This story is a translation of Innate Destiny [诡秘:先天命运圣体 by 异冕星光], set in the universe of LOTM. No copyright infringement intended.
English isn't my first language. Constructive feedback is always welcome.
To support the project or get early chapter access: https://aureliusgularis.carrd.co/
Also I wanted to let you know that the Discord server is now up! You can find all the information about it in auxiliary Discord Server.
-------------------
If someone were to transmigrate into the world of Lord of the Mysteries with nothing but the title to go on, how would they survive? A few points of reference might help:
The Assassin Potion is the safer bet if you want to stay alive. If you have savings you want to invest, go find the famous mine owner Lanevus. If you can't find Lanevus, don't panic. He's only gone off to look for new investors, and in the meantime you can try his pregnant wife. If you're looking for a way to pass the time, an astronomical telescope for stargazing isn't a bad choice.
"What is even Lord of the Mysteries? I've never read it, so why is this even showing up in my feed? The algorithm these days, seriously."
Chen Yuzhe stared at the video on his phone and muttered under his breath. As a university student, the things weighing on him most were the courses he had already failed and the upcoming fitness test, and of the two the fitness test was worse, because failing it meant he would not be allowed to graduate no matter how well he did everywhere else.
Transmigration was something he had stopped entertaining back in middle school. Even if it were real, what were the odds that it would ever happen to him? Chen Yuzhe had never trusted his own luck. He was the sort of person who could not guess a coin flip correctly, so if transmigration were a lottery, he would be the one holding the losing ticket.
Then his head started to spin, and a dull ache spread through his chest.
Before he could work out what was happening, his legs gave out and he dropped to the floor, face twisting, both hands clamped over his heart while he writhed against the pain.
Am I about to drop dead? I'm too young for this, I can't—
His eyes locked onto the phone lying just out of reach.
At the very least, let me format it before I go. Just let me wipe the thing first.
He forced an arm out, but it gave out halfway and his hand flopped back to the floor.
No. My search history. My reputation. It can't—
Ahhhhh
His body curled forward, and within a few moments his thoughts began to scatter. Then he went still.
Loen. The City of All Cities, Backlund.
So I really did transmigrate.
Chen Yuzhe pressed a hand against his forehead. His skull was buzzing, and fragmented memories were pouring in so thick and fast that he thought his head might split open. When he looked down, the clothes he was wearing belonged to a century he could not name, and the hands resting in his lap were not the hands he had grown up with. The mismatch made his stomach turn with a mix of irritation and dread.
One complaint. I made one complaint, and this is what I get.
This is the world of Lord of the Mysteries? I watched a single video and heard a handful of names, and I don't even know who the protagonist is. Have I transmigrated as the protagonist?
Lucien Destin. That was the name that came attached to the body. Was that the protagonist's name in Lord of the Mysteries?
It took about a quarter of an hour before his breathing settled enough for him to start sorting through the situation. He sat where he was and looked around properly for the first time.
It was a small room, cluttered and plainly furnished, and to a modern eye the whole thing read as aggressively retro. A narrow bed stood against one wall, and the desk he had woken up at was covered in bottles and jars, along with a scattering of materials that looked thoroughly wrong in ways he could not name. Some instinct he did not bother questioning told him the room belonged to a single man, and he accepted that without argument, because intuition was intuition.
The same instinct, quieter and a great deal firmer, told him this was the world of Lord of the Mysteries.
Lucien Destin. That's the name of the body I'm in now. So he's dead. How did he end up in this state?
The memories in his head put Lucien in Backlund, the capital of the Loen Kingdom on the Northern Continent. His father's family had been merchants for generations, and his mother had died of illness not long after he was born. Life had been comfortable once, but after his mother passed away his father began making one poor decision after another.
His father's name was Tarkin Destin, and the first mistake had come from a friend at the bank. The man told him there was an opening to invest in the industries of the Hall family, the great bankers and nobles of the kingdom, and Tarkin believed him enough to liquidate everything he owned. He pulled out all his cash, sold the family's land in the Loen colony of the Luoside Islands, and even parted with the spice plantations that had been producing a steady income for years.
The friend had been playing a word game with him. The investment was "Hall family industry," true enough, but it was not Earl Hall's own bank. It was a fund belonging to Earl Hall's daughter, and a closed-end fund at that, one that could not be withdrawn short-term and could not be resold.
Overnight, that wiped out the bulk of his liquid capital. Businesses that had been ticking along perfectly well suddenly could not cover their own costs, and bankruptcy stopped being a distant worry and started being a matter of weeks.
Tarkin, however, was not the type to accept a loss. To scrape together fresh funds, he sold off the family's several properties in Backlund's North Borough, telling himself it was only temporary.
Then he opened a new round of investments, and a friend who owned factories talked him into sinking money into a batch of newly built munitions plants.
The trouble was that he had not done a shred of market research. Demand for munitions was flat, and those plants were never going to turn a profit on any timeline short enough to save him.
Rather than admit defeat a second time, he gathered what little remained and put all of it into the grain market, betting that the slow climb in grain prices would let him claw back everything he had lost in one clean stroke.
But the earlier collapse had already left him deeply in debt to the bank.
So the bank simply seized the grain as collateral. Technically, the rising prices meant the grain covered what he owed, and on paper he came out even. But if he had been allowed to hold on, that same grain would have been worth considerably more. Being robbed of a profit he could already taste did something ugly to Tarkin's head.
The man had always been the impatient sort, the kind who wanted everything in one season. After a string of failures like that, he had no capital left for a comeback, and his health had never been good to begin with.
The shock and the fury arrived together, and his heart gave out.
Working through all of it left Chen Yuzhe with nothing to say.
Investing in that many munitions plants. Did the man think he was going to become an arms dealer?
Why take strides that big?
And every one of them was a long-term play, with demand on the market flat on its back. The only way to see a return inside a year would have been a world war.
The real wound was the real estate. Capital properties, no less. Anyone with half a brain knew those held their value, and there had been all that land in the colonies besides. For any of it to depreciate, the capital would have had to be invaded or the colonies would have had to break away.
But the Loen Kingdom was booming. Neither of those was remotely plausible, and everything he had sold could only have climbed in value.
So Lucien's standard of living had dropped from that of a rich young master to that of an ordinary citizen, and it had happened fast enough to give a person whiplash.
Even now, his situation was not truly desperate. The problem was that the original owner had inherited his father's temperament along with his debts.
To pull off the comeback he was owed, Lucien had started gambling too. Only his table had been the occult.
He had stumbled onto the existence of supernatural power, and for the sake of it he had given up his place at a business university.
Instead, he had buried himself in Hermes, along with a smattering of Jotun and Elvish, forgetting food and sleep in the process.
Then, with a stroke of luck that bordered on the absurd, he had found a potion formula for sale, and drained the last of the family's money to assemble the ingredients.
And then he had collapsed into unconsciousness, undone by overwork and sheer excitement.
After that, Chen Yuzhe had opened his eyes in the body.
Having reviewed the entire mess, Chen Yuzhe had exactly one conclusion to offer: never be a gambling addict.
Beyonder.
That seemed to be what they called people who gained extraordinary abilities after drinking a potion.
Chen Yuzhe turned the word over carefully, testing it against the rest of the memories that had come with the body.
After a while, his eyes drifted to the newspaper on the desk. The headline announced that the Corn Laws would be formally repealed next month, and the date printed at the top was May 27, 1349.
"Sigh." Chen Yuzhe let out a long breath. It was looking more and more like he would not be going home anytime soon.
"So from now on, I'm Lucien Destin."
As for whether he was the protagonist of the original novel, Lucien had a firm premonition that he was not.
He also did not believe any self-respecting protagonist would get stuck with an opening this dramatic.
The thought left him vaguely depressed.
"What kind of transmigration doesn't even make you the protagonist?"
He looked up at the mess of materials scattered across the desk, and only then did it come back to him: the formula he had bought was called "Monster."
Potions were probably where this world's extraordinary power came from, and a potion's name probably matched the Beyonder profession it led to. It was just that Lucien could not bring himself to like the name "Monster." Nothing good had ever been called that.
But he had transmigrated, and transmigrating without any extraordinary power felt like a waste of the ticket.
"Right. Assassin. That was the one from the video."
"Maybe I can pick Assassin." Lucien's eyes brightened as the idea took hold.