Chapter 4: Chapter 3: A Cosmic Joke

CHAPTER

3

A Cosmic Joke

I

Hao Zhen awoke with a groan. He scowled. His whole body hurt, and he didn’t remember his bed being this hard—or this prickly. Prickly. Like grass. He blinked, and his gaze focused. Branches and leaves hung above him. A canopy. He was … under a tree?

He shakily stood up. His body protested—for some reason he felt really tired—but he wasn’t about to sleep in this unfamiliar place. He was in a forest, he quickly ascertained. A moment later it came to him—the mission. Right. He had left the sect on a mission.

While thinking, he kept looking around, and as he did, he caught sight of something blue. He blinked. Not something—someone.

A body wearing blue robes. Tian Jin’s robes—Tian Jin’s body.

Hao Zhen’s drowsiness fled him as if scared away. Yesterday’s events, which had been trying to recall, rushed through his mind. Finding Tian Jin and Ke Li, being suddenly assailed by ungodly pain, being sent flying by Tian Jin’s punch, and finally feeling an all-consuming pain that rendered him unconscious….

He hurried over to Tian Jin’s body and checked on his condition. The taller boy was alive—his chest slowly rising and falling. Hao Zhen slowly breathed out, thoughts churning in his head. He doubted Ke Li would have left without ensuring that Tian Jin was dead. This could only mean that the inner disciple had failed. So what happened to him?

Hao Zhen’s gaze fell on a tree on the opposite side of the clearing. Held up against its bark was a corpse, the hilt of a sword sticking out of his chest—the rest of it no doubt buried into the bark of the tree. The corpse’s head was hanging down, so he couldn’t see its face, but Hao Zhen recognized the robe it wore.

That answered his question. Hao Zhen looked away; it wasn’t a pretty sight to behold.

Tian Jin had, somehow, turned the tables on Ke Li and killed him. But how? Hao Zhen groaned. The mission had really gone south, hadn’t it? In hindsight, he should have expected this. Tian Jin’s presence was already a major red flag. How that hadn’t occurred to him, he had no—

Hao Zhen blinked. Red flag? What did that even mean?

A sign that something bad was about to happen.

Right. He nodded to himself. That was what it meant. So why— No. Wait. How did he know what it meant? He didn’t remember ever hearing that term before. And then he remembered: he hadn’t heard it; he had come across it while browsing the…

Internet.

He had found it on the internet. The internet. His eyes widened. He didn’t know that term—or did he?

His vision swam. He felt his thoughts slow to a crawl, and then…

Memories. Memories flooded into his head, tearing through his thoughts, piercing his mind like ice-cold needles, fighting for relevance. He stumbled backward and fell onto the ground, clutching his head, a storm of alien memories burrowing into him.

It ended as abruptly as it began. Hao Zhen gasped as the swirl of memories in his mind subsided. Closing his eyes, he took a moment to calm himself down, trying to understand what had just happened. Then, slowly, he felt his mind rearrange itself, adapting to the new memories, and as he reviewed them, he soon found the centerpiece that held them together.

Amyas Auclair.

A name. His name. Somehow.

Hao Zhen took in a deep breath and tried his best not to panic. These memories he had just received weren’t new, but old—the oldest memories he had. Although they seemed foreign at first, the deeper he looked, the more he absorbed, the more he felt himself resonate with them.

Earth. Transmigration. Another world.

Those were the words at the forefront of his mind. They echoed throughout his thoughts, guiding him from memory to memory, from thought to thought. He just stood there, thinking, recalling, adapting. With every memory he assimilated, the faster he assimilated the remaining memories, and before long, he was taking in one memory after the other without stopping.

A while later, Hao Zhen opened his eyes. He was still in the forest, it was still morning, but nothing looked the same. More questions than he could count plagued him. There was just too much he wanted—too much he needed—to know.

Transmigration. In his current life, as Hao Zhen, he had never heard the word, but he was familiar with reincarnation, which could be considered a type of transmigration. Cultivators were taught about the Cycle of Reincarnation, a process that all sounds underwent after their physical vessel perished. And as far as Hao Zhen could tell, these new memories inside his head belonged to his previous incarnation. He couldn’t think of a way to confirm it, but they at least felt like they were his. If they were, then something had happened and he had somehow managed to recover the memories of his previous incarnation. He couldn’t tell what had caused it, but that wasn’t his main concern at the moment.

He reviewed what he remembered about his previous incarnation. Amyas Auclair. That was his name—or at least it used to be. He could remember almost everything about his old life—his family, his friends, his sister—but only until a certain day. He had been at home, cooking dinner in the kitchen… And then his life as Hao Zhen began: his mother dying, his father remarrying, only to also a few years down the line, the abuse from his stepmother and stepbrother, running away from home, and finally joining the Blazing Light Sect.

Hao Zhen couldn’t remember how, exactly, he had wound up in this world. Did he die and somehow reincarnate? Was there … a way to go back to Earth? He paused. Did he even want to go back? And … who was he? Moments ago this would have been a stupid question, but as the memories of what he believed to be his previous incarnation burrowed into him and took root, he couldn’t help but ask himself …  Was he Amyas Auclair, or was he Hao Zhen?

He groaned. Great. Just what he needed—an identity crisis. Yet another thing he would have to worry about later.

He set his previous life and his transmigration aside for the moment. After receiving these new memories, Hao Zhen was forced to reevaluate the world he had grown up in and spent the last sixteen years in.

Absurd. That was the only word he could use to describe it. There wasn’t any other way to think of it—not after remembering his previous life, knowing what he now knew. He found himself questioning many of the things he had taken for granted over the last sixteen years. The word itself, the people, the powers they had… Particularly the people. Including him. Particularly him.

Everything else aside, he should have turned around and left the moment he learned that Tian Jin was his teammate. Everyone knew that Tian Jin had powerful enemies, and that trouble seemed to find him wherever he went. He couldn’t understand how someone as careful as him had missed all of that.

Then there was what happened last night. In hindsight, he realized how stupid he had been. He had pretty much just stood there as if he were a sitting duck, waiting for Ke Li to make his move, even though Ke Li had been visibly straining to keep Tian Jin under control. Sure, that could have been an act, but it was still better than nothing. The situation had been obvious from the start. He should have at least tried something—to run away, to attack first, to help Tian Jin. He should have acted instead of just reacting until it was too late. That made him think a little further back, and he felt a sinking feeling in his stomach, realizing that this wasn’t simply a case of hindsight being twenty-twenty.

He was a cautious—overly cautious, according to many people he knew—person. So how come he just rushed over without thinking twice when he saw the red cloud from Tian Jin’s spiritual flare? How come he just threw caution to the wind?

Now that he thought about it, he should have realized that something wasn’t quite right the moment Ke Li offered them those pills. Hao Zhen had never heard of inner disciples doing something like this in a mission. He had even found it odd how Ke Li’s behavior was so unlike the kind of behavior usually expected from inner disciples, and then simply waved it off as Ke Li being an exception. Instead of being suspicious, he had just taken Ke Li’s highly irregular behavior for granted. Most likely, those pills were behind the pulses of pain he had felt yesterday.

Hao Zhen had been acting completely out of character—inconsistently, incongruously.

That thought opened the floodgates of his mind. He recalled bizarre events one after the other—situations in which people, now that he was looking back, had just acted completely illogically. It was as if a fog that had clouded his mind all his life had just cleared up, and for the first time he was actually seeing the world for what it was.

Just as alarming was that the world he now lived in closely resembled that of a certain genre of novels he used to read back when he was Amyas.

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Cultivation, spiritual energy, magical powers, sects, and clans—all of these elements were common both to the world he had been born in as Hao Zhen and cultivation novels. Although there were a few differences, mostly with regard to the terminology, this world was eerily similar to the setting of those novels. Even the Common Tongue, the only language spoken in this world as far as he knew, closely resembled the Chinese language from Earth, in which most cultivation novels were written.

Hao Zhen felt a shiver run down his spine— No. He shook his head. No way. That was too much. The implications…

Yet it was right in front of his eyes. He couldn’t deny it. It fit perfectly. The world resembled the setting of cultivation novels, and the people resembled the characters. It was like some sort of cosmic joke.

The more he thought about it, the more similarities—the more proof—he found. He slowly exhaled. Did that mean that was inside a novel, then? Had he transmigrated into a fictional world?

No. He shook his head. That wasn’t necessarily the case. This world had magic and monsters. People could grow almost infinitely stronger through cultivation. Clearly, this world followed different rules, and these rules affected how people behaved. That it resembled cultivation novels so much could very likely be a simple coincidence. Weren’t there theories about parallel universes back in his old world?

Parallel universes. Alternate realities. That could explain everything. It was an easier pill to swallow than being inside a novel. He had simply somehow wound up in a different universe—one that operated based on different rules. Yes. Hao Zhen nodded to himself. That was it. By remembering his previous life, he must have somehow “broken” those rules—or at least become an exception to them.

Mental crisis averted for now, Hao Zhen turned around. He could think about the rest later. He had to wake up Tian Jin and figure out what to do. His eyes fell on Tian Jin, and just as he was about to walk over to the unconscious boy, he froze in place.

Tian Jin. Tian Jin. He had entered the sect two months ago, getting first place in the entrance examination. Nobody knew his background or where he was from. He was devilishly handsome, supremely talented, had caught the eye of several elders, and had somehow managed to get on the bad side of a prime disciple—an existence that an outer disciple would usually never have any contact with—to the point that the prime disciple in question had schemed to have him killed him on his first mission outside of the sect. Somehow, however, Tian Jin had managed to triumph over an inner disciple, who was stronger than him by at least an entire level, despite having been in a seemingly hopeless situation.

Hao Zhen faltered. He missed his next step and almost fell to the ground.

No way. No. Nope. Nah. Uh-uh.

Then and there, Hao Zhen came dangerously close to having a mental breakdown.

He had just dismissed the possibility of being inside a novel—he had just managed to convince himself that he was simply in another world instead and that all similarities were simply coincidences—and yet…

No matter how he looked at it, Tian Jin’s trajectory so far, not to mention his appearance and behavior, were just like those of the protagonist of a cultivation novel. He ticked all the boxes.

But no. This wasn’t a novel. Hao Zhen couldn’t accept that. There was no way Tian Jin was this world’s so-called protagonist. This was an alternate reality, and everything could be attributed to coincidences.

Then again … Parallel universes. Infinite possibilities.

Right. He could accept the world and the people resembling the setting and characters of cultivation novels, so why couldn’t the events of the world resemble the plot? Events were, after all, the result of people interacting with each other and with the world, and since both the world and the people appeared to follow different rules, it’d make sense if the same applied to events—to fate.

Hao Zhen decided to leave it at that for the time being. He’d have plenty of time to theorize and agonize over the nature of reality in the future, he reckoned. Right now, there were other things he had to take care of. He looked at Tian Jin, debating whether to wake him up, before finally deciding against it.  

Deciding to ignore Tian Jin for now, Hao Zhen made his way over to Ke Li’s corpse.

As he walked, he reviewed what he knew of the plot of cultivation novels. Usually, there was something on the corpse of enemies that would be useful in some way. It wasn’t always the case, but it happened more often than not, and it was particularly common at the beginning of novels, which Hao Zhen believed, based on what he knew of Tian Jin, to be where the trajectory of the world was currently at, analogously.

He couldn’t act as if every event would develop according to the plot of cultivation novels—that would be a highly reckless and dangerous assumption—but it was an avenue he had to at least consider and explore. At the very least, there was a good chance that there was something on Ke Li’s corpse that would point to his relationship with Du Qing, and that could come in handy later on.

Now that he was closer to the corpse, Hao Zhen avoided looking at the sword—as Hao Zhen, he had already seen corpses before, some in an even worse state, but it didn’t mean that he liked the sight, and his memories of his life as Amyas, a modern person from Earth with modern sensibilities, only made it worse—and tentatively reached forward and grabbed the corpse’s hand, retrieving the spatial ring he remembered noticing the previous day.

Stepping away from the corpse, he turned around before channeling his spiritual power into the ring. Finding no obstruction, he sighed in relief. He had heard that some spatial rings were keyed to their owner and as such couldn’t be used by other people, but it seemed like not even inner disciples had access to that kind of stuff.

In his mind’s eye, he saw the contents of the ring, floating in what appeared to be a void. Tentatively, he channeled more spiritual power inside the ring, and he saw his flow of spiritual power being reproduced inside his mind’s eye. Then, tentatively, he directed his spiritual powers towards one of the items inside the ring—a sword—and the moment his spiritual contact came into contact with it, the sword disappeared from the mental image in his mind, and reappeared in the outside world, falling down to the ground in front of him.

So that’s how it works, Hao Zhen thought to himself, repeating the process over and over again until on the ground in front of him was a small pile of weapons, flasks filled with pills, paper talismans, and jade slips. He then reached out with his spiritual power, this time in the outside world, and wrapped it around the jade slips, lifting them up in the air and into his hands.

He couldn’t help but grin at what he was doing. This wasn’t his first time using spiritual power to interact with the physical world—most recently, he had done so yesterday, when gathering the magical plants—but now that he knew that what he was doing was effectively telekinesis, something he could only dream of in his previous life, he appreciated this ability of his a whole lot more.

Choosing one of the jade slips at random, Hao Zhen channeled his spiritual power into it, and in his mind’s eye, a series of incantations and images appeared. Realizing that it was a cultivation method, he put it back in his pocket to look through later, before sending his spiritual power into another jade slip.

He was looking for instructions from Du Qing—something incriminating. There were over three dozen jade slips, and it was only on the twenty-seventh one that he found what he was looking for: A request from Du Qing to kill Tian Jin and a promise of a reward. It seemed like they hadn’t met in person. He found it was rather stupid of Du Qing, to not only reveal his name, but also so helpfully provide incriminating evidence when he could’ve just met Ke Li in secret and left no physical proof of their agreement, but he reckoned that this was pretty in line with a cultivation novel antagonist.

Hao Zhen then placed all the times back inside Ke Li’s spatial ring and spent a few moments organizing his thoughts, eventually coming to the conclusion that there was only one thing left to do now.

He made his way over to Tian Jin, who was still asleep. As he walked, he was suddenly struck by the feeling that he was forgetting something, but quickly dismissed it. If it was important, he wouldn’t have forgotten it.

And then he froze.

He felt like he was forgetting something, and he had just decided to ignore it.

His instincts as Hao Zhen were telling him to just move on and that it wasn’t important, whereas his newfound instincts as Amyas … Hao Zhen decided that he had already raised enough red flags.

He was forgetting something, and it was probably important. Something that would probably become a problem later on. He recalled the recent events: waking up, struggling with his memories, and searching Ke Li’s corpse. Nothing wrong so far. He went further back. He had arrived at the clearing, at the fight scene… No, still nothing. Further back, then. He had arrived at the meet-up location but found nobody there. No sign of Ke Li, Tian Jin, or… Duo Lan.

Duo Lan.

His heart skipped.

Right. She was what he had forgotten. Was she in on Ke Li’s plot? She certainly didn’t seem like she had any goodwill toward Tian Jin. However, she had yet to make an appearance, so that was unlikely. But if she had nothing to do with this, where was she? And why hadn’t she been at the meet-up location last night?

He had no time to lose. He hurriedly walked over to Tian Jin. He had to wake him up and get the situation in order before Duo Lan came back. She had taken second place in the entrance examination and was probably at the second level of the Red Spiritual Realm already. He wasn’t sure he would be able to handle her if she turned out to be an enemy.

He first tried to call out to Tian Jin, but he seemed to be in deep sleep. Only after he started shaking him did the taller boy stir. Hao Zhen took a step back and collected himself, carefully considering what he was about to say.

Tian Jin opened his eyes.

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