Lu Yuan woke up to the taste of rust in his mouth and the smell of damp wood.
For a moment, his mind refused to accept what his eyes saw. The ceiling above him wasn't the familiar pale concrete of a rented room on Blue Star. It was a crooked weave of straw and old beams, darkened by smoke, patched badly enough that thin blades of sunlight cut through the gaps. The air was cold, carrying the scent of wet soil and ash—like a hut that had endured too many storms and too little care.
He tried to move. Pain tore through his ribs, sharp enough to steal his breath. Lu Yuan's fingers clawed at the bedding, knuckles whitening as he forced himself to sit up in slow, trembling increments. His chest felt bruised from the inside, like someone had used him as a practice dummy. Even swallowing hurt.
Then he looked down at his hands and froze. They were rough—calluses thick along the palms and fingertips. Dirt was embedded under the nails. Faint green stains marked the creases of his fingers, the kind that didn't come from paint, but from crushed leaves and herb juice. These weren't the hands of someone living a modern life. These were the hands of someone who had survived by scraping at the earth.
"Lu… Yuan…" he muttered, and the name came out naturally—because it was still his name. That was the strangest part. He had expected to wake up as someone else, with someone else's identity. But when he searched his mind, the first thing he found was the same two syllables he'd carried on Blue Star since birth.
The world tilted. Memories surged like floodwater, not gentle and not gradual—two lives colliding in his skull until he couldn't tell where one ended and the other began. Blue Star Lu Yuan: exhaustion, noise, streetlights blurred by rain, a final moment of darkness. Then another Lu Yuan: a life of dust roads, cold nights, cheap food, and cultivation dreams that refused to die.
He wasn't merely transported into a new world. He had transmigrated into the body of a loose cultivator—who, absurdly, also happened to be named Lu Yuan. The coincidence would've been funny if it didn't feel like Heaven's cruel joke. Same name, different fate. Or maybe the same fate, just dressed differently.
He pushed the hut door open with a stiff arm and stepped outside. A narrow town street stretched ahead, packed with mud-brick houses and small shops. People moved with their heads lowered, voices quiet, as if the air itself demanded obedience. In the distance, a mountain ridge cut into the sky, crowned with pale buildings half-hidden in mist—pavilions that looked too clean, too lofty to belong to mortal hands.
His borrowed memories supplied the truth before he could even ask it. This town was under the control of a sect. The sect's disciples rarely showed their faces down here, but their authority was everywhere—tax collectors, town guards, and even merchants who spoke their name like prayer. And above the sect stood a Supreme Elder, a terrifying existence spoken of with equal parts awe and fear: a Golden Core cultivator.
Golden Core. Even in the loose cultivator's memories, that realm felt like a wall made of the sky. Mortals couldn't touch it. Ordinary Qi cultivators couldn't imagine it. It was the level where one person could decide the fate of a town by mood alone. That was the power watching over this place, and it made Lu Yuan's spine feel cold even under morning sun.
He closed his eyes and focused inward. In his lower abdomen, there was a faint warmth—a thin thread of energy moving sluggishly through his meridians. Qi. Real qi. This body's cultivation was clear the moment he guided it: Qi Cultivation, 2nd Layer. Not even close to the mid stage. Not even close to safety. For a second, he felt relief—at least he wasn't starting from nothing. Then reality settled in: at twenty-five years old, stuck at the second layer, in a world that judged people by speed.
Another memory rose—bright, humiliating, impossible to forget. The day he first entered the cultivation world with great aspiration. Back then, he had been younger, eyes shining, standing among hundreds of hopeful youths at the sect's Spirit Root Testing Ceremony. The stone stele had been tall and cold, carved with ancient patterns. One by one, youths pressed their palms to it, and light responded.
The talented ones were obvious. A single pure color—Single Root, sometimes praised as Heavenly Root. The elder's eyes sharpened immediately for them. Dual roots were accepted. Triple roots were still considered good enough. Even four-element spirit roots could enter, though with lowered status—servant disciples at best. Those people had a path. Those people had a place.
Then it was Lu Yuan's turn. He had walked forward with his heart hammering and his dreams roaring louder than the crowd. He pressed his hand to the stele and watched the light bloom—five colors swirling together: metal, wood, water, fire, earth. For an instant it looked magnificent, like the whole world had answered him. Then he saw the elder's expression: bored, unimpressed, already turning away.
"Five-element spirit root," the elder had said flatly. "Worst one. Mixed." The whispers had been immediate: trash root, slow, waste. And then the rules that smashed his aspiration into powder: only those with three spirit roots and above could enter the sect. Even servant disciples had to have at least four elements. Five elements? Leave. Don't beg. Don't argue. Don't waste our time.
That was the slap of reality. High talent—Single or Heavenly roots—advanced fastest, walking like they were born on the mountain path. Low talent—Five-element mixed roots—moved like they were dragging chains through mud. No one wanted to invest resources in a cultivator who might spend ten years just to gain what a genius gained in one season.
Lu Yuan had stayed anyway. He had refused to go back to being purely mortal. He became a loose cultivator in the town's shadow—working like an ox, saving every copper coin, every spirit fragment, every scrap of chance. He did errands for merchants. He carried goods. He gathered herbs outside the town where beasts and bandits roamed. He ate plain buns and watery porridge while watching sect servants swagger past him like kings, even when their cultivation wasn't much higher.
By twenty-five, he had managed to crawl to Qi Cultivation 2nd Layer—and then he got stuck. With his talent, he didn't have the chance to break into mid stage. Mid stage was a wall: layers four to six. A wall built from resources, pills, and techniques he didn't have. The town under sect control offered him no mercy, only fees and fear. Loose cultivators like him were allowed to exist, but only as long as they didn't become troublesome.
That was why the breakthrough pill mattered. He had saved for months—painfully, obsessively—until he could finally buy one Qi cultivation pill meant to push a cultivator from the second layer to the third. It wasn't even a rare treasure, just expensive for trash-root people. He had held it in his palm like a piece of his future, fingers shaking as if it might vanish.
And then—his death. The reason was simple, the kind of simple that made the world feel even crueler. On the way home, he took a shortcut through an alley to avoid sect patrols and greedy eyes. Three desperate rogues were waiting there, watching the market's exits like wolves watching a herd. They didn't need to know what he carried—only that a loose cultivator who'd just left a pill stall might be worth robbing.
He fought. He ran. He screamed. But Qi Cultivation 2nd Layer was still weak, and a five-element root was slower even in panic. A blade flashed. Pain bloomed. His pouch was ripped away, his pill stolen, and he was kicked into the mud like trash. He crawled out of the alley, leaving a trail of dark blood, refusing to die in the open street… but the wound didn't care about stubbornness. By the time night swallowed the town, his qi had thinned, his body had chilled, and exhaustion dragged him under like a river current.
Now he had awakened in that same broken body, ribs aching, qi weak, the same name on his tongue—Lu Yuan—as if Heaven had looped his fate and dared him to try again. He stood in the doorway of the hut and stared at the distant mountain sect buildings, eyes narrowing. This world was really dangerous. Aspiration alone was a joke. Talent decided status. Backing decided survival. And if he didn't change something—if he didn't find a path that didn't rely on being "chosen"—then this second chance would end the same way: robbed, bleeding, and forgotten.
Lu Yuan slowly closed his fist. The pain in his ribs sharpened, but his gaze steadied. In the town market, herbs were everywhere. Pills ruled everything. Even sect disciples needed refinement and medicine. If trash roots couldn't win by speed, then he would win by value—by skill, by calculation, by turning the world's rules into tools instead of chains. He took his first step onto the street, moving carefully, like a man walking on the edge of a blade—because in this world, that was exactly what living meant.