I woke up with a headache from hell.
The first thing I remembered was staying up too late again, bouncing between strategy games and another mind-numbing martial arts novel, the kind where the protagonist always gets some ridiculous cheat skill and a harem of jade beauties. Just background noise to help me fall asleep, same as always.
But something was wrong.
The second thing I noticed was a deep, bone-weary ache in my lower back. The kind of pain that comes from decades of sitting on hard wooden beds and thin meditation cushions. I'm twenty. I shouldn't have a bad back.
My eyes snapped open.
This wasn't my room.
The ceiling above me was rough wooden beams, dark with age and coated in dust. The air smelled like old incense, mildew, and something I couldn't identify. My room didn't smell like anything except takeout containers and unwashed laundry.
I sat up too fast, and my head swam. My body felt heavy in a way that was completely alien; slower, stiffer, like I'd suddenly aged fifty years overnight. My heart started hammering against my ribs. What the hell was happening? Was this a dream? A prank? Had someone drugged me and dumped me in some rural ren faire?
I swung my legs over the side of the bed. A plain wooden frame with thin, threadbare blankets, and my feet hit cold dirt floor. Dirt. Floor. Who the hell has a dirt floor?
There was a bronze mirror on a rickety table across the room, tarnished and covered in dust. I stumbled toward it, my legs almost giving out underneath me like I'd forgotten how to walk in this heavier, older body. I had to see. I had to know.
I grabbed the mirror and wiped my sleeve across its surface.
The face that stared back wasn't mine.
It was some stranger. Some old stranger. Thin face, deep lines around the eyes and mouth, streaks of gray at the temples. A face that had lived through decades I couldn't remember. I stared, and the stranger stared back, and I felt my breath start to come in short, sharp gasps.
This wasn't my face. I was supposed to have a chubby, pimply twenty-year-old face that still broke out if I ate too much greasy food. Not... not this.
My vision started to tunnel. I could hear my own pulse roaring in my ears. This couldn't be happening. This was some kind of nightmare, some fever dream, I was going to wake up any second in my own bed with my phone buzzing somewhere—
And then the memories hit.
Not mine. His. A lifetime's worth, crashing into my skull like a tidal wave. Decades of training. Meditation. Fighting. Loss. An orphan boy taken in by an old man with kind eyes and calloused hands.The previous Sect Leader of the Coiling Dragon Sect. Years of grueling cultivation, pushing through bottlenecks, finally breaking through to Foundation Establishment. The old Sect Leader dying of age, passing the burden to his most talented disciple. Twenty years of leading a sect that was already dying. Twenty years of watching disciples leave, resources dwindle, hope fade.
Twenty years of failure.
I stumbled backward and collapsed onto the bed, the mirror falling from my hands and landing in the dirt with a dull thunk. I pressed my palms against my temples, trying to stop the flood, but it kept coming.
Lu Chen. His name was Lu Chen. My name was Lu Chen. The same name as mine in real life. What were the odds? What kind of cosmic joke was this?
I looked around the room again, really looked this time, with his memories overlaying my own. The cracked walls. The single wooden chest in the corner with my—his—robes folded inside. The incense burner on a small altar to ancestors I never knew. The patched curtains over a window that looked out onto gray morning light.
This was the Sect Leader's quarters. The Sect Leader of the Coiling Dragon Sect. And the Coiling Dragon Sect was a joke.
I squeezed my eyes shut, sorting through the memories. Orphaned as a child, found by the previous Sect Leader during one of his trips outside the sect's territory. Raised in these very halls, trained in techniques that were already outdated even then. Kindness and patience from the old man who had four other disciples, no children of his own.
Foundation Establishment at twenty-eight, which was... fine. Not impressive, not pathetic, just fine. Middle-of-the-road. Average. The kind of progress that wouldn't earn praise or mockery.
And then the old Sect Leader died, and Lu Chen inherited... nothing.
Over twenty years since. Twenty years of watching disciples transfer to better sects. Twenty years of failing to attract new talent. Twenty years of slowly running out of spirit stones, elixirs, techniques, hope. The sect still existed, technically. But it was a corpse that hadn't stopped breathing yet.
I opened my eyes and stared at the ceiling.
The stories I'd read, the ones I'd fallen asleep to just... however long ago... they always gave the protagonist something. A young body, full of potential. A rich family with resources. A forbidden technique. A system. A cheat skill.
What did I get? A middle-aged failure of a sect leader with no talent, no resources, and a sect that was one bad season away from extinction. No cheat skill. No system. No pretty junior sister to pine after me.
Just... this. This body. This life. This slow, pathetic decline into obscurity and death.
I laughed. It came out bitter and hollow, echoing in the small, empty room. "Of course," I muttered to myself in that unfamiliar voice. "Of course I get nothing. Why would I—"
I looked at the mirror on the floor, still face-up, still reflecting the gray light from the window.
And I saw words.
They floated in the air above the mirror's surface, not physically there but somehow visible, like a heads-up display I hadn't noticed before. Text. Clean, sharp, impossible to ignore. Written in a language I'd never seen but somehow understood perfectly.
Lu Chen - Foundation Establishment (Middle Stage)
Name: Lu Chen
Age: 48
Spirit Root: Mixed Five Elements (D-grade)
Cultivation: Foundation Establishment (Middle Stage)
Verdict: Utterly mediocre. Will reach Core Formation with difficulty if given Heaven-defying opportunities. Otherwise will die at Foundation Establishment.
I stared at it. Blinked. Rubbed my eyes. Looked again.
It was still there.
"Well," I heard myself whisper, a slow grin spreading across this weathered, unfamiliar face for the first time, "at least it's honest."
I had a cheat skill after all.