Chapter One: The Tenth Life Was Meant for Rest
Death had stopped hurting after the third time.
By the sixth, it had become routine, almost… boring. He had learned to anticipate the pain, to greet it like a cruel old friend who returned at the most inconvenient moments. By the ninth, he had stopped counting the times his chest had been pierced, his limbs torn, his soul shredded by destiny itself. And yet he survived, again and again, only to die in the same cruel cycle.
Li Chen had once believed in the promise of transmigration. A man from Earth, torn from his mundane life, thrust into the Great Azure Cultivation World with a vision that felt as divine as it did impossible: save the ten destined heroines. The system, a cold and calculating presence, whispered to him in fragments—names, fates, places, times. He had tried to follow it faithfully, his every thought, every heartbeat aligned with the sacred duty he had been handed.
And every time, without fail, he had failed.
At first, he thought it was the world that betrayed him. The cruel sects, the demons, the poisonous lands. Then he realized it was not the world—it was them. The ten heroines. Each of them, in their beauty, their innocence, their allure, had become the instruments of his death. Every life ended at their hands, their hands, gentle and soft as they were, now bearing the cold weight of inevitability.
The first death had been shocking. He had been unprepared, too naive, too certain that a man like him, armed with knowledge from another world, could save them all. The sword had come from behind. The sharpness had cut through bone and muscle and soul alike. And he had realized then that love and loyalty were useless weapons in a world that demanded obedience to destiny.
By the third life, he understood. By the fifth, he was terrified. By the seventh, he hated them, even as he ached for them, even as the memory of their warmth haunted him more than the fear of pain ever could.
And the ninth death… oh, the ninth. It was the one that had nearly broken him. He had been clever, cautious, and for a fleeting moment, he had thought he might finally succeed. She had been beautiful in the dying light, her hair catching the sun like threads of molten gold. Her eyes had been gentle… almost human, almost like the woman he had saved countless times before, almost like she would spare him.
He had let his guard fall.
Her fingers had brushed against his chest—lightly, almost lovingly—before the blade had found him. And in that moment, when the world tilted and the sky cracked open above him, he had realized what he had known but refused to see: the heroines were not innocent. They were fated, designed, and ruthless. Saving them had always meant standing against a tide of inevitability. And inevitability always won.
---
When Li Chen awoke for the tenth time, there was no pain. No system voice. No cultivation base roaring back to life. No countdown, no warning. He opened his eyes to a sky too bright, a wind too soft, a mountain too quiet.
For the first time, he was alive and unbound. His body was whole. His meridians hummed faintly, not with the power of rebirth, but with something else—something mundane and fragile. He had been given the rarest gift: a chance to simply exist.
He lay on the cold earth for hours, watching the clouds drift lazily across the sky, waiting for the familiar surge of qi, for the cruel tug of destiny to remind him that life was a privilege he could not claim. Nothing came.
A strange relief settled over him, heavy and slow, like a weight finally lifted. He had been broken nine times, and perhaps the world had finally grown tired of trying to break him again. Perhaps it had decided that the tenth life—his last—was not for struggle or glory, but for rest.
He rose slowly, every movement deliberate, his body aching in ways that had nothing to do with cultivation. His limbs, though unscathed, carried the memory of every cut, every stab, every poisoned blade that had ended a life before he had even truly lived it.
"I suppose…" he muttered to no one, voice low and rough from disuse, "…this is the end of the road."
And for the first time, Li Chen did not resist.
He walked down the mountain, past the sacred streams, past the spirits that had once tested him, past the villages where mortal lives passed unnoticed by cultivators. The world was alive, lush, full of energy he had long ignored, but he did not cultivate. He did not seek treasures or forbidden techniques. He did not even care about destiny. He only walked.
He became a shadow among mortals, nameless and unnoticed. He chopped wood in the forest, repaired roofs for villagers, slept under the stars. It was a simple life, painfully ordinary, and yet he had never felt so alive.
---
And yet, even in this fragile peace, the past did not leave him.
At night, when sleep finally took him, it came in fragments: fleeting touches, whispered words, hands that were not there, lips that only memory could conjure. He remembered the nights he had spent with them—the warmth of their bodies pressed against his, the way they had cried into his arms, the way their skin had burned under his hands, not with passion alone but with desperation, with fear, with something darker that he could not name.
He had never touched them fully—not in ways that would satisfy desire, not in ways that would betray loyalty—but the closeness, the intimacy of shared breath, shared life, had been enough to haunt him. Now, in the silence, it came back. The warmth of Yue Ling's skin against his palms, the faint tremble in her fingers when she had clung to him during the poison purge. The shiver that had run through Mei Xin's spine when he had whispered to her in the moonlight. The faint, impossible smile of Fen Xian, who had always resisted him, until she could not.
Memories bled into dreams. Dreams bled into waking. And he realized, with a shudder that traveled deeper than his bones, that rest was not meant for him. Not yet.
---
Far across the lands, the heroines began to stir.
One by one, in palaces and forests, in sects and hidden valleys, they awoke with hearts pounding and bodies betraying them. It was not merely longing. It was memory itself, a vivid, unbearable replay of moments they had tried to bury. They remembered kneeling over him in secret sanctuaries, holding his hands as poison coursed through his veins. They remembered how he had whispered to them, guided them, restrained them, teased them. How he had demanded nothing, yet left every nerve and fiber of them trembling for his touch.
They had forgotten—or thought they had—until the dreams returned.
They could not explain the heat in their limbs, the ache in their chests, the way every man they had touched since had felt wrong, pale, distant. All of it paled beside him, beside the weight of memory, beside the impossibility of his absence.
And so they began to gather.
Bound by shared dreams, by guilt and confusion, by desire they could not name, they searched.
"He is alive," Yue Ling said, voice shaking as she clutched the hem of her robe. "I can feel him."
"No," Mei Xin whispered, eyes wide. "He left. He has chosen to abandon us… again."
But the world offered them nothing. No threads of karma. No trace of his cultivation. No hidden record of reincarnation. Li Chen had vanished from destiny itself, leaving only echoes of what had been, and a hunger they could not sate.
And in the quiet, beneath the moon and the endless stars, Li Chen walked alone.
He was alive. He was free. And he wanted only to rest.
But the world, as always, had other plans.