Life is unfair.
It crushes most beneath burdens they never chose. Some are born with every advantage-talent, family, fate-while the rest of us crawl through the dirt, praying for a sliver of hope.
The infirmary was silent, save for the faint hiss of heated coals beneath the stone floors-a rare luxury in the Gēngù Shì clan. Morning light filtered through carved lattice windows, dust motes drifting in slow, golden shafts like time itself had slowed to watch.
On a raised dais lay the youth they called Huāpíng (flower vase), the Xiǎo Bái Liǎn (weak child), fifteen-year-old Gěng Yúhuī (light/radiance)-so named for the brightness he was expected to embody. Yet he lay in bed, silent and unmoving, as though swallowed by shadow instead of chasing the path of body tempering and cultivation.
But today, something had changed.
He sat upright on the bed, hunched over a small table cluttered with half-sketched blueprints. Wind tugged at the loose pages, but a white marble medicine grinder-still damp with residue-anchored them in place. Nearby, empty vials rolled in gentle arcs across the surface, faintly clinking like the ticking of a broken clock.
Yúhuī paid no attention to the mess or the breeze. His fingers clutched a brush, his gaze dull and distant, tracing out words in the worn pages of his diary. Melancholy flickered in his eyes. That's when a dazzling light shone as the blueprints scattered once again.
---
Diary Entry (1st Person)
Name: Gěng Yúhuī • Earth: 20 → New World: 15 (26 total) • Clan: Gēngù Shì (Rootbound)
Welcome to my life-again. Sigh. I'm telling you, if I don't write it all down, I'll forget my first life completely. Only now, in this strange silence, can I write freely without someone labeling me a genius, pressuring me to invent a language, or stripping away my ideas to feed their own ambitions.
I was born on Earth to a lower-middle-class migrant family. My parents? They could handle basic math and the essentials, but beyond that, everything was off.
Mental health? A cruel joke. Creativity? Luxury. Freedom and emotional expression? Absolutely twisted jokes.
What mattered was money, status, and stability. Nothing was ever enough. I was always a disappointment-a lazy bum-until I failed enough for them to finally appreciate my earlier self. But of course, that's not how it works. That's too naïve. I was never truly a son-just a tool.
If I succeeded, "Look at how well we raised him!" If I failed, "Why did you destroy yourself and bring shame to us?"
Yes, I'm young. Yes, I'm spoiled-I wanted to write stories, chase wild ideas, and get rich the clever way.
I wanted comfort, warmth, and a chance to test all those crazy business schemes that were ahead of their time.
But did I have confidence? ha No, where would that come from? I couldn't fail-not even once. One stumble and it was over. I had to be like everyone else-follow the same path, be presentable when visitors came, and be polite when they needed to show me off. In the end, I was little more than a status project, a living investment, and I knew it was all falling apart.
Of course, I escaped-sort of. The internet and novels offered something beautiful, but they also seeded new chaos in me. Constant shifts in morals, contradicting philosophies, spiraling confusion. I was labeled spoiled, ungrateful, and lazy-always drifting, always lost.
I tried explaining. ADHD, autism, trauma-none of it mattered. They had it worse, so I was the brat. I was the burden.
And then, somehow, I got transmigrated.
A magical world. A fresh start with cheats. And for a time, it was joyous-beautiful, even. Handsome parents. A world of beasts and qi and cultivation. No rent. No shame. No screaming.
I still missed my parents sometimes. But this world was full of wonder. My new clan praised me-I made heating tiles, stylized architecture, and tiny inventions that brought warmth and smiles to cold kitchens and lonely children. I even used scraps of knowledge from YouTube Shorts and bedtime science tales.
But in the end, I became that child again, just like any New Year's resolution or good time. The Weak One. Nerdy. Prettier than the others, sure, but weak. Jealous cousins used me as their nanny, asked for help fixing toys and tools, praised me to my face, and mocked me behind my back.
Some still resent me for surviving my series of comas and blackouts. "The useless lineage," they whisper. Even my own bloodline shuns me.
Here, in a world where talent and aptitude rank decide everything, I am nobody. In this rigged cultivation system, the only hope for someone like me lies in rare Gu worms, strange treasures, dangerous artifacts, and ancient secrets. But none of those are easy to find-or keep.
Sometimes I wonder if I'll awaken at all. What if my aperture is low-tier or shattered? What if I fail to awaken completely? The Ascension Trials of the Ancient Fort are two years away-and I don't even know if I'll survive the first test.
---
Artifact's Arrival
The artifact pulsed.
Glyphs etched along its lacquered sides glowed like trapped hearts, beating faster. The room grew colder. The incense stopped curling and floated still, as if afraid to move.
Yúhuī's eyes snapped open, pupils catching the reflection of the golden, pagoda-shaped frame as it hovered above him. The artifact rotated slowly-then violently, humming without sound-as decades of knowledge and memory poured into him.
His body tensed. His brain spasmed. All of his nerves near his skull were clearly popping out, and his eyes were red. It was like his soul cracked in two; he could differentiate past and present battling inside his skull.
---
This feeling... Yúhuī remembered it from when he first transmigrated into this world into a six-year-old body, splintering mind."
The headaches felt like an old computer trying to load a new game or opening too many Chrome tabs it couldn't comprehend-a computer overheating. Flickers of awareness, sudden blackouts, bursts of images.
This was worse.
The artifact didn't just show me memories-it forced them into me.
There were spiderwebs woven of blood and silk. An assassin's dagger cutting the light. A father's final breath, filled with regret.
The pain nearly split my head open. I lost myself again.
---
Yúhuī opens his eyes only to find himself, I blotted out the present world into a past or a future." It felt like a VR recording.
---
A priest entered.
He dropped to one knee beside the dais, pale and shaking.
"He… he's awake," he whispered.
The boy-once mocked as the flower vase-took a steady breath. His eyes shimmered, clear and sharp. Blood surged with unfamiliar power and resolve.
He rose from the bier-no longer asleep, no longer lost.