen mud paths were empty. The skeletal trees stood like silent sentinels over the dying settlement.
Lin Yuan walked with a slow, shuffling limp, keeping his head down. Thanks to his Heightened Olfactory Senses, the stench of the village was almost unbearable. He could smell the profound sickness in the air—the scent of rotting teeth, unwashed bodies, and the distinct, sour smell of human waste mixed with freezing mud. It made his stomach churn, reminding him of how far from civilization he truly was.
As he neared the village square, hoping to gather some dry brush or twigs to maintain his cover as a firewood gatherer, he heard voices.
Loud, aggressive voices.
Lin Yuan shrank back against the wall of a dilapidated hut, peeking carefully around the corner.
In the center of the square, near the dried-up village well, stood three members of the Black Tiger Gang. Zhao San was among them, leaning casually against the stone lip of the well, chewing on a piece of straw.
Kneeling in the dirt before them was Old Man Wang, the village carpenter. Wang had once been a burly, jovial man who carved small wooden toys for the children. Now, he was a skeletal husk, his clothes hanging off his frame like rags on a scarecrow. Next to him, shivering uncontrollably, was his twelve-year-old granddaughter, Xiaocao.
"Please, Lords," Old Man Wang was begging, his voice a reedy, pathetic whine. He pressed his forehead into the frozen dirt, completely abandoning any shred of dignity. "I have nothing left. The bark is gone. The roots are gone. We are eating dirt. I cannot pay the protection tax this month."
The third gang member, a bald man with a cruel sneer, stepped forward and casually kicked the old man in the ribs. The sound of a bone snapping cracked loudly in the quiet morning air. Old Man Wang let out a wheezing cry, collapsing onto his side.
Xiaocao screamed, throwing her small, frail body over her grandfather to protect him. "Leave him alone! You're bad men!"
Lin Yuan felt his hands ball into fists so tightly his fingernails dug into his palms. A surge of righteous anger, a remnant of his modern morality, flared brightly in his chest. His newly acquired strength twitched in his muscles, urging him to step forward, to do something, anything.
He could imagine it. He could visualize rushing out, using his new power to strike the bald man down.
But logic—cold, hard, and utterly ruthless—slammed down on his emotions like an iron gate.
Think, he ordered himself, his heart hammering against his ribs.
He had absorbed the Qi and Blood of one feral dog. He had practiced a mortal-tier martial art for half an hour. He was slightly stronger than a starving villager.
The three men in the square were full-fledged gang members. They ate meat every day. They trained in combat. Zhao San was in the Skin Refining stage. If Lin Yuan stepped out, he wouldn't be a hero. He would be a minor inconvenience. They would cut him down in seconds, and then they would still take Xiaocao. And worse, they would search his hut, find the salted meat, and realize he had a secret.
He couldn't save them. He didn't have the power.
The realization tasted like bile in the back of his throat. This was the true horror of the cultivation world. It wasn't the demonic beasts or the aloof Immortals; it was the sheer, suffocating helplessness of the weak in the face of the strong. Justice was a luxury only the powerful could afford.
"Quiet, brat," the bald man snarled, grabbing Xiaocao by her ragged hair and yanking her upright. The little girl shrieked in pain and terror.
"No tax, no protection," Zhao San said lazily, finally spitting out his piece of straw. He looked at Xiaocao, his eyes scanning her frail form with a detached, mercantile calculation. "The Spring Breeze Pavilion in Qingshui Town is always looking for young stock. They pay well for the fresh ones. She'll fetch enough to cover your tax for the next five years, old man."
"No! No, please!" Old Man Wang sobbed, trying to reach out with a trembling, broken arm. "Take me! Kill me! Don't take her!"
The bald man ignored him, dragging the thrashing, screaming girl toward the village gate. The other villagers, those who were peeking through the cracks in their shutters, remained silent. No one stepped forward. No one spoke. Fear and starvation had stripped them of their humanity, leaving only the primal instinct for self-preservation.
Lin Yuan squeezed his eyes shut and turned away, pressing his back against the rough mud-brick wall. He bit his lower lip so hard it bled, using the physical pain to anchor himself, to stop himself from doing something suicidal.
He listened to Xiaocao's screams fade into the distance, growing fainter and fainter until they were entirely swallowed by the howling wind.
When the square was silent again, Lin Yuan slowly opened his eyes. The anger in his chest had not vanished; it had condensed, hardening into a cold, diamond-sharp resolve.
He looked at his trembling hands. He hated his weakness. He hated the fear that kept him hiding in the shadows. He hated this brutal, beautiful, terrifying world.
He needed to get stronger. Not eventually. Not tomorrow. Now.
He couldn't rely solely on the feral dogs in the outer woods. They were too rare, and hunting them took too much time. He needed a consistent source of Qi, Blood, and Lifespan. He needed to find prey that no one else was hunting, targets that he could kill safely and quietly to fuel his ascent.
He looked down at the frayed burlap sack in his hands. He took a deep breath, letting the icy air fill his lungs, calming his racing mind.
He stepped out from the alleyway, resuming his hunched, shuffling gait. He walked past the spot where Old Man Wang lay weeping in the dirt, keeping his eyes fixed firmly on the ground. He didn't offer a word of comfort. Comfort was useless here. Power was all that mattered.
He walked out of the village gates, heading not toward the outer woods where the feral dogs roamed, but toward the desolate, rocky crags at the base of the Black Mountain.
The original Lin Yuan's memories told him that those crags were barren, devoid of large game or edible roots. The villagers avoided them. But Lin Yuan wasn't looking for large game. With his newly acquired Heightened Olfactory Senses, he was looking for something smaller, something venomous, something that still carried the spark of life and the essence of Qi and Blood.
He was going to hunt the things that hid in the dark. Because right now, he was one of them.