The last thing Lu Chen remembered was the taste of stale coffee and the blinding white light of his monitor. He had been staring at line 4,052 of the legacy codebase, trying to fix a race condition that had plagued the server for weeks. He had pressed Enter to commit the patch.
Then, his heart had given a painful lurch, like a hard drive skipping a beat, and everything went black.
System Booting...
Loading Assets...
Rendering Texture: Muddy Ground...
Lu Chen gasped, his eyes snapping open.
He wasn't in his office chair. He was lying face-down in dirt that smelled faintly of copper and sweat. His chest throbbed with a dull, aching pain, as if someone had used his ribcage as a drum.
"Trash! Get up!"
The voice was shrill and annoying. Lu Chen lifted his head, spitting out a mouthful of grit. Standing over him was a young man in gray robes, sneering with a look of utter disdain. Behind him, two other lackeys chuckled.
"Did you think you could just sleep during the morning assembly, Lu Chen?" the gray-robed youth spat. "You waste of the Azure Cloud Sect's rice! Your meridians are broken, your cultivation is zero, and you still have the nerve to be lazy?"
Lu Chen blinked. Azure Cloud Sect? Meridians? What kind of VR game is this?
He tried to push himself up, but his arms trembled. A sharp pain shot through his wrists. He looked down at his hands—they were smaller, paler, and calloused in places his coder hands never were.
This isn't my body, he realized with a jolt of cold panic. I died. I definitely died. Is this... transmigration?
"Ignoring me?" The bully raised a foot, aiming a kick at Lu Chen's ribs.
In that split second, the world flickered.
It wasn't a dizzy spell. The colors of the world—the brown dirt, the gray robes, the blue sky—suddenly drained away, replaced by a cascading waterfall of neon green symbols. The bully wasn't a person anymore; he was a wireframe model constructed of glowing lines.
Floating next to the bully's foot was a text box:
Object: Disciple_Zhao
Action: Kick
Force: 450 Newtons
Trajectory: Linear
Hit_Probability: 99.9%
Lu Chen's brain, wired for years of debugging spaghetti code, didn't panic. It analyzed.
450 Newtons? That's gonna break a rib. The trajectory is linear... which means if I rotate my torso 30 degrees to the left, the hit box misses.
Lu Chen didn't think about moving his muscles. He thought about executing a function.
Run: Dodge_Left()
His body moved. It wasn't graceful—it was a frantic, desperate scrabble in the dirt—but he rolled exactly thirty degrees to the left.
Whoosh.
Disciple Zhao's foot stomped heavily into the ground where Lu Chen's chest had been a millisecond ago. The impact kicked up a cloud of dust.
"What?" Zhao stumbled, his balance thrown off by hitting empty air.
Lu Chen scrambled to his feet, panting. The green code rain faded, and the world returned to normal colors. He stared at the bully, then at his own hands.
"You... you dodged?" Zhao's face turned red. "You trash! That was luck!"
"Wait," Lu Chen said, his voice hoarse. He held up a hand. "Let's pause. I need to check the logs."
"What logs?! Are you insane?" Zhao gathered Qi in his palm. A faint, pathetic glow of yellow light appeared—First Stage Qi Condensation. "I'm going to cripple you for real this time!"
Lu Chen narrowed his eyes. The vision returned.
Object: Disciple_Zhao
Energy_Level: 12 (Low)
Skill: Rock_Crushing_Palm.exe
Status: Charging (2.5s remaining)
Lu Chen looked at himself. He focused on his own chest.
User: Lu_Chen
Role: Outer_Disciple (Trash)
HP: 15/100
Mana (Qi): 0/0
Status: CRITICAL_ERROR - MERIDIANS_BROKEN
A holographic window popped up in his vision, displaying a diagram of his body. The "meridians"—which looked suspiciously like circuit pathways—were shattered, disconnected lines of red code.
Error: Connection timed out. Data packets (Qi) cannot be transmitted.
"Meridians broken..." Lu Chen muttered. "It's just a hardware connectivity issue."
Zhao lunged, the glowing palm aiming for Lu Chen's face.
Lu Chen didn't have time to fix the hardware. He had to patch the software.
Access Console.
A command prompt blinked in his mind's eye.
> sudo override_limiters
> enable_adrenaline = true
Lu Chen felt a surge of chemical heat flood his veins. The pain in his chest vanished, masked by the override. The world seemed to slow down. Zhao's attack was moving in slow motion, rendering frame by frame.
Lu Chen saw the flaw in Zhao's code. The bully was putting all his weight on his front foot.
Target_Weakness: Balance.instability
Lu Chen didn't use a martial art. He didn't know any. He simply stepped forward, extended his leg, and executed a low-level command: Trip().
Zhao's shin hit Lu Chen's foot. With his momentum fully committed forward, the physics engine took over.
Zhao went airborne. He flailed, his "Rock Crushing Palm" flying wildly off-target, before he face-planted spectacularly into the dirt with a sickening crunch.
The courtyard went silent. The two lackeys dropped their jaws.
Lu Chen stood over the groaning bully, wiping dust from his robes. He looked at the sky, where the "Heavens" loomed above.
"Spaghetti code," Lu Chen scoffed, dusting off his hands. "The physics engine in this world is buggy as hell."