Darkness.
But it wasn't a peaceful empty dark.
It was loud.
A rushing, roaring sound like a river, but the river was made of whispers. A million voices, a billion memories, none of them his own. He saw fragments of other lives flash by like specs of dust in a sunbeam --- a farmer's love for his daughter, a soldier's terror in his final moments, an old woman's quiet satisfaction at a long life lived.
He was drowning in it. Losing himself.
His consciousness, his sense of Jiang Shen, was a tiny, flickering ember in a hurricane. He clung to the last real thing he knew. The board. The grid of nineteen lines. The cool, smooth feel of a go stone between his fingers. The memory was an anchor, a shield against the roaring tide of souls.
Then, a pull.
It wasn't gentle. It was a violent, cosmic hook that snagged his little ember of a soul and reeled him in. The river of whispers vanished, replaced by a blinding, silent light.
And then… pain.
A headache. The kind of headache that felt like his skull was full of cotton and broken glass. His whole body ached with a profound weakness, as if he hadn't moved in a year.
Sensation returned in pieces. The feel of soft, impossibly smooth silk against his skin. The smell of strange, sweet incense and bitter medicinal herbs. And a voice. A woman's voice, humming a soft, sorrowful tune in a language he'd never heard before, but somehow… understood.
He forced his eyelids open. They felt as heavy as lead.
The world was a blurry mess of color and light. A face swam into view above him. A woman, impossibly beautiful, her features like a classic painting, her eyes filled with a deep, weary sadness. Her hand is cool and gentle rested on his forehead.
"Shen'er…?" she whispered, her voice cracking with hope.
His mind, the mind of a Go grandmaster, a strategist, tried to process the data. It didn't work. Not a hospital. The ceiling is carved from some kind of dark, polished wood. The light is from glowing pearls, not bulbs. Her clothes... robes. Like in a period drama. And her voice... I understand her. How?
A flood of new memories, not his own, crashed into him. The memories of a different Jiang Shen. A boy of sixteen. A life of privilege, of respect, of learning sword forms and cultivation arts in a place called the Eternal Dao Sect. He felt the boy's love for this woman—his mother. He felt his respect for a powerful, imposing father. He felt the boisterous camaraderie with a friend named Fen Yue.
It was too much. His own nineteen years on Earth, his championship, his entire identity, was being swamped by the life of another. His mind was fracturing.
Just as the panic threatened to swallow him whole, a new sensation bloomed in the center of his soul. A cool, orderly, and deeply calming energy.
And with it, came text. Not text he saw with his eyes, but text that appeared in his mind's eye, written in threads of pure, white light.
[System Booting... Soul Integrity at 31%]
[Foreign Soul Signature Detected... Host Soul Remnant Detected...]
[Error. Host Soul is dissipating. Initiating Emergency Soul Fusion Protocol.]
[Fusion Progress: 1%...]
Jiang Shen's panic receded, replaced by a wave of stunned and logical clarity.
A system.
The impossible, ludicrous explanation from the novels he used to read. It was insane. But it was the only theory that fit the facts. A system. Data. Something he could understand. Something he could work with.
He clung to the glowing text as his new anchor.
His mother must have seen the light return to his eyes. She gasped, her face breaking into a radiant, tearful smile. "He's awake"
Tianlong, he's awake!
The door to the room slid open and two figures rushed in. One was a tall, powerfully built man with an aura of immense authority—his new father. The other was a youth his age with a wiry build and a look of fierce, unrestrained joy on his face—Fen Yue.
Jiang Shen tried to speak, to ask a question, but his body wouldn't obey. He was a passenger in a vessel he didn't know how to pilot, his mind a battlefield where two lives were being violently stitched together.
[Fusion Progress: 14%... Soul Stabilization reaching minimum threshold.]
[Detecting successful transmigration into a world with a high-density Dao Matrix.]
[Granting [Transmigrator's Gift Package] as per Protocol 7.]
A new wave of information , far more complex and profound than the simple system text , poured directly into his soul . It wasn't just data; it was knowledge , instinct . It was the blueprint for a new existence.
[Package Opened. You have received: Physique - The Uncarved Primordial Form.]
[You have received: Cultivation Technique - The Scripture of Infinite Genesis.]
He had no idea what the words meant , not really. But he could feel their weight. It was the feeling of being handed the first two stones in a game of cosmic significance. A game he had to learn, and win.
The strain of the awakening, the fusion , the influx of knowledge—it was too much for his weak new accuired body. The world began to fade to black at the edges. The last thing he saw were the hopeful, tear-filled faces of his new family before his consciousness submerged once more . leaving him to the quiet , orderly work of the system that was rebuilding him from the soul up.