Boundless darkness surrounded an elevated terrace.
Staring at the towering tome before him, Wang Ping was overwhelmed by a storm of conflicting emotions. "So my golden finger only activates after I die? Couldn't even give me a heads-up beforehand."
If it had warned me sooner, wouldn't I have just died sooner?
Soon, however, wild ecstasy lit up his face.
After all, who transmigrated without cheats these days? Better to check his cheat than wallow in sentiment; this was the foundation he needed to survive and thrive.
"Let me see..."
Wang Ping stepped forward at a measured pace. The moment his gaze fell upon the characters inscribed on the open page, he could no longer look away. A deluge of information was forcibly poured into his mind.
It was an extraordinary sensation. The flood of knowledge was automatically organized and categorized, as though none of it were unfamiliar to him—as if he had mastered it long ago and had merely been forced to forget, only now recalling it anew.
"Phoo... hah!"
A moment later, Wang Ping fell to his hands and knees, gasping for breath. Sweat rolled down his forehead drop by drop. The violent rush of emotions and memories left his head throbbing with a splitting pain.
Yet thanks to that influx, he remembered.
This place was the domain of the Classic of Great Peace—or, to put it plainly, a morgue. It was exceedingly fitting for someone who was, in a sense, a "dead man."
In short, the grimoire's function was settlement. Whenever the bearer personally experienced an event involving the hearts of the people, karmic fortune, and popular sentiment, the tome could take in the corpse of the event's protagonist, transmuting it into a usable scroll that bestowed power upon the bearer.
Such as the scroll before him now—Volume 1: Fiend from Beyond.
"It took my transmigration as an event and converted it into this Fiend from Beyond scroll... Does that mean it devoured my corpse from before I crossed over?"
The resulting scroll's effect was remarkable.
"Resurrection once after death, a seven-day cooldown, and the option to choose different worlds... So it was the culprit behind my transmigration all along?"
Wang Ping realized what had happened.
Judging by its effect, he had likely obtained this golden finger back on Earth. Upon his death, he had transmigrated at random and ended up in a wretched place like Dashun.
A surge of excitement swept through him.
Twenty years had passed since that first transmigration. Having lived half a lifetime in mediocrity, no one knew better than he did that the notion of transmigrators being destined for greatness was utter nonsense.
If you couldn't make something of yourself on Earth, what made you think you'd soar just because you crossed over?
If there were a way back, who would want to stay in that godforsaken place?
Though his long-overdue cheat had finally activated and granted him resurrection, its cooldown took away much of its luster.
"Seven days? It'll be far too late by then!"
"And how is one resurrection enough? A hundred would be more like it! If it rewound time after reviving, that would be even better... There'd be so much more room to maneuver."
"Even without that, tossing in a plus sign on a status screen would work!"
Wang Ping grumbled for a good while, his eyes glued to the Classic of Great Peace, reading through the Fiend from Beyond scroll word for word.
"...Earth isn't on the list," Wang Ping sighed heavily.
In the mechanics of the Fiend from Beyond, Earth did not seem to count as a world he had visited, which left him with very limited options.
"My only choice is to gamble on a random leap to a new world."
At that thought, Wang Ping's expression soured. "If my luck holds, I'll land in a safe world, lie low for seven days, and wait out the cooldown."
If his luck was bad, he might drop straight into a disaster zone or a battlefield and turn into a loot box the instant he landed.
Wang Ping hated staking his life on luck.
Of course, there was another option: revive and remain in the Dashun Dynasty. But that raised an unavoidable dilemma:
"I just died. Heaven only knows how this revival mechanism works. If it resurrects me right on the spot, won't I run straight into the constables who just murdered me?"
"Whew..."
Wang Ping exhaled slowly. Gritting his teeth, he walked up to the towering tome and examined Volume 1: Fiend from Beyond. Two lines of script ran across the page:
*Cleave the primal chaos, open the ancestral aperture to join the Mysterious Female;*
*Light fills the empty chamber, pass through this portal to enter the grotto-heaven.*
Radiating golden light, the characters—resembling dragon scales and phoenix calligraphy—parted to the left and right, transforming into a magnificent gateway that seemed to beckon him forward.
"...Damn it all."
Wang Ping set his jaw and stamped his foot. He paced in circles for half an hour until a pang of hunger struck his belly, finally forcing him to make up his mind.
It couldn't be helped; this morgue clearly didn't serve meals.
If he stayed any longer, he would either starve to death here or risk dying upon arrival. He quickly abandoned his pointless hesitation.
"...Screw it!"
Wang Ping strode forward and pushed through the door.
In the next instant, golden radiance swallowed his vision. It felt like a gentle hand brushing over him, or a warm breeze drifting past.
Then, an indescribable sensation enveloped his body, like sinking into a pool of hot springs. The cozy warmth tempted him to lose himself in it, while sound, touch, and all his innate senses slipped away, as if he had returned to the womb.
After who knew how long, he started awake.
His sight remained obscured, surrounded by a hazy, dreamlike golden glow. Yet faintly, voices drifted in from very close by:
"Did you hear about the big incident in the sect recently?"
"Of course I did. It happened in the Elixir Courtyard, didn't it? Something went wrong with the Shennong Cauldron, and the spiritual pills went wild. The cauldron nearly exploded, and quite a few people were punished."
"You're not wrong."
"If you ask me, the Elixir Courtyard got too ambitious trying to concoct some supreme divine pill without the control to back it up. That's why the accident happened."
"That was nothing. If you want to talk about real disasters, who could match what the Divine Weapon Courtyard pulled off back then? When the Sect Master wanted to forge that supreme treasure, who knows how much manpower and resources were poured in? In the end, the whole sect was thrown into chaos, and it took immense effort to set things right."
"Shh... Watch your tongue!"
Wang Ping listened quietly, committing every word to memory. At the same time, he realized that this transmigration might have actually landed him a jackpot.
*An immortal cultivation world?*
Wang Ping's heart pounded with excitement. Who didn't dream of cultivating into an immortal and attaining eternal life? Could it be that he had transmigrated as a disciple of an immortal sect?
Yet a moment later, his daydream was brutally shattered.
A joyful cheer rang out. "It's finally done! This batch of strongmen is fresh out of the furnace, ready for delivery."
Refined? Out of the furnace? Delivery?
While Wang Ping was still bewildered, the hazy colors before him rippled, followed by a surge of sharp pain as another flood of information and memories surfaced.
The good news was that he had indeed transmigrated into an immortal cultivation sect.
The bad news was that he was no disciple.
*I am... a strongman of the Protector Courtyard.*
In other words, a puppet and servant refined by the sect specifically to attend to its disciples. In terms of standing within the sect, he was roughly equivalent to a robotic vacuum cleaner.
Right then, the voices spoke again:
"All right, hurry up and apply the talisman marks."
After a few brief exchanges, Wang Ping felt a cool sensation spread from the crown of his head. It drove out the dry heat permeating his body, seeping into his limbs and bones.
It should have felt wonderful, yet Wang Ping felt as if he had been dropped into an ice pit.
As that cool sensation spread throughout him, an urge to pledge lifelong loyalty to the immortal sect abruptly blossomed in his mind—a shift that was entirely abnormal.
*Is this... the sect's method for controlling strongmen?*
Terror gripped Wang Ping's heart as memories rushed into his mind.
*All strongmen are blank slates when they leave the furnace. This cooling sensation generates their personalities directly, effectively imprinting a mental stamp.*
*But I'm different. I'm a transmigrator. My memories and inherent personality were already formed long ago, and the sect clearly never anticipated that. Although this shocks my mind and creates cognitive distortion, so long as I catch my breath, I can still tell what's real and what isn't.*
Wang Ping breathed a quiet sigh of relief.
When that cooling sensation had struck him just now, he had nearly cried out in submission. The feeling of cognitive rupture was agonizing.
At the same time, an ominous premonition crept over him.
Refining puppets, implanting memories, mental stamps... Wang Ping could understand why they did it, but it still felt deeply unsettling.
Then there were the duties of a strongman. The embedded information described them as practical, durable tools. That phrasing did nothing to ease his unease. After all, by all appearances, strongmen were human in shape. Had they been intentionally made into human form, or were they originally human to begin with?
*Is this sect even righteous?*
Could it be a demonic sect?
Subconsciously, Wang Ping tried to reach out to the Classic of Great Peace. When he focused his awareness, the boundless morgue came into view once more.
Yet that was all.
He could see it, but he could not enter. That was the grimoire's current state. To physically enter that morgue, he had to borrow the power of a scroll.
Unfortunately, he had only one scroll at his disposal.
Fiend from Beyond.
Looking at the scroll—now rendered in dull gray, locked in a cooldown that required seven days before it could be lit again—Wang Ping forced himself to remain calm.
He immediately thought of another possibility:
*How do I increase the number of scrolls?*
If entering the morgue required the power of a scroll, and Fiend from Beyond was unavailable, unlocking a new scroll would give him an escape route and a means of survival.
As if responding to his thoughts, the colossal tome inside the morgue stirred again. Golden light gathered across the still page, coalescing into lines of text:
*Mundane mortal wares, earth-nurtured essences, heaven-bred splendors, rarities of the cosmos, singular authentic treasures.*
*Gather items of the types listed above and assimilate them into the book. Each item collected will add one scroll. The quality of each newly gathered item must exceed that of the previous one.*
*...Ah.*
Wang Ping immediately grasped the catch. *Every gathered item must be of a higher tier than the last, which means I can't just absorb things haphazardly.*
For instance, if the first item he gathered happened to be an earth-nurtured essence, collecting any number of mundane mortal wares afterward would be completely useless. He would effectively forfeit that entire lower tier, even though the benefit yielded by both tiers was identical.
Each merely added a single scroll.
*So the most efficient method is to start from mundane mortal wares and move upward step by step, avoiding needless waste.*
Beyond that, the feature had another application:
Appraisal.
*If I run into something I don't recognize in the future, presenting it to the Classic of Great Peace should immediately yield an objective judgment.*
Of course, all of that belonged to the future.
A promising future was meaningless if he didn't survive to see it. Wang Ping understood this all too well, his instinct for self-preservation burning fiercely.
*Things have come to this. Even if there were a cure for regret, I'd have to wait seven days to take it.*
*Besides, as long as I survive this hurdle, gather materials, and unlock more scrolls down the line, I'll only grow stronger. What I need right now is time to develop.*
*Then again...* Wang Ping's train of thought took an unexpected turn.
Thinking carefully, unsettling details aside, the immortal sect was actually quite wonderful, constantly imparting the virtues of proper conduct.
*I really ought to be grateful.*
Grateful to the sect for giving me the opportunity to serve the immortals.
Grateful to the sect for giving me the chance to draw near the immortal path.
Grateful to the sect for granting me the fortune to be reborn and remade.
*...Fuck!* Wang Ping shuddered, snapping himself out of the bizarre thoughts that had abruptly seized him.
Even so, he couldn't stop himself from feeling a lingering resonance with that gratitude.
For a strongman, the greatest happiness was to earn the sect's approval; the more approval he received, the greater his worth as a tool.
This was nothing more than human livestock...
*...No!*
The next instant, Wang Ping regained his clarity, his scalp tingling with dread. *As long as I remain a strongman, will my mind constantly be influenced like this?*
He could hold out for now, but if this persisted, he couldn't guarantee he would stay lucid. When the time came, he might genuinely be reduced to a living instrument for the sect.
*What kind of joke is this?!*
At that realization, only a single thought remained in Wang Ping's mind:
*Seven days. As long as I endure for seven days until Fiend from Beyond comes off cooldown, everything will be fine. Until then, I have to keep my head down and survive!*
Chapter 5