Lan An awoke with a jolt, his body gripped by agonizing pain, as though every bone had been crushed to powder. Even the slightest twitch of a finger felt like an impossible task. Worse still, his head throbbed with ferocious intensity, flooded by a deluge of unfamiliar memories that left him reeling, unable to process the chaos.
Two hours later, the searing headache began to subside, and clarity slowly returned. Lan An's mind sharpened as he grasped the reality of his predicament.
"I… I'm alive? I've truly transmigrated?" he murmured, his voice trembling with disbelief. His face twisted in shock, jaw slack, cold sweat soaking his brow. The sheer weight of this truth left him staggered. If he had the strength, he might have pinched himself to confirm this wasn't a dream.
Struggling to sort through the chaotic torrent of memories, Lan An pieced together his past life. He had been an orphan, raised in an orphanage until age seven, when an old man adopted him. Over time, he learned his adoptive father was a legendary war hero, a man who had devoted his life to his nation's battles, forgoing a family of his own. In his twilight years, the old man chose Lan Nan as his son, seeking companionship in his final days.
Inspired by his adoptive father's valor and idolizing him, Lan An vowed to follow in his footsteps. At eighteen, he aced the military academy exams, earning top honors with dreams of becoming a great soldier like his father. But fate, cruel and unyielding, had other plans.
His adoptive father, a paragon of integrity, had made powerful enemies through his principled career. When he retired, stepping away from power, those enemies struck. Lan Nan would never forget that night—dozens of black-clad assassins infiltrated their home under cover of darkness. Despite their sharp instincts, father and son were outmatched. A relentless barrage of bullets and firepower razed their quiet wooden house, reducing it to ashes. In that inferno, a legendary soldier and a young man brimming with ambition were consumed.
In his final moments, Lan An glimpsed his adoptive father's clouded eyes, filled with boundless warmth and a flicker of regret. Perhaps the old man believed that if he hadn't adopted Lan Nan, the boy might have escaped this tragic end. Lan Nan's parched lips parted, desperate to tell his father he was proud to be his son, but the words were lost. The sea of fire devoured everything.
"That was my greatest regret in my past life," Lan Nan thought, his heart heavy with sorrow.
Suppressing his grief, he turned to the memories of his current life, unraveling the identity of the body he now inhabited. Moments later, his expression shifted dramatically. A surge of unrelenting fury, like a raging wildfire, consumed him. His fists clenched so tightly that blood seeped from his palms.
Taking several deep breaths to steady himself, Lan Nan gritted his teeth and summoned every ounce of strength to lift a trembling hand to his face. As his fingers brushed the space where his eyes should have been, the world seemed to spin. His eye sockets were utterly empty.
Lan Nan was blind—his eyes cruelly gouged out. Rage, raw and uncontainable, surged within him. If he had the strength, he would have roared like a feral beast. The unbearable truth was beyond comprehension: the one who had ripped out his eyes, condemning him to a life of darkness and shame, was none other than his biological father.
The stark contrast between the father who had raised him with love in his past life and the blood-kin who had mutilated him in this one left Lan Nan in profound shock. Struggling to regain composure, he knew he had to find a way to survive in this dire situation.
The original owner of this body was also named Lan Nan, the son of Lan Po Lei, the patriarch of the Lan Clan, a renowned cultivation family in the Bing Tian Continent. In this world, strength was worshipped, and the weak were scorned. There were no laws—only the brutal rule of the strong. The powerful were always right, their might the ultimate truth, while the weak were forced to submit or perish.
The continent was dominated by cultivation factions, divided into nine tiers, with the First Tier being the lowest and the Ninth Tier the highest. The Lan Clan was an Eighth-Tier cultivation force, surpassed only by the two supreme Ninth-Tier powers: Tian Shan Immortal Realm and the Bing Xuan Empire. Despite ranking below these titans, the Lan Clan's influence in the Bing Tian Continent was immense, rivaled by only a handful of other factions.
With a storied legacy spanning countless generations, the Lan Clan boasted vast territories, millions of clansmen, and a lineage of prodigies. Its founder was a legendary figure said to have ascended to the Immortal Realm. Such was the fearsome might of the Lan Clan.
As the eldest son of Lan Po Lei, Lan Nan should have been a revered young master, bathed in privilege and adoration. Yet, fate dealt him a cruel blow. Born to the eager anticipation of the clan, Lan Nan delivered a devastating humiliation: he lacked a spiritual root.
In the Bing Tian Continent, even a toddler knew that a spiritual root was the foundation of cultivation. Without it, Lan An was doomed to be a useless cripple for life. In an ordinary family, this might have been unremarkable, but as the son of the Lan Clan's patriarch, it was a colossal disgrace, a laughingstock across the continent.
The mighty patriarch of an Eighth-Tier cultivation force had sired a useless son. This alone sealed Lan Nan's tragic fate from the moment of his birth. His mother, hailing from a modest Fifth-Tier family, was shunned and scorned by the clan and her husband after giving birth to a "defective" son. Heartbroken, she died with her eyes unclosed.
Lan Nan's life grew bleaker still when his younger brother, Lan Wu, was born a year later. Unlike Lan Nan, Lan Wu inherited his father's dual spiritual roots of Ice and Lightning. The Lightning spiritual root was exceptionally rare, enabling the cultivation of devastating Lightning-based techniques with immense destructive power. Cultivators with Lightning roots were often stronger than their peers, a trait that had secured Lan Po Lei's unchallenged authority as clan patriarch. Lan Wu's dual roots sparked jubilation across the Lan Clan, and through the Elder Council's decree, he was named the future young master.
Lan Wu's rise only deepened Lan Nan's humiliation. Within the clan, Lan Nan's status was lower than that of the lowliest servants, for even they could cultivate. He lived a degrading existence, performing menial tasks to earn scraps of food, treated not as the clan's eldest son but as its greatest shame.
But the cruelty didn't end there. At thirteen, Lan Nan's younger brother, Lan Wu, suffered a mishap while practicing a clan ocular technique, resulting in blindness. As an Eighth-Tier cultivation force with a millennia-long legacy, the Lan Clan possessed a secret method to transplant eyes, but for the procedure to succeed without complications, the donor had to share Lan Wu's bloodline.
And so, the ultimate cruelty unfolded. Lan Po Lei, with ruthless resolve, personally gouged out his eldest son's eyes to transplant them into his younger son. Lan Nan's face, etched with despair and burning hatred, did nothing to sway his father's determination. To Lan Po Lei, the choice between a useless son and a prodigy was no choice at all.
Blinded at thirteen, Lan Nan was stripped of any semblance of humanity within the clan. He became a living punching bag for the clan's younger members to practice their techniques. Whenever his battered body neared death, they would toss him scraps of food and allow him time to recover, only to resume their torment. For these rebellious youths, abusing the patriarch's son gave them a perverse sense of accomplishment.
For three years, Lan Nan endured this hellish existence—blind, broken, and humiliated,Policing, his body and soul scarred beyond measure. His tragic life ended at sixteen, during a "training session" that went too far, courtesy of the clan's sadistic youths.
And in that fateful moment, a different Lan Nan, from another world, transmigrated into his body.
"Compared to you, my past life was a blessing," Lan Nan sighed, reflecting on the original owner's suffering. Though his own previous life had ended in tragedy, it paled in comparison to the horrors this body's owner had endured.
Lan Nan silently vowed that, having been given this second chance in this world, he would not surrender to fate. No matter the odds, living with purpose was better than dying in shame.
"But first, I must escape this wretched situation," he muttered, his brow furrowing as his mind raced for a solution.
Clang! "Activation successful. The Overlord System is now initializing."
"Binding to host in: 10, 9, 8… 5… 2…"
A strange, mechanical voice echoed in his mind, interrupting his thoughts. In that moment, Lan Nan's breath caught, his face freezing before flushing with wild excitement.