He woke to pain.
A deep, all-encompassing pain spread through his entire body, as if a herd of elephants had trampled him into the ground. His ribs screamed with every breath. His muscles protested each small movement. Even his jaw hurt when he tried to open his mouth to speak.
He attempted to move. Pain exploded through him, his vision swimming as he nearly passed out on the spot.
'What the hell happened to me?' he thought.
The thought barely finished before memory slammed into him.
Headlights. A horn. The wet thud of his body hitting metal. Asphalt rushing up. A brief moment of weightlessness—then nothing.
Then another memory surfaced.
A courtyard choked with overgrown weeds. White robes stained with blood. A senior disciple's lazy smile.
"Hand it over. Half your monthly contribution. I won't ask again."
"I don't have it."
Laughter—then more beating. A fist to the stomach. Someone kicking his legs out from behind. The taste of blood. Boots. Too many boots.
As he lay there, half dead, someone took his purse, the one holding all his contributions. More laughter followed as they left him there to die.
He gasped and forced his eyes open.
A low wooden ceiling came into focus.
For some reason, he had expected a hospital. But there were no fluorescent lights, no beeping machines. No nothing. Only crude wooden beams and smoke-darkened planks.
One thing became clear in an instant. This wasn't his apartment. Nor the hospital room where he expected to wake up after that car accident.
He pushed himself upright despite his body's protests. Pain flared sharply in his stomach and chest but he ignored it.
His hands… they were... different. Smaller, leaner, callused in unfamiliar places. White fabric hung from his arms, loose and long sleeves marked with faint embroidered lines meant to channel qi.
It took him a process to realise what kind of clothes he was wearing.
Cultivator robes.
His breath caught.
He staggered over to the mirror propped against the wall. The face staring back wasn't his. It was too young, and too fucking pretty to be him.
Then his head buzzed with pain as the memories poured in.
Names, places, cultivation manuals, clan rules, sect hierarchies—and a shit ton of other information hammering itself into his brain until he had to grip the edge of the table to stay upright.
When he looked back at the mirror once again, he knew who he was. Or at least who this body belonged to before he possessed it,
Li Yuan of Li Clan from the Redleaf Prefecture.
The Li clan was one of five ninth-tier families in Redleaf Prefecture. It was neither the strongest nor the weakest, but it held its ground. The clan had three Foundation Establishment cultivators, more than a hundred at the Qi Condensation stage, and ruled over hundreds of thousands of mortals.
The clan's history spanned one hundred and fifty years. In that time, it had produced many cultivators, but none had ever reached Golden Core, an ambition the family had chased since its founding.
Then came Li Yuan.
A once-in-a-century genius. He completed Body Tempering in a single year and crossed two minor realms of Qi Condensation in another.
The clan elders watched his progress and smiled until their faces ached.
"A genius," they'd called him.
"The future pillar of Li clan."
Their faith in him was not misplaced. If his growth had continued, he might have reached Foundation Establishment before the age of twenty. That alone would have given him a real chance of reaching Golden Core within his lifetime.
But while the Li clan was not poor, it was far from wealthy. They also wanted to give him greater opportunities to grow. So they sent him to the Nine Peak Sect, bearing gifts and heavy expectations.
The Nine Peak Sect.
A name that carried weight across more than a dozen prefectures, with Redleaf Prefecture ranking among the least of them.
A sect with three Nascent Soul experts. Any one of whom could wipe out the entire Li clan from existence with a single sweep of their hand.
Li Yuan had arrived with great hopes and expectations at the sect, only to face a very bitter truth.
The truth was… he wasn't special.
In a family of a hundred cultivators, being the most talented made him a one-in-a-hundred genius. But in a sect that accepted tens of thousands of disciples each year—most of them geniuses in their own families—he was a nobody.
Here, his cultivation was average. No. Below average. He wasn't special anymore, just another face in the crowd. His background meant nothing, and his confidence was loud, misplaced, and unwelcome.
Li Yuan, being only fourteen, had a hard time accepting his new place in the world. He argued. Picked fights he couldn't win. Refused to bow quickly enough. And failed to adapt to his new reality.
Bruises followed. Then broken bones.
Until he insulted the wrong senior. Until the extortion began. Until the beating didn't stop. Until Li Yuan finally died—a nobody. A forgotten name among the countless disciples who met their end within the sect each year.
His hands tightened into fists as the memories finally settled.
He turned to look at the bed where he'd woken up. Where the boy named Li Yuan had died, alone, terrified, and far from home.
He exhaled slowly.
He was here because someone else wasn't.
"I'm sorry this happened to you." He said to himself in the mirror. "But now that I've taken your place, I promise to take care of your family. And I promise to take revenge on your behalf, if possible."
At his declaration, he felt a strange peace came over him. As if the last remnants of Li Yuan's soul finally departed from the body.
Then, he blinked in surprise as a grey halo suddenly appeared atop his head.
'What's this?' He thought to himself as he tried to poke the grey halo with his finger, only for his finger to go right through it as if it was nothing but air.
'Is this my transmigration cheat?' He wondered 'If so, then how does it work?'
As if answering his question, the Halo suddenly flashed and left him with a vision.
——
When they realized he hadn't died and had survived the beating, the senior returned the next month with his cronies. Once again, they extorted him, taking every spirit stone the sect distributed to outer disciples for completing their monthly tasks.
——
The vision ended and he was left slightly disoriented in its wake.
'Was that… the future?' He wondered to himself. 'Is this my power? The ability to see future events?'
He tried to think of other future events. What he would eat that evening. When he might advance to the fourth stage of Qi Condensation. But no new vision appeared, and the grey halo remained unchanged.
'Can I only see one event?' he wondered. 'Is this my death? If I refuse to pay, those bastards would beat me to death again, wouldn't they?'
Yet he doubted it was that simple. Whatever was happening to him, it would take time to understand.
Then, his vision suddenly swam, and he nearly collapsed.
Now that his focus had drifted from his new power, the pain came rushing back tenfold. Only then did he remember... he was still badly injured.
'My wounds are too severe. I need to go to the Alchemy Hall and buy an elixir or a pill to heal them,' he thought, lifting his sect identity token. The bastards had taken all his spirit stones, but the merit points stored in the token could still be used to buy items within the sect.
With that in mind, he left his courtyard and slowly made his way toward the Alchemy Hall, his body protesting with every step.
It didn't take long for other outer sect disciples to notice him and started whispering about him.
In his past life, he wouldn't have caught a single word. But completing Body Tempering meant his body had been enhanced to superhuman levels—and that included his senses. The Qi Condensation realm only sharpened them further.
Which meant that despite the distance and the lowered voices, he was able to hear them quite clearly.
"Damn. That guy looks half dead. What happened to him?"
"Isn't that the idiot that offended Senior brother Shu Wen?"
"Did he, really? Anyone foolish enough to do that really deserves to be beaten half to death. Does he not know who Senior brother Shu Wen is?"
"I remembered being paired up with him once in one of the sect tasks. He was quite arrogant back then. Thinking that his 3rd Qi Condensation cultivation made him anything special."
"Do the elders of this sect really not care about Outer sect disciples being beaten like this?"
He ignored the voices and kept walking, doing his best to ignore their words. But then he paused as he noticed a purple colour glowing in his peripheral vision.
He looked in that direction and froze as he noticed that one of the disciples had a purple halo glowing above his head.
Not only him, but every other disciple in the near vicinity had a white coloured halo glowing above their heads. Due to the insults, he had been so adamant in keeping to himself that he hadn't even noticed those halos.
He then looked at the Purple halo and tried to focus on it.
An instant later, another vision assailed him.
——
The vision showed the disciple leaving the sect, heading down the mountain to the city at its base. There, he entered a gambling house to feed his gambling addiction.
This time, he chose to gamble on rocks.
He spent all ten of his spirit stones, buying ten rocks. The shopkeeper cut open the first five. One contained a piece of low-quality jade, not even worth the single spirit stone used to buy the rock. The remaining four were nothing but ordinary rocks.
Disappointed, the cultivator took the remaining five rocks back to his courtyard and opened them one by one. To his great surprise, one of them contained a Gu insect.
After some research, the disciple learned that the Gu insect in his hands was incredibly valuable—a Lifespan Gu. And not just any Lifespan Gu, but a hundred-year Lifespan Gu.
It was a single-use Gu. And once consumed, it granted an additional hundred years of lifespan to any being, with no adverse side effects.
The disciple wisely submitted the Lifespan Gu to the sect leader. In return, he rose from an outer disciple to an inner disciple and received enough resources to advance to Foundation Establishment.
——
The vision ended, and he swayed in place before forcing himself to steady. When he looked back at the crowd, most had already lost interest in him and had moved on.
He studied the disciples around him. Most had white halos above their heads. He focused on one of them and waited. Nothing happened.
He tried another white halo. Still nothing.
After four more attempts, he reached a conclusion—white halos showed no visions.
He began searching for other colours and soon spotted one above a female disciple's head. It was pitch black.
The moment he focused on it, another vision unfolded.
——
The disciple went to the edge of the Forbidden Forest to gather herbs. There, misfortune struck. She encountered a Three-Eyed Lightning Fox and met her end.
——
He came out of the vision feeling only mildly disoriented now that he knew what to expect. Even so, the image of the female disciple being torn limb from limb lingered in his mind, unsettling him.
"Hey," he said before he fully gathered his bearings.
The female disciple with the black halo paused and looked at him strangely.
"Do I know you, fellow disciple?" she asked, cautious.
"I… yeah. I've seen you go to the edge of the Forbidden Forest to gather herbs before. I—"
"Have you been stalking me?" She backed away, eyes sharp with suspicion.
"No—no. No. I just…" He swallowed. "There's been a Three-Eyed Lightning Fox sighted in that area recently. You should probably avoid it for a few days."
He blinked in surprise as the halo above her head changed instantly, shifting from pitch black to white.
"Really?" She asked, her eyes widening in fear.
"Yeah." He nodded and winched as his stomach suddenly clenched in pain. "Just… be careful."
"I will. Thank you for telling me this fellow disciple." She said and he gave her a nod before continuing on his journey to the Alchemy Hall.
'So… the halos do indeed show the future. And if I act on that future, I can change it.' He thought as a slow grin came over his face.
Because this meant that if he went down the sect and entered the city, then he could buy the rock with the Lifespan Gu well before that other disciple could.
A hundred year additional lifespan. With that, even if he left the sect and returned back to his clan, he'll have enough time to easily climb his way to Golden Core level of cultivation.
'Holy shit. This cheat is awesome.' He thought.
By the time he reached the Alchemy Hall, he had seen half a dozen halos of different colours. From them, he drew several conclusions. Pitch-black halos signified death in the near future. Grey halos meant something bad would happen. Yellow, green, and purple halos pointed to good fortune.
In one case, a female disciple went to the edge of the Forbidden Forest for an herb-gathering task and discovered a high-quality spirit herb. She later sold it for more than three hundred spirit stones.
In another, a disciple purchased a basic spatial ring at an auction, only to discover later that it was an ancient spatial ring—one that contained an island-sized world as well as its own spirit lake.
By then, he finally understood how his power truly worked.
It showed him the future fortunes and misfortunes of others. And he could take advantage of that—by changing the future to his liking.
—————
"This is the best healing pill you can get with the amount of merit points you have," the disciple at the Alchemy Hall cashier said.
"I'll take it." He said.
He was handed a Wound Mending Pill, which he swallowed on the spot before sitting on a nearby bench to absorb its effects.
The pill didn't heal him completely, but it restored him enough to walk down the mountain to the city below—and take advantage of the opportunities he had seen, including the Lifespan Gu.
"Can you convert the rest of my Merit Points into Spirit Stones?" He asked.
The cashier blinked in surprise "Are you serious?"
"Yes." He replied.
"Are you really, really serious?" The cashier asked again and he nodded.
He understood the man's hesitation. Sect merit points were incredibly valuable—far more so than spirit stones. Many of the sect's most precious items could only be purchased with merit points, not stones.
Under normal circumstances, he would never have considered exchanging them. But with so many opportunities waiting for him and not a single spirit stone to his name, he had no choice.
"Yes," he replied.
The cashier nodded and handed him eighty spirit stones in exchange for the sixteen merit points left in his identity token.
"Come again if you want to exchange more merit points," the cashier called as he turned and left the Alchemy Hall.
A minute later, he was running down the sect mountain toward Ninepeak City.
Injured as he was, and with the mountain's vast size, it took him more than an hour to reach the bottom and enter the city.
Then, it was time to go on a shopping spree.
The first thing he bought was the rock at the gambling den—the one that contained the Lifespan Gu. He picked up a few other rocks as well and cracked some open on the spot, just to avoid suspicion.
After that, he purchased a piece of metal from a mortal's shop. To everyone else, it looked like ordinary steel. To him, the moment he injected his qi into it, it shone like a star.
Star metal.
He took it to a weapon shop run by a cultivator blacksmith and earned more than three hundred spirit stones for it.
It was the largest sum he had ever held. He gave up most of it almost immediately after at an auction, spending two hundred and thirty spirit stones on an ordinary-looking spatial ring.
In truth, it was an ancient artefact—one that contained a large island's worth of space and a low-grade, first-stage spirit lake.
He finished the day by spending his remaining spirit stones on a ten-year ginseng from a spirit herb store.
Ironically, it was something he had learned about through someone else's misfortune.
Like the shopkeeper, the original buyer had mistaken it for an ordinary ten-year ginseng. In truth, it was a thousand-year ginseng that had shrunk and warped due to poor storage, making it appear far younger than it was.
That buyer—also a disciple of the Nine Peak Sect—would later consume the ginseng to strengthen his body and cultivation. But the energy of a ten-year ginseng could not be compared to that of a thousand-year one.
The power released would be far more than he could control. Turbulent qi would surge violently through his body, tearing apart his meridians and organs. By the time others found him, he would already be dead.
'Turning someone's misfortune into my fortune. Aren't I a great guy?' he thought as he turned back toward the sect.
Then he froze on the spot as he realised that the halo above his own head had suddenly turned pitch black.