Ch 01 - An Optimistic Restart

He was hearing something. It was the first time in a while he was able to hear something.

Existing in a state of functional non-existence for a while had messed with his mind a bit, so he couldn't be sure if he was actually hearing something or just hallucinating it.

He had been dead for quite a while now after all, existing merely as a bundle of fading thoughts in the boundless void.

But no, he really was hearing something at the moment. Specifically, it was a baby's high-pitched cry.

And then, other sensations started to filter in. Touch, for example. Along with the sensation of limbs.

As a man of culture, he immediately jumped to the optimistic conclusion. And his conclusion was proven right as he soon gained full control of his body and the crying petered out.

He restarted the sound of crying. His own cries, specifically.

'Ah yes, the Reborn as a Baby in Another World trope. A classic.' The literal newborn baby thought as he desperately tried to cry his lungs out despite not feeling any particular urge to do so.

Around him, he assumed (correctly) that his parents were letting out trademarked joyful-parent noises while gently cradling him like he was a newborn baby… which he was.

Not that he could see any of it properly. Undeveloped baby eyes and all.

When he felt himself swaddled in a warm cloth and finally feeling some amount of warmth in this cold, chilly world, he brought his ear-splitting crying to a gradual and graceful halt. He let out a mental sigh of relief at finally letting his lungs and throat get a well-deserved rest.

Pretending to be a clueless baby was hard work.

---

As a normal looking baby born to a set of normal looking parents, he had a lot of time on his hands. Mostly because he was confined to his crib whenever one of his parents wasn't carrying him around. The random and strong urges to sleep were quite bothersome though.

As such, the only thing he could do besides sleeping was think. Contemplate. Meditate.

He wasn't particularly bothered by the fact that he died. A heart attack in the middle of the night was not the most glorious of ways to pass away but he supposed there were worse and more painful ways he could have died.

It had been a while anyway and he had made his peace with it. The afterlife being nothing but literal nothingness was extremely annoying but there was nothing he could do about it.

In fact, he was only slightly disturbed by his own death. He had after all went through a suicidal depression phase when he was in college and had mostly recovered from it but traces of it remained as aftereffects of the experience.

The most notable of them was his apathy towards his death. While he'd recovered the wonder and positive outlook he'd had towards life, some side effects still lingered. Notably, he was quite apathetic towards his inevitable end and when it finally came for him, the only thing he felt was the vague regret that he couldn't make his parents happy.

Perhaps because of that, when he suddenly found himself not dead after such a long time (was time even a working concept after death?) and being given a second chance, he grabbed the opportunity with both hands with barely any emotional baggage. The only things he felt were excitement and wonder at the concepts of reincarnation and transmigration being proven to be real.

That was until he came to realize how mentally painful being a baby truly was. At that point, he really just wished that time would run faster and he would grow up already.

Pooping himself was a more traumatizing experience than even dying.

---

It took until he was two years old for him to come to the realization that he had been reborn in a world of cultivators. One of those worlds where every man, woman, grandma and their dog strived for immortality while leaving a trail of offended seniors and face-slapped arrogant young masters in their wake.

One would wonder what a cultivator world even was. In essence, cultivation was a recurring subgenre in Chinese-based novels from his previous world. The act of cultivation in most of those novels referred to the act of absorbing some vague energy and tempering one's body to achieve immortality… somehow. And naturally, those who practice cultivation were called cultivators.

Now, how did he find out that he was in such a world? Well, it was originally because of the shabby picture books he was given to read. Nearly all of them contained the story of one or the other cultivator accomplishing one or the other impressive deeds.

Frankly, he found the downright mythical sounding stories of these picture books to be quite fascinating. Mostly because unlike in his old world, there was a real chance for these stories to be true considering the sheer craziness that cultivation worlds usually were.

Curiously however, his parents almost never talked about cultivators. There was some talk about monsters and such but never about cultivators. Naturally, he wondered why that was the case.

That question was answered when he found out that he was the only son of a lumberjack-and-hunter and his dainty housewife who lived at the edge of a small village in the middle of nowhere.

Simply put, no one in the village had even seen a cultivator in their entire lives. And because they were in a remote village, there were no aftereffects from any shenanigans that cultivators usually got up to.

And thus, there was no reason for the villagers to talk about them. Nor did they have any significant information about them other than fairy tales.

The infant transmigrator was justifiably bummed out by the revelation.

But of course, he was still in a cultivation world after all so he thought perhaps he could try cultivating by himself.

Sadly however, one of the few pieces of information that he did find out was that even the most prolific of geniuses only started cultivating from the age of ten or so. And though he didn't find out why that was the case, he just assumed that doing it at an age younger than that was a bad idea.

Who knew? He might explode or something.

With that being the case, he put his radical self-cultivation ideas on hold for the moment and decided to focus on being a normal lumberjack's child in a remote village.

Well, as normal as he could be at least.

---

Shen Boqin and Shen Qi loved their son, Shen Jian. It was an undeniable fact. Even though they didn't have much to call their own, they gave him everything they could.

Mother Shen played with him every moment she was free and he was awake. Seeing the way he responded to her actions from his crib each and every time without fail was a heartening experience. Her face was filled with smiles all day.

Father Shen was no less enthusiastic. Though he was busy with his work for part of the day, the time he did have was always spent with his son. He would carry him on his shoulders or above his head, gladdened by the way his son would laugh happily.

Both of them loved the fact that he was such a calm child. When it was feeding time, he didn't make a single fuss and calmly drank his milk and later on, when he was a bit older, he ate his food silently. He even seemed to instinctively chew with his mouth closed!

Potty training was a breeze as well. Their son picked up the way to control his bladder and bowels at record speed. Later on, when he learned to crawl, he would crawl towards the bathroom door and call for one of them to open the door.

Their son was so smart!

However, as he grew older, they started to notice that he wasn't entirely normal.

Shen Jian was a strange child. This was something that both of his parents unanimously agreed on. They still loved him with all their hearts and they were sure their feelings were reciprocated as well but there was no denying that their son was a bit strange.

He was a bit eccentric in his own little ways. Most notably, he was very uninterested in socializing with anyone (besides his parents, thankfully).

Other than that, he was strangely less curious than the average child. He never asked why the sky was blue. He never asked for any toys to play with. He never made any excessive child-like demands.

However, as he grew up, he did have many questions to ask about cultivation. Questions that neither his mother nor father had the answers to.

As the years passed, the husband and wife came to understand that their son was fiercely intelligent for his age. When his education reached the point where they were beginning to teach him mathematics, he learned it so ridiculously fast and to such a high degree of ability that within a matter of weeks, he was the best mathematician in the whole village.

Then again, the standards of a small remote village far from any cities weren't high to begin with.

Though what was definitely normal for his age was the amount of energy he had. There was never a moment where he wasn't doing something. If he wasn't running aimlessly around the village, then he was climbing a random tree he found or wandering into the forest nearby.

The husband and wife had nearly had a heart attack when they'd found him scurrying around the edge of the forest. It was the first and only time that they had sternly scolded him before telling him about the various dangerous beasts that lived in the forest.

Shen Jian had never stepped foot into the forest alone after that. He did tag along with his father when he went inside for his lumberjack work though.

As he slowly grew however, the father and mother pair started to secretly feel bad about themselves. They felt that their humble village life was holding their son back from achieving something more worthwhile with his life. His intelligence and drive were plain to see and simply raising him to be another humble villager was too much of a waste of his potential.

Every loving parent wanted the best for their child. And the Shen mother and father pair were no different.

With that in mind, the two of them started to save some money for the future in the hope that they could send him to a nearby city when he was grown up. Surely, there would be better opportunities for him there after all.

The whole situation just left them with conflicted and bittersweet feelings.

---

Eight-year-old Shen Jian strained his arms and dragged his body above the tree branch one more time. Currently, he was doing pull ups with a tree that had a low hanging branch.

Although he had accepted long ago that he could not experiment with true cultivation before age ten, he was dissatisfied with the idea of wasting of so much time until he did turn ten. Coupled with the fact there was very little entertainment to be had in such a remote village, his whole body itched for some kind of stimulation.

Having memories of a past life in the information age felt a little bit like a curse at times.

Therefore, he decided to put his energy into something productive. In this case, that was to prepare his body for cultivation in the future.

Though he still didn't have any real information about cultivation, having a strong physical body had to be useful somehow. He didn't know for sure but he still believed it to be so.

Thus, he spent his time being as active as he possibly could be. Ironically, it was the exact opposite of his previous life's couch potato life style.

It was hard, of course. Shen Jian absolutely hated the burn in his muscles. And as he grew more proficient with exercise, he learned to just ignore it. As for those who learned to like the pain in their body? He thought of them as masochists.

While he'd spent his earlier childhood just running around and exhausting himself, in recent days, he'd started to do some actual exercises to build himself up.

Of course, he did it all in secret. He was not ready for the questions that his parents or the other villagers would undoubtedly have.

With sweat pouring down his body like he'd just gone swimming, Shen Jian dropped to the ground and stood on wobbly legs. He lifted a shaking arm and ran it through his short black hair, his amber eyes blinking drops of sweat off his eyelashes as he panted in exhaustion.

"I overdid it again." He mumbled as he began to drag his tired body back home. "I wonder if it will happen again anytime soon."

Reaching home, he wiped his sweat off with a cloth, had dinner with his parents and directly went to sleep because he was too exhausted to stay awake much longer.

However, anticipating (or rather, hoping) something unusual happening, instead of sleeping on his bed like usual, he instead decided to sleep on the floor with only a long cloth under him. Just in case.

The next morning, Shen Jian woke up as the sun was barely rising and the first thing that he noticed was the awful smell coming from all around him.

Grimacing, he pinched his nose and got up and as he expected, both his clothes and the sheet under him were stained with some kind of dark residue. Besides looking very dirty, it also had a smell that made him feel mildly nauseous.

Now fully awake, he gathered all the stinky clothes and made his way to the washing area. Dumping them nearby, Shen Jian filled a bucket with water from the storage and hurried into the bath.

With ease of practice, he thoroughly scrubbed off all the bits of residue still stuck to his skin until he felt clean enough to start the day.

Looking at the light skin of his arm that should logically be tanned considering the amount of time he spent under the sun but strangely wasn't, he hummed thoughtfully. "This really should be that impurity ejection thing that cultivators do. I don't have any other clue what else it might be."

In fact, it wasn't the first time Shen Jian had woken up with sticky oily residue all over him. The first time it happened, he had been startled enough to alert his parents who'd been just as startled as him. A trip to the village doctor had yielded no results and after seeing that there wasn't any adverse effect caused to his body, everyone had just left the matter despite being a little worried.

But afterwards, Shen Jian had remembered reading novels in his previous life where cultivators would refine their body with some methods and afterwards, their body would release a black oily substance that was said to be the body's impurities.

He figured it was the same case here and that was what happened to him. And he figured that the trigger for it was that his body reached some sort of nondescript threshold.

Over the years, the phenomenon had happened multiple times. And they always happened whenever he pushed himself particularly hard in his pseudo training regimen.

It was not predictable though. Even though every time it happened, he'd usually pushed himself beyond his limits the previous day, it didn't happen every time he pushed himself beyond his limits. It was too random.

After secretly washing his clothes and hanging them on the clothesline before his mother woke up, Shen Jian went back to his bed and laid on it with his hands behind his head, looking up at the ceiling as the morning sun's rays slowly spread across the room. His eyes slowly closed.

---

He was standing in the void, nothing below to place his feet on and no gravity pulling him downward. There was no air, however he could breathe just fine. There was no atmosphere, yet his body remained sturdy.

Stars dotted his view. The sun was there to the side, shining its light upon him. It felt strangely warmer than usual.

He stood there in the emptiness of outer space for a long time.

In front of him was a planet. It was not Earth. There was more land than seas on this planet.

He watched the planet rotate on its axis for a long time. Then he smiled and turned away, looking towards the distant stars.

"Onward." He whispered.

---

Shen Jian's eyes opened, hearing the chirping of the birds. He didn't even notice when he fell asleep again. Thankfully, it seemed like it hadn't been long.

He rubbed his eyes, feeling like he had a dream just now but couldn't remember the details of it. That was normal though so he quickly forgot about it. He stretched his arms and legs, hearing the clicking sounds of his joints popping.

'Father said he'd teach me how to hunt today. I'm excited.' A small smile grew on his face, his amber eyes shining in anticipation.