Boundless darkness. A towering platform.
Looking at the majestic tome before him, a storm of emotions surged in Wang Ping’s heart. “So my cheat only activates after I die, and it couldn’t even give me a hint.”
If it had warned me earlier, I would have killed myself ages ago!
Soon, however, wild joy claimed his features. After all, in this wretched world, what’s the point of transmigrating without a cheat? Rather than wallowing in sentiment, inspecting his cheat took priority. This was his true capital for survival.
“Let’s see…”
Wang Ping stepped forward. His gaze landed on the text of the open page and locked on. A massive influx of information forcefully flooded his mind.
It was an incredibly bizarre experience. The information pouring into his mind automatically sorted and integrated itself, as if this knowledge wasn’t foreign at all. It felt like he had mastered it ages ago, only to be forced to forget, and was now merely recalling it.
“Haa… huff!”
A moment later, Wang Ping fell to his hands and knees, gasping heavily. Sweat rolled down his forehead. The intense surge of emotions and memories made his head feel like it was splitting apart.
But thanks to that, he remembered.
This place was the internal space of 【The Taiping Classic】, plainly known as the Morgue. It was incredibly fitting for someone who was, in a sense, a “dead man” like him.
In short, this scripture’s ability was “settlement.” When the wielder personally experienced an 【Event】 involving human hearts, destiny, and public sentiment, they could use this scripture to store the corpse of the 【Event Protagonist】. This would transform the corpse into a usable 【Scripture Scroll】 to bless the wielder.
Take, for example, the current 【Volume One: Otherworldly Heavenly Demon】.
Using my transmigration as the 【Event】 to convert it into the 【Otherworldly Heavenly Demon】 scroll… Did I consume my own corpse from before I transmigrated?
The resulting scroll’s effects were phenomenal.
“Resurrect once after death, with a seven-day cooldown, and the ability to choose different worlds… Doesn’t this mean it’s the actual culprit behind my transmigration?”
Epiphany struck Wang Ping. Judging by its effects, he might have obtained this cheat back on Earth, randomly transmigrated after his death, and ended up in this dump called Great Shun.
Wang Ping was instantly thrilled.
Having transmigrated for twenty years and lived half a lifetime in mediocrity, no one knew better than him that the notion of “destined for greatness after transmigration” was utter bullshit.
If you couldn’t make it on Earth, why would you suddenly take off just because you transmigrated?
If he could go back, who would want to stay in this wretched place?
Although his belated cheat had finally activated, granting him resurrection after death, the cooldown significantly reduced its value.
“Seven days? The day lily will be cold by then!”
“Besides, how is one time enough? A hundred times would be more like it. It would be even better if I could rewind time after resurrecting… the room for operation would be much larger.”
“Even without that, giving me a plus sign to upgrade stats would work too.”
Wang Ping grumbled for a good while. His gaze fixed on 【The Taiping Classic】 before him as he read the 【Otherworldly Heavenly Demon】 scroll word by word.
“…Earth isn’t here.” Wang Ping let out a long sigh.
Under the 【Otherworldly Heavenly Demon】 mechanism, Earth apparently didn’t count as “a world he had visited,” so his current options were incredibly limited.
“I can only gamble and randomly transmigrate to a new world.”
Thinking of this, Wang Ping’s expression soured. “If I’m lucky, I’ll transmigrate to a safe world and lay low for seven days until the cooldown ends.”
If he was unlucky, he’d drop straight into a disaster zone or a battlefield, dying instantly upon landing.
Leaving his life to chance was something Wang Ping despised.
Of course, there was another choice: resurrecting and remaining in the Great Shun Dynasty. However, this brought up an unavoidable problem:
“I just died. Heaven knows how this resurrection mechanism works. If I respawn in the same spot, wouldn’t I run right into the soldiers who just killed me?”
“Phew…”
Wang Ping exhaled deeply. Finally, he gritted his teeth and walked up to the towering tome, looking at 【Volume One: Otherworldly Heavenly Demon】. There were two lines of text:
【Shatter the primordial void, open the ancestral aperture to connect with the mysterious origin.】
【Light fills the empty room, step through this gate to enter the heavenly grotto.】
Glistening with golden light, the characters—resembling dragon and phoenix runes—arranged themselves on the left and right, finally transforming into a majestic gateway, seemingly inviting him to step inside.
“…Damn it.”
Wang Ping gritted his teeth and stomped his foot. He paced around for a full half-hour until hunger struck his belly, finally forcing his resolve.
There was no helping it; this Morgue clearly didn’t serve food.
If he kept this up, he would either starve to death here or have to gamble on not dying the moment he spawned. Thus, Wang Ping quickly abandoned his pointless hesitation.
“…Let’s do this!”
Wang Ping took a large stride forward and pushed through the gate.
The next second, golden radiance swiftly flooded Wang Ping’s vision, like a gentle hand slowly caressing his face, or a soft breeze brushing past.
Following that, it felt as if his body were submerged in a hot spring. An indescribable sensation washed over him. It was warm and intoxicating, and he couldn’t help but lose himself in it. At the same time, his hearing, touch, and innate five senses slipped away one by one, as if he had returned to the womb.
He didn’t know how long it took before he jolted awake.
He still couldn’t see anything clearly; it was a blur of hazy, illusory golden light. However, faintly, voices drifted over from extremely close by:
“A major incident occurred in the sect recently. Have you heard?”
“Of course I have. It was the Elixir Institute, right? Apparently, something went wrong with the 【Shennong Cauldron】. The spirit pills ran wild, nearly blowing up the furnace. Quite a few people were punished.”
“Tell me about it.”
“If you ask me, the Elixir Institute’s ambitions were too grand. They wanted to refine a supreme immortal pill but failed to control it, which caused the accident.”
“It’s nothing, really. If you want to talk about accidents, who caused a bigger scene than the Divine Weapon Institute back then? When the Patriarch tried to refine that supreme artifact, who knows how much manpower and resources were dumped into it? It left the entire sect in a foul mess, and it took a massive effort to repair.”
“Shush… watch your tongue!”
Wang Ping listened to these words silently, carving them into his memory while faintly realizing that his transmigration this time seemed to have actually hit the jackpot.
An immortal cultivation world?
Wang Ping was instantly thrilled. After all, who didn’t dream of cultivating into an immortal and living forever? Could it be that his transmigration this time made him a disciple of an immortal sect?
However, his fantasy was brutally shattered in the next second.
A joyous cheer rang out: “Finally refined successfully! This batch of 【Lishi】 is fresh out of the furnace. We can take them for delivery.”
Refined? Out of the furnace? Delivery?
Wang Ping was still bewildered when the hazy illusion before his eyes suddenly rippled, followed by a burst of agonizing pain as a massive influx of information and memories surfaced once more.
The good news: he had indeed transmigrated into an immortal cultivation sect.
The bad news: he wasn’t a disciple.
I am a 【Lishi】 of the Dharma Protector Institute.
In other words, a puppet or servant specifically refined by the sect to serve its disciples. His status in the sect was essentially that of a roomba.
Just then, the voice returned.
“Alright, hurry up and plant the talisman seals.”
A few brief words later, Wang Ping felt a refreshing coolness strike the top of his head. It expelled the dry heat that had filled his body and spread through his limbs and bones.
This should have been a very comfortable sensation, but Wang Ping felt as if he were plunged into an icy abyss.
Because as the coolness saturated his body, a thought suddenly bloomed in his mind: to devote his entire life in absolute loyalty to the immortal sect. This change was obviously abnormal.
Is this… the sect’s method of controlling Lishi?
Horror gripped Wang Ping as memories flooded his mind.
All Lishi are blank slates when they come out of the furnace. This cooling sensation directly generates their personalities, even carving mental stamps into their minds.
But I’m different. I’m a transmigrator. My own memories and inherent personality have long been established, and the sect clearly didn’t anticipate this. Although this will shock my psyche and cause a certain degree of cognitive confusion, as long as I have a moment to recover, I can still tell reality apart.
Realizing this, Wang Ping finally breathed a sigh of relief.
During the initial shock of the cooling sensation, he had almost cried out loud. The sensation of cognitive fragmentation was extremely unpleasant.
At the same time, a bad premonition arose within him.
Refining puppets, injecting memories, mental stamps… How to put it? While Wang Ping wasn’t entirely unable to understand it, something felt very wrong.
Then there were the duties of a 【Lishi】. The inherited memories described them as practical and durable tools. This phrasing made it hard for Wang Ping to shake his anxiety. After all, no matter how he looked at it, Lishi were shaped exactly like humans. Were they deliberately crafted to look human, or were they originally human to begin with?
Is this orthodox immortal sect actually legit?
Could it be a demonic sect?
Wang Ping instinctively tried to connect with 【The Taiping Classic】. However, when he focused his consciousness, although he could still see the boundless Morgue, that was the extent of it.
He could see it, but he couldn’t enter.
This was the current state of 【The Taiping Classic】. To enter the Morgue with his true body, he had to harness the mighty power of a scripture scroll.
Unfortunately, he currently only had one.
【Otherworldly Heavenly Demon】.
Looking at the scroll, which had entered a cooldown state, turned entirely gray, and couldn’t be reignited for seven days, Wang Ping forced himself to stay calm.
He immediately thought of another plan.
How do I increase the number of scripture scrolls?
If he needed a scroll to enter the Morgue, and the 【Otherworldly Heavenly Demon】 was unavailable, he just needed to unlock another one. It was a lifesaving method, after all.
Seemingly sensing his thoughts, the towering tome in the Morgue sprang into action again. On the open page, golden light converged once more to form text.
【Mundane Objects, Earthly Essence, Heavenly Splendor, Peerless Treasure, Unique Relic】
【Collect the above types of items and integrate them into the book. Each collected item adds one scripture scroll. The quality of each newly collected item must be higher than the last.】
…Ah.
Wang Ping instantly realized the extreme difficulty of this condition. The quality of each collected item must be higher than the last, meaning I can’t just collect things carelessly.
For example, if the very first item he collected was an 【Earthly Essence】, no matter how many 【Mundane Objects】 he collected afterward, it would be utterly meaningless. It was equivalent to completely skipping a tier, even though the benefits provided by both tiers were identical: they both added a single scripture scroll.
So the most efficient method is to start with a 【Mundane Object】 and slowly work my way up step-by-step. Only then can I avoid senseless waste.
Besides this, the function had another use.
That was 【Appraisal】.
In the future, if I encounter something I don’t recognize, showing it to 【The Taiping Classic】 should immediately yield the most accurate assessment.
Of course, all of that was for the future.
Although the future was promising, if there was no future to speak of, then all promises were bullshit. Wang Ping knew this full well, and his will to live nearly exploded.
What’s done is done. Even if there’s a cure for regret, I’ll have to wait seven days to take it.
Moreover, as long as I survive this hurdle and collect materials to unlock more scrolls in the future, I will only grow stronger. I need time to scale.
However… coming back to it. Wang Ping’s thoughts suddenly shifted.
Thinking about it carefully, putting aside those terrifying implications for a moment, the immortal sect was actually quite wonderful, teaching the principles of being a good person at every turn.
I should actually be grateful.
Grateful to the sect for giving him the opportunity to serve immortals.
Grateful to the sect for giving him the chance to touch upon the Dao.
Grateful to the sect for giving him the chance to be reborn.
I am a brick for the sect; I’ll go wherever they need… Fuck! Wang Ping shivered, snapping out of the bizarre thought that had spontaneously popped into his head.
Even so, he couldn’t suppress a lingering sense of agreement with those thoughts of 【Gratitude】.
As a 【Lishi】, his greatest happiness was earning the sect’s approval. The more approval he gained, the higher his value as a tool.
This is practically treating humans like livestock…
…No!
The next second, Wang Ping regained his clarity once again, his scalp turning numb. As long as I am a 【Lishi】, my mind will continue to be influenced?
Although he could hold on for now, if this persisted, he couldn’t guarantee he would stay sane. By then, he feared he truly would become nothing more than a living weapon for the sect.
Are you kidding me!
Thinking of this, only one thought remained in Wang Ping’s mind:
Seven days. As long as I survive for seven days and wait for the cooldown of the 【Otherworldly Heavenly Demon】 to end, everything will be fine. I just have to lay low until then!
Translator’s Note:
Shennong is the name of the legendary emperor associated with agriculture and medicine