Outside the main gates of Azure Sky Sect, in a rotting wooden shack that smelled of mildew and old blood, Lu Chen lay dying.
Again.
"Damn it…" Blood bubbled at the corner of his lips. "Is this really how I go out? Twice?"
He almost wanted to laugh.
Back on Earth, he'd been a convenience store clerk pulling night shifts when a gang shootout decided his fate. Wrong place, wrong time. One bullet, lights out.
He'd woken up in a cultivation world — a world where the strong held absolute dominion over the lives of the weak. Where a single irritated senior disciple could snuff out a commoner like blowing out a candle.
In a world like this, cultivation was survival. Cultivation was everything.
And Lu Chen? After eight years of grinding, he'd clawed his way to Body Forging Realm, Level Four.
The bottom of the ladder.
He would have given up long ago — if not for Shen Qing.
She wasn't blood. Just a girl who'd moved into the Lu household years ago, grown up beside him, called him brother like she meant it. Her name was Shen Qing, and she carried within her the Nine Heavenly Frost Physique — a constitution so rare it made legendary spirit bodies look commonplace, one that teetered on the edge of the truly divine.
Eight years ago, Azure Sky Sect's Grand Elder had been passing through on a journey when she sensed Shen Qing's constitution and halted in her tracks. She'd demanded to take the girl as her personal disciple on the spot.
Shen Qing agreed. On one condition.
Her brother comes too.
For a prize disciple of that caliber, it was a trivial price. The Sect accepted. Shen Qing became the Grand Elder's direct successor — the Azure Sky Sect's shining Divine Maiden. Lu Chen was shuffled into the outer sect and mostly forgotten.
But Shen Qing's name had been a shield. Outer disciples kept their smiles on when he was around, if nothing else.
Then, half a year ago, she entered the Forbidden Zone of Longevity Mountain.
And never came out.
The Sect Leader mobilized. Elders searched. Even sealed Great Elders broke their isolation to investigate. All of them returned empty-handed. The whispers started fast: she's dead.
Without his shield, Lu Chen became prey overnight. Resources stolen, meals sabotaged, dignity ground to dust one insult at a time. When they started mocking her — his sister, his reason for enduring all of it — something inside him finally broke.
He fought back.
The result was predictable.
Beaten bloody and stripped of everything worth taking, he'd been dumped here like garbage.
"Cough— cough—"
Fresh blood. His ribs ground against each other with every breath. The high-grade healing pills that could have saved him were long gone — stolen with everything else. All that remained was a single First-Grade Golden Wound Pill, the kind meant for paper cuts and bruised egos.
Useless.
"How do I even survive this one…"
The thought barely finished forming before—
[DING!]
A voice rang directly inside his soul — mechanical, crystalline, impossible.
[Detected: Host in critical condition. Emergency initialization triggered.]
[Binding to Host… complete.]
[System online. Welcome, Host.]
Lu Chen's breath stopped.
A system.
Every nerve in his battered body fired at once. He'd devoured enough cultivation novels in his past life to know exactly what those words meant. The system was the great equalizer. The cheat code that turned the world's biggest losers into its most terrifying monsters.
I actually got one.
[Core Function: All resources belonging to the Host may be enhanced by a factor of ten thousand.]
Ten. Thousand. Times.
The pain in his chest didn't disappear, but it suddenly felt very, very unimportant.
"System," he said, voice barely above a whisper. "What qualifies as a 'resource'?"
[Any item, attribute, or entity that belongs to the Host qualifies.]
Anything.
Pills. Techniques. Weapons. Cultivation base. His body itself.
[Scanning Eye unlocked. The Host may now identify enhanceable items.]
Golden frames materialized in his vision, overlaying the filthy room:
[Wooden Bed — Common Object — Enhance? Y/N]
[First-Grade Golden Wound Pill — Healing Pill — Enhance? Y/N]
[Bronze Mirror — Common Object — Enhance? Y/N]
[Azure Sky Sect Outer Disciple Robe — Common Object — Enhance? Y/N]
And then — a new frame expanded, larger than the rest, hovering directly over his own chest:
[Host Body — (Talent / Bloodline / Physique / Cultivation / Soul / Comprehension / Techniques / Skills) — Enhance? Y/N]
Lu Chen stared at it.
His entire self was on the table.
He pulled up his attribute panel with a thought:
Host: Lu Chen
Bloodline: Mortal Human (Common)
Talent: Low-Grade
Cultivation: Body Forging Realm — Level 4
Technique: Body Forging Art (Mortal-Grade Mid)
Martial Skill: Serpent Spear Art (Mortal-Grade Peak)
Embarrassing numbers. But not for long.
First things first — stay alive.
He focused on the Golden Wound Pill, the last thing standing between him and death, and selected:
[Enhance? → YES]
[Enhancement successful!]
[First-Grade Golden Wound Pill → Fifth-Grade Golden Wound Pill]
His eyes went wide.
Pills ran from First to Ninth Grade. Each grade was ten times more potent than the last. Four grades of difference meant ten thousand times the efficacy.
The pill in his palm had visibly changed — swollen slightly, its surface gleaming, releasing a fragrance so dense it hit like a physical force. Just breathing near it made the wound in his side throb less.
He swallowed it without hesitation.
The effect was immediate and overwhelming — like swallowing liquid fire that somehow didn't burn. Pure medicinal energy surged through his meridians, knitting bone, sealing torn vessels, rebuilding what had been broken. In under fifteen minutes, he sat up straight in bed without a grimace.
Fully healed.
And the pill's energy was barely ten percent spent. The rest sat coiled in his core, a reserve waiting to be called upon.
Lu Chen exhaled slowly, rolled his shoulders, and looked back at his attribute panel.
Now. For the real work.
He started with Physique.
The moment the enhancement resolved, it was like someone had replaced his skeleton with iron. Strength flooded his muscles in a hot, roaring wave — enough raw physical power to level a small building. His base lifting capacity had gone from roughly two hundred kilograms to something that could be measured in tons. A single punch from him now would obliterate any core disciple who got in his way.
But his soul couldn't keep up. The mental weight of it crashed over him like a wall — his consciousness began to fog, threatening to drag him under.
Soul. Now.
He enhanced it immediately. The fog shattered. His mind expanded, crystalline and sharp, suddenly capable of holding the weight of the body it inhabited.
Next — Bloodline. Still mortal human at its core, but the potential written into every cell of him was rewritten. What he could become had just become something else entirely.
Comprehension followed. It was the subtlest change — no surge of power, no flood of energy — just a quiet click, like a lock opening. Suddenly, every cultivation principle he'd ever struggled to understand lay transparent before him. Mysteries that had taken senior disciples years to grasp now seemed almost obvious.
He paused.
Four attributes left: Talent, Cultivation, Technique, Martial Skill.
Talent was the one that had always defined him — and humiliated him. The cultivation world's brutal hierarchy ran: Low-Grade → Mid-Grade → High-Grade → Top-Grade → Heavenly-Grade. Each tier was ten times more effective than the last. A Heavenly-Grade talent could achieve in a single day what took a Low-Grade cultivator ten thousand.
Heavenly-Grade talents were myths. They were whispered about in the same breath as legendary physiques like Shen Qing's Nine Heavenly Frost Physique — gifts from heaven itself.
Lu Chen had spent eight years at the very bottom of that hierarchy.
He selected Enhance.
[Low-Grade Talent → Heavenly-Grade Talent]
The world didn't shake. No heavenly thunder, no dramatic light show. But something deep inside him shifted — like a river that had been trickling through cracks in stone suddenly finding the sea. Combined with his enhanced bloodline, the synergy multiplied further. He estimated his effective talent now ran seven, maybe eight times beyond even a standard Heavenly-Grade.
He almost felt sorry for whoever crossed him next.
One left.
Cultivation.
This was the axis everything else orbited. In this world, realm was destiny — the difference between a man who bowed and a man who was bowed to. Between someone who could be killed as a joke and someone who made the jokes.
Body Forging → True Yuan → Sea-Unity → Divine Core → Divine Ability → Soul Palace → Golden Body → Immortal → Saint.
Nine realms. Each one a world apart from the last.
Enhancing cultivation wasn't simply stacking ten thousand copies of Body Forging Level Four on top of each other. The system didn't work like that. It was transformation — qualitative, total, irreversible.
His finger hovered over the confirmation.
What realm will I reach?
His heart hammered. After eight years of scraping the bottom, of watching others soar while he was left to rot — this was the moment the debt came due.
He pressed YES.