The first thing he heard was metal.
Not one sound, but many.
A heavy hammer striking iron in a measured rhythm. The hiss of steam escaping a pressure valve. The distant hum of a spirit-powered engine running somewhere beyond the walls. None of it sounded like home. None of it sounded familiar. And yet, before he even opened his eyes, his mind somehow knew that every one of those noises belonged together.
Clang.
Pause.
Clang.
Pause.
The rhythm was steady, almost like a heartbeat.
When he finally opened his eyes, he saw a ceiling crossed with dark beams reinforced by engraved metal brackets. Soft blue light spilled from a wall-mounted soul lamp shaped like a polished crystal flower. The air smelled faintly of hot iron, machine oil, and expensive incense.
He stared upward without moving.
Then memory hit.
Not one stream of memory. Two.
The first belonged to a life that should have ended. A normal world. Late nights spent reading fantasy novels and cultivation stories, scrolling through discussions about fictional power systems, biochips, nanomachines, magical engineering, and all the absurd things people argued about when they wanted to imagine a world more interesting than the one they had. He remembered lectures he barely cared about, cheap food, the glow of a phone screen in the dark, the half-joking thought that if he were ever reborn into one of those worlds, he would never trust luck. He would build everything himself.
Then that life had ended.
The second stream belonged to this body.
A child.
A noble estate.
A younger sister who was impossible to ignore.
A grandfather whose name carried enough weight to make grown men straighten their backs.
And a name that, once it settled properly in his mind, made him sit up so quickly the blanket twisted around his legs.
Xiao Hongchen.
He sat on the edge of the bed and breathed once, slowly, just to make sure the room stayed still.
"…No way."
His voice was young. Too young. It made the entire situation feel even more unreal.
He stood and crossed the room, his bare feet touching a floor made of dark polished wood inlaid with thin silver lines. Those lines were not decorative. The second set of memories told him that much immediately. They were spirit-conductive channels, subtle quality work built into the room itself. Even here, in a private bedroom, the Sun Moon Empire did not separate luxury from engineering.
At the window, he pulled aside a layered curtain and looked out.
The sight almost made him laugh.
He had not been reborn in some quiet mountain sect or noble courtyard where spirit beasts cried in the distance and elders floated around on swords.
He had been reborn inside a city of metal.
Tall towers rose into the pale morning fog, linked by mechanical skybridges and suspended transport rails. Spirit lights glowed along elevated platforms. Smoke rose in slow white ribbons from forging halls. He could see circular test grounds, workshop domes, and armored transport vehicles moving in the distance. Everything looked ordered, powerful, and expensive. Even half-awake, the city gave off the feeling of restrained force.
The Sun Moon Empire.
Not Shrek Academy. Not the old Douluo Continent from the earliest legends. Not some remote corner of the world.
The Sun Moon Empire, the most technologically advanced power in the age of Soul Land II.
His fingers tightened on the metal window frame.
That mattered.
It mattered a lot.
Because if his memory was correct, then Xiao Hongchen was not some random extra. He was one of the most talented young people of his generation. A major genius of the Sun Moon Royal Soul Engineering Academy. A proud member of the Hongchen family. Someone born into one of the only places on the continent where the union of machinery, metallurgy, and soul power was already beginning to reshape warfare itself.
And if that was true, then his rebirth had not put him in the worst possible place.
It had put him in the best.
A sharp voice broke the silence behind him.
"Why are you just standing there?"
He turned.
A girl his age stood at the door with her arms crossed and her expression already halfway to annoyed. She had silver hair like his, though hers fell looser around her shoulders, and eyes that seemed permanently prepared to roll at someone else's stupidity.
Meng Hongchen.
Not cousin. Sister. Younger sister.
That settled in properly a heartbeat later, and with it came a clear correction from memory. Yes. In canon, Meng Hongchen was his younger sister, and her martial soul was the Vermillion Eyed Ice Toad.
She squinted at him.
"You look stupid."
That was apparently how his new life's mornings would go.
He leaned one shoulder against the window frame. "Good morning to you too."
"It's not a good morning. You're late."
"For what?"
She stared at him, genuinely offended.
"For your own martial soul awakening."
Right.
Today.
The memories were still settling, but that detail came through perfectly now. The family had arranged the awakening ceremony this morning. The younger generation of the Hongchen line and several branch families would gather. Jing Hongchen would personally oversee the process.
Meng took two steps into the room and frowned harder.
"You really are acting weird."
"I just woke up."
"You've been awake long enough to stand there talking to yourself."
He said nothing to that.
She pointed toward the hall. "If Grandfather has to call for you twice, he's going to be in a bad mood all day."
"He's always in a bad mood."
"That's different. This would be your fault."
Fair enough.
He followed her into the corridor.
The Hongchen estate was less a family home and more a private research fortress disguised as one. Servants moved efficiently but quietly, staying out of the way of apprentices carrying trays of metal parts and assistants transporting sealed spirit crystals in padded cases. Farther out in the main courtyards, he could already hear the morning routines beginning: the snap of training dummies being struck, the click and whir of calibration mechanisms, the hiss of pressure-release valves from experimental soul tool chambers.
He absorbed everything while walking.
That was another thing he noticed immediately. His mind was fast today. Unusually fast. Not because of some sudden cheat panel or awakened system, but because two sets of memories were constantly cross-referencing the world around him. The old life supplied ideas. The new one supplied context.
Meng spoke again as they descended a metal-railed staircase into the main hall.
"If your martial soul is worse than mine, I'm never letting you forget it."
He glanced at her. "You don't let me forget anything anyway."
"That's because you deserve it."
He almost smiled.
Their relationship, from what he could tell, was exactly the kind of sibling rivalry that grew best inside powerful families: competitive, sharp, and entirely accustomed to each other's presence.
The lower hall opened into a long corridor lined with framed blueprints and old weapon prototypes. Some were simple first-class soul tools. Others looked far more advanced, the kind of devices ordinary nobles would probably never be allowed to touch. At the end of the corridor stood a pair of engraved doors already open to admit members of the family.
Inside waited the awakening hall.
Children stood in careful rows, some trying to look calm, others very obviously failing. Branch family relatives and senior attendants stood farther back. On the raised front platform stood the one man in the room who did not need to raise his voice for people to obey him.
Jing Hongchen.
The old man wore dark robes trimmed with silver metal thread. He looked neither frail nor particularly warm. His posture was straight, his expression restrained, and his eyes had the cutting precision of a man who was entirely used to deciding whether things were useful or useless within seconds.
The moment Xiao Hongchen saw him in person, he understood something the original story could only imply.
Jing Hongchen was dangerous.
Not only because of his status or soul power, but because he was exactly the kind of man who would recognize value in something unusual and then immediately ask how to weaponize it.
Good.
Xiao Hongchen respected that already.
Jing Hongchen's gaze flicked over him once, noting the late arrival, the composed face, the lack of open panic. He did not comment. Somehow that was worse.
The awakening began.
One child at a time stepped into the center array. The floor lit. Spirit power rose. Martial souls appeared. A blade. A lamp. A hound. A support flower. A heavy hammer. Most of them ordinary. Some decent. One or two clearly promising.
Then the steward called his name.
"Xiao Hongchen."
The hall grew just a little quieter.
He stepped into the formation circle and stood still.
The awakening array activated beneath his feet with a low hum. Lines of light rose in intersecting rings around him. Spirit power touched his skin like warm flowing air. For a second, nothing happened.
Then the entire hall flashed gold.
The pressure changed immediately. Several children nearby took involuntary steps backward. A few attendants straightened in surprise. Even some of the more seasoned family members narrowed their eyes.
Above Xiao Hongchen's outstretched palm appeared a spirit beast unlike anything else in the hall.
A toad.
Golden. Heavy-looking. Broad-bodied. Marked with ancient circular patterns that resembled coins or seals pressed into metal. Though not large, it carried an immediate sense of density, as if the little creature weighed far more than its size suggested.
The Three-Legged Golden Toad.
The moment it appeared, Xiao Hongchen felt something from the martial soul itself.
Not emotion exactly.
Instinct.
Hunger.
The toad spirit leaned almost imperceptibly toward the nearest metal sources—the array engravings in the floor, the silver clasps on ceremonial robes, the support brackets in the hall columns. It wanted metal. It recognized it. It desired it.
That alone told him more than any family archive could have.
Not just affinity.
Devouring potential.
Refining potential.
Good.
Very good.
The awakening steward hurried in to test his innate soul power. His composure lasted all of three seconds.
"High," the man said, then corrected himself at once. "Extremely high."
A murmur ran through the room.
Meng, standing off to one side, lifted her chin as if this somehow also reflected well on her.
Jing Hongchen did not smile. That probably would have unsettled everyone more than the awakening itself. But his gaze sharpened.
"Good."
One word.
Heavy as an official seal.
Xiao Hongchen lowered his hand and let the martial soul fade.
The hall was still watching him.
He knew what they saw.
A gifted heir. A rare beast spirit. A natural fit for soul engineering. Someone with enough family backing to matter.
What they did not see was what he saw.
He saw an entire road.
The Three-Legged Golden Toad was not just a noble metal-type beast spirit. It was a foundation. A spirit with the potential to devour and refine resources, perhaps even evolve toward something mythic if pushed the right way. Metal, gravity, poison, treasure resonance, battlefield control—none of those possibilities felt distant anymore.
And his birthplace mattered just as much as the spirit itself.
Sun Moon Empire.
Soul tools.
Workshops.
Research archives.
Jing Hongchen.
This was not a world where he needed to chase somebody else's inheritance across the continent hoping fate favored him.
He was standing in the middle of the best industrial and engineering base in the age.
All he needed was time, knowledge, and the discipline not to waste either.
Jing Hongchen's voice cut through the room.
"Come to the family library after the ceremony."
Xiao Hongchen bowed slightly. "Yes, Grandfather."
As he stepped out of the array, Meng sidled close enough to whisper out of the corner of her mouth.
"You're smiling."
He hadn't realized he was.
"Am I?"
"That's annoying."
He let the expression stay.
Because this was the first moment he knew for certain that his future did not need to resemble the original story at all.
Most reincarnators spent their first day praying for a cheat.
Xiao Hongchen had just awakened one piece of his.
The rest, he would forge himself.