A Transmigrator with Nowhere Left to Turn

The Great Zhou Immortal Dynasty. Qingzhou. The Guihua Sect. Inside the Grand Elder's Hall. A middle-aged man dressed as a scholar sat on one side of the hall platform, a young female cultivator on the other, the two of them keeping close guard over a grand array between them. Within the array, another young figure in green robes sat cross-legged, suspended in midair, eyes shut, spiritual energy surging wildly over the body and pouring all of it into the array patterns below. Yet the array still flickered, now bright, now dim, like a guttering candle in the wind. Suddenly— "Ugh—" The young figure convulsed violently and spat out a mouthful of dark red blood, then dropped back to the ground and slumped limply to one side. The array patterns dimmed rapidly as well. "Master!!" At the sight, the two cultivators still standing guard paled and rushed forward in a panic, one on each side, to hold the young man up. "Ugh..." After several breaths, the young man slowly opened his eyes, and a voice came from his mouth, aged and at odds with his appearance: "The sect-protecting grand array... can't hold much longer." "What?!" The middle-aged scholar's pupils contracted, and for a moment he even forgot to breathe. "Master, could it be that even you..." "I can do no more," the young man said, glancing at the bloodstain on his sleeve and shaking his head sorrowfully. "At most the array will hold for five more shichen. After that, those two Golden-Eyed Crimson-Scale Beasts will certainly break through." "Zhao Ping, Su Qing. Think of it—thirty-seven years since our Guihua Sect was founded... and today we are likely to meet with annihilation." Beside them, the young woman named Su Qing also looked utterly hopeless. She stared helplessly at the master in her arms, then at her senior brother beside her, her eyes full of bewilderment and fear. Half a day earlier. Two Golden-Eyed Crimson-Scale Beasts in the late second rank had suddenly appeared outside the Guihua Sect and, without the slightest warning, begun battering at the sect-protecting array. To be sure. A demon beast of this strength was nothing at all in the eyes of the great sects; any mountain-guarding steward they sent out could, with a wave of the hand, drive them off or even wipe them out. But the problem was... The Guihua Sect was no powerful faction with deep foundations. It was merely a small frontier sect, barely more than thirty years old. It had just over thirty disciples under its roof, and only Su Qing herself, her senior brother Zhao Ping, and their master possessed Foundation Establishment cultivation comparable to second-rank demon beasts. And their master, the highest in cultivation of the three, had only just reached the middle stage, with little of his lifespan left. Su Qing and Zhao Ping were both only at the early stage. Once the grand array fell. Even if the three joined forces, they were doomed to have no way to resist at all. "Zhao Ping, Su Qing." After another moment. The young man seemed to have reached some decision. He raised his head with difficulty and heaved a long sigh. "Pass on my order as Grand Elder... all disciples in the sect are to prepare to abandon it and flee for their lives." "After the array breaks, I will set my own lifespan alight and stake my life in the fight. I should be able to trap those two wretched brutes for a little while." "Then, in that moment, you will lead the disciples out through the back mountain, each group by a different route. Run as far as you can." "Master!" both exclaimed at once. "Listen to me!" The young man cut them off, panting hard twice, his tone brooking no argument. "The situation as it stands leaves no room for sentiment. Either we all wait here to die, or someone must sacrifice themselves of their own accord and gamble for that sliver of a chance to live." "You are both in the prime of your lives. I, however, suffered grave damage to my foundation in an incident in my early years; my lifespan was already nearly spent. Even had I not met this calamity, I would have had at most a few months left to live." "So... let these old bones see you off one last time. And if it is possible... rebuild the Guihua Sect in the future." As he spoke. The young man reached out and took a small brown pouch from his person, handing it to the two of them. "This is the only storage pouch in the sect. From now on, the two of you will keep it together." "The Spirit-Locking Contract—"In life, there are green hills everywhere." Remember this well: what I and Senior Brother Wu taught you from childhood is the Chinese language." "Put the storage pouch away quickly and go gather the disciples. In these last few shichen I must regulate my breath and prepare for battle." Zhao Ping looked at the little pouch held out before him, his heart twisting as if cut by a knife. "Master, let me stay with you, and let junior sister..." Yet before he could finish, the young man's furious shout cut him off. "Zhao Ping, would you have me die with my eyes still open?!" Zhao Ping's body went rigid. After a moment. He said no more. With reddened eyes he took the pouch, and together with Su Qing he kowtowed heavily three times to his master, their foreheads striking the floor with a resounding knock. After the two had left. The young man swept his gaze once around the hall and let out a sigh of inexpressible complexity. A trace of remembrance flickered through his clouded eyes, and his thoughts gradually drifted back seventy years. His original name was Lin Yi, and in another world he had been nothing more than an ordinary graduate student in electromechanical engineering. Then, on a trip back to school. The bus Lin Yi was riding had suddenly met with an accident, and for no reason at all the sixteen people aboard, the driver included, had been transported to the Great Zhou Immortal Dynasty in the Tianling Realm. Even more wretched. The moment the group landed, they ran into an attack by a demon beast, and six of them—unlucky souls whose names Lin Yi still did not know to this day—died on the spot. The remaining ten fled desperately and escaped, and only after reaching a small town, by pretending to be mute and gesturing and by secretly observing, did they barely learn a few scraps of information about this foreign land. It was a cultivation world, utterly different from Earth... There were cultivators who could fly through the air, burrow into the earth, and dwell high above the mortal world, and there were vicious, man-eating demon beasts and alien races; society was chaotic and cruel. Stranded in a foreign land with no one to rely on, the group could only huddle together for warmth, struggling to survive from the very bottom. During that time, Lin Yi consumed a stalk of the Appearance-Fixing Herb, and his features were fixed at the appearance of a man in his twenties. In the decades that followed. Of the original survivors, one after another, some reached the end of their lifespans and some perished, until only Lin Yi and two other companions who had set foot on the path of cultivation remained alive. On one expedition into a secret realm. The three of them, by great good fortune, found some rare resources, barely enough to count as a small windfall. After cashing in the resources, they put their heads together and thought, well then, never mind splitting it evenly—why not simply use this money to found a small sect? At least it would leave the slightest trace of themselves in this world. And so, in a remote corner of Qingzhou, the Guihua Sect was quietly established. More than thirty years passed in a flash, and Lin Yi's two companions—or rather, fellow Daoists—passed away one after another. Today, it had finally come to Lin Yi himself. Recalling all that had gone before, Lin Yi sighed once more, his expression desolate, though little despair at his coming death could be seen in him. After all, at his age, life and death had long since become a matter of indifference. The only thing he could not let go of was a homeland whose whereabouts he did not know, and the family there. "A great river flows on, its waves run wide, the wind blows over the rice blossoms..." Humming the little tune he had still been unable to forget after decades of being transported here, Lin Yi took from his bosom a black cube the size of his palm. The cube was oddly shaped, its surface smooth and sleek. Anyone from his original world who stood here would surely have recognized it as a HuaWei Mat-series phone. After being transported to this world, Lin Yi and his companions had tried many times to contact home, but all to no avail. In truth. Lin Yi and the others also understood that the chance of returning home after being transported was all but zero. But in this life, one always ought to have something to hold on to, no? So the group had spent a great deal of time, and after many failed experiments that ruined several phones, they finally combined a basic lightning technique to smoothly convert the transient voltage into low-voltage direct current, and thus worked out a charging technique that could prolong a phone's lifespan. Lin Yi had contributed a great deal to it—it was right in his field, after all, and he had not disgraced the electromechanical engineering nerds. Now that only five shichen of his own lifespan remained, he might as well fulfill this last lingering attachment... Then Lin Yi found a reclining chair and settled back into it. He lit up the phone screen and first dialed his parents' number from the contacts. What answered him were two rapid dead tones, the signal that the call could not be put through. Lin Yi heaved a small sigh at that, then casually keyed in three digits engraved in his memory. Still no one answered. "..." The light in Lin Yi's eyes dimmed. And yet— Just as he shook his head and was about to hang up. Beep— A faint vibration suddenly came from the phone's body. The display on the screen changed, too, from [Dialing] to [In call, 0:01]. And then. A woman's voice, flat but not at all distant, came out of the phone: "Hello, Chongli City Police Dispatch Center. How may we help you?"