1 Well... shit.

'Hmmm... did I forget to close the curtains last night?... it's like the sun is in my face...'

Slowly I moved my body, and I tried opening my eyes slowly so that I wouldn't go blind with this goddamn sun. Just as I was expecting the sun, what greeted me was the "unfamiliar ceiling".

Keeping my cool, my mind started working fast, trying to find the last memory that I had, but to no avail.

A few moments later, I got up quickly from where I was sleeping. You might be thinking, "Why am I panicking?" To answer your question, I just remembered where I was yesterday.

'I was at the company doing the usual routine: checking reports, sending feedback, getting to meetings if there are any, making some calls that I need to do personally, and the cycle repeats itself.' And after work hours, I headed to a restaurant. After dinner with some business partners, all I can remember is darkness...

'So they did something funny with the food.' Remembering the fail-safes that I placed on my person and in the staff to stop these plots from happening, I was genuinely amazed by the level of dedication that they showed to implement their ploy. It shouldn't have been easy to do all of this.

Thinking so, there was a small smile forming on the corners of my mouth, but seconds later, my face started looking a little funny. Why would they go to all this trouble just to recreate the famous "unfamiliar ceiling" scene? Even I could not think of a reason for these shenanigans...

Shaking my head, I looked for a mirror in this room to fix myself up and tried, at the same time, to come up with a plan to get out of there in one piece and with as much HP as possible.

I located the mirror and walked toward it. After splashing some water on my face, I looked in the mirror. I lazily looked at my face, my deep blue eyes, my face, and my trimmed silver-white hair— It was at that moment that I froze. The "me" in the mirror was not only younger than "me," but "my" hair was way longer than it should have been.

Just as I was in a state of denial, I had a sense of overlap in my brain, and after that, it was like a fast roller coaster ride through 14 years' worth of memories.

I could see a child being born, learning how to crawl, starting to walk, and his father and mother being with him almost all the time. His name was Li Huang, with Li meaning "power" and Huang meaning "bright."

From what I could see, he was with his grandfather and a young woman in addition to his mother and father.

Years passed doing what children do: eating, shitting, moving around, and sleeping.

When he was around four years old, something happened to his parents. The child didn't get it at first, but from my perspective, as an adult, it was clear that they somehow died.

From then on, it was his grandpa and the young lady from before, who now I know is his grandpa's disciple, taking care of him.

Years passed, and soon he was 7 years old, and his grandpa started training him. Well, I say training, but if I didn't see how much he loved his grandson for seven years, I would think that he was torturing him. I mean, the way I saw it, Huang was like a sine or cosine function; imagine -1 edge of death and +1 being in your full health. So what was happening was that Huang's body was alternating between -1 and +1 like a sine/cosine function.

Well, if he were recovering normally, it would be fine, but no, the loving grandpa would make some sort of medicinal bath and drop him in there. Somehow, this would make his body a bit stronger and help him make a fast recovery, although I'm not sure if "help" is the right wording for it.

From what I gathered from their talks, this is body cultivation, and the bath was something that was made from some precious resources that would help with recovery and also help him achieve higher realms in body cultivation.

Also, body cultivation is harder and fewer cultivators are doing it; why? Well, it's pretty much obvious.

First, you have to have resources so that you can achieve results, or else you get the same result as one of Huang's baths in 100 years or so. So buying this bathwater might not be a bad idea.

The second is the pain. You have to go through hell and back in your training, so there is that.

The third is that you have to have a good training method because if you don't, even good resources won't be of help...

This training went on for a couple of years, and soon he was 9 years old. One of the fruits of his training was that at the age of 9, he looked like he was 12 years old.

At the age of 9, grandpa started training him in sword arts. Well, so far, I cannot say for the "art" part, but he is definitely doing something with the sword. If I didn't know better, I would think of it as a scam.

According to Grandpa, he has to first solidify his stances and then try to learn a technique because "you cannot build a house on muddy water."

So with no other way around it, Huang was swinging a sword and taking baths. Because of sword training, the bath sessions were becoming less frequent, but according to Grandpa, this method of body tempering won't have many effects on his body at his current body cultivation realm.

You might be interested in the realms of body cultivation. No? Well, I'm going to tell you about it anyway. In body cultivation, there are two sections: mortal realms and transcendent realms.

Mortal realms are the realms that make your body as hard as some element that can be found in nature, but if you can reach the transcendent realms, you can go further and beyond that, and it would be like if you were an alloy of elements.

Grandpa told Huang that there are not many transcendent body cultivators in the world, and they can be summed up with ten fingers. This clearly shows how hard it is to train your body and how much time it would take to see results. You have to keep in mind that, unlike Qi cultivation, body cultivation doesn't have the benefit of adding to your life span, so as age progresses, fewer and fewer people will be willing to put their time into body cultivation when they need to cultivate so that they can keep their lives.

There are seven great realms in the mortal realms: lead, silver, copper, iron, titanium, topaz, and diamond. Each of these great realms contains five smaller realms. On each great realm, your body will be imitating the hardness of that element, and in smaller realms, the purity will be increasing.

After two years of training, Huang is at the fifth stage of the lead body. The so-called bottleneck in body cultivation is more vivid, and for that, you have to put in more effort to overcome it.

About transcendent realms, when Huang asked Grandpa, he told him "don't bite more than you can chew" and to think about how he could progress faster in the mortal realms instead of daydreaming about transcendent realms...

Three more years passed, and Huang was really 12 this time. Well,  he looked 16, but that's not the point. In these three years, he advanced to the second stage of the Silver Body, which in itself was a big achievement, but his biggest gain was something else that even made Grandpa's jaw drop.

Just a month ago, in his sword training, Huang was able to produce sword Qi. Sword Qi is the first step toward true swordsmanship. To give you an impression of how great a feat this is, you have to know that a talented swordsman can generate sword Qi after 50 years of training. Even his grandpa's disciple, who is considered a "once-in-a-million-year genius," was able to generate sword Qi in 9 years, but Huang did it in less than 3 years.

This event was the cause of celebration in the sect. Huang, as the patriarch's grandson, was the center of attention from a very young age, and this achievement was a needed boost to his reputation.

After the celebration was over and other smaller and affiliated sects and kingdoms sent their representatives and gifts, Huang was back to his training routine, and another two months passed like that.

This time his grandpa came to see him, and Yuan Jia, his disciple, was with him. She was like a big sister to Huang and would always help him in his training if Grandpa wasn't available.

Grandpa told him that he was going to go into a deep sleep for some time to save his lifespan and would leave Huang's training to Yuan Jia. This big sister has been in the sect's matriarch position for about five years as of now.

The Heavenly Sword Sect has always had both patriarchal and matriarchal positions so that there won't be any gender discrimination in the sect. Yuan Jia's skills made her a good candidate for this job, and her accomplishments made it easy for the sect elders to decide that she should get the job.

Grandpa chose to go into a deep sleep to save his life and leave the sect's matters to her now that her position is as secure as it can be after 5 years.

The reason Grandpa is going to deep sleep is that advancing in the Taoist Palace realms is too difficult, and even after two hundred years of cultivating, he has just advanced to the second river of the Taoist Palace, and this is the man who is known as the number one genius of his generation.

In the Taoist Palace realms, you have to build a Taoist Palace and fill nine rivers with an understanding of rules. In the end, these rivers will determine your future cultivation path.

According to Grandpa, the way of heavenly Dao has become thinner, making cultivation in the Taoist Palace realm far more difficult, and if you don't want to wait for your death, the only way is to go to deep sleep in the hope that, in the meantime, there will be some treasure of heaven and earth that will aid in understanding the way of heavenly Dao, and the sect will be able to obtain it.

From that day on, he started his Qi cultivation under Yuan Jia, and at the same time, he trained in one of the sect's strongest and hardest sword techniques, the [Eclipse Devourer Sword Art].

This sword art focuses on lethality, and the main goal in its creation was to kill the opponent as soon as possible. If you want to translate it to simpler terms, the goal is to "360 no scope" the fool before he finishes his trash talk.

Two more years passed, and Huang was now 14. Last night, after training and a bath, he got in bed and slept.

This roller coaster ride came to an abrupt end, and I was looking at Huang.

"Li Huang..." I said.

"...The Heavenly Sword Sect," I continued.

I took a deep breath and talked to my reflection in the mirror.

"Li Huang, the young master of the Li family and the core disciple of the heavenly sword sect."

After all the memories that I experienced, I know for a fact that I have somehow transmigrated into this body, and this is a world of cultivation.

If I were naive, I'd be overjoyed like the main character in a bad third-rate novel, promising to the heavens that "now that I've been given a second chance, I'll live my life to the fullest." But I've read too many Chinese novels to ignore the patterns.

Have you ever seen a Chinese novel in which the MC doesn't face-slap a young master from a powerful background for no reason at all? Not me!

What about a Chinese novel in which the main character does not confront and trash talk a genius in order to prove to the world that all other geniuses are garbage in comparison to him? Not me!

How about a Chinese novel in which the MC doesn't fuck with the Heavenly Sword Sect for a treasure, a girl, not giving face, or some other bullshit reason? Not me!

Not only am I a "young master," but I am also a "genius" from the goddamn "heavenly sword sect." Aren't I the last villain of the lower realm or something? I'm just a steppingstone for the son of the plane, aka the MC.

In this situation, I could only say one thing.

"Well... shit."