The vending machine groaned like it hated him personally. The paper cup dropped at a slant, the nozzle choked, and the "coffee" that came out tasted like watered-down resentment. Sim Gwan didn't flinch. He sipped the burnt liquid like it was sacred tea.
It was 2:48 AM.
Office lights flickered with that slow death rattle of old fluorescent tubes. The building had long since emptied, save for janitors and the scattered few cursed with deadlines and bosses who mistook human beings for calendar entries. Gwan was one of them Senior Systems Analyst, B-rank efficiency score, zero absences in five years. Not that anyone cared.
His cubicle was neat. Not tidy in the polite sense, but obsessively organized. Paper stacked perfectly. Pens in color-coded jars. Even the half-eaten onigiri on his desk was wrapped neatly in a napkin. The only mess was the monitor screen—a dozen tabs open across different forums, fan-translated manhua, martial arts wiki pages, and a PDF titled "Intermediate Qi Manipulation Theory in Post-Heavenly Realms."
A co-worker once joked that he must be doing a master's in fantasy bullshit. Gwan had just smiled. No one noticed that he barely blinked when reading those ancient cultivation texts. No one questioned why a man with no hobbies and no girlfriend bookmarked sword forms over stock prices.
That wasn't to say he believed in any of it. Belief was for the stupid or desperate.
But fascination? Fascination didn't need to make sense.
Gwan loved Murim.
Not the mainstream kung-fu movies or the watered-down webnovels with their overpowered MCs and system cheats. He devoured the obscure stuff the treatises on internal versus external cultivation, debates on dual core merging, historic records of the Hao Sect collapse, the forbidden arts of the Violet Flame Widow Clan.
He didn't watch Murim. He studied it.
It was the only world that felt like it meant something.
This world? Just alarms, deadlines, and pretending to laugh at department parties.
His phone buzzed. A message from "Manager Gyu."
> "Need report by 9AM. Clean version, no debug logs. Clean your code. Don't fuck it up."
Sim Gwan sighed.
He stretched his fingers. They cracked like dry twigs. He glanced at the clock on the wall. It was still 2:48 AM.
Still.
He stared.
Something wasn't right. The second hand was stuck.
He looked down. His coffee had stopped steaming. He sniffed. Cold. But not "I waited too long" cold. Instantly cold.
No breeze. No hum from the vending machine.
The world had gone dead quiet.
Then he noticed something else.
The monitor tabs were flickering.
Each tab, every manhua panel, every wiki page glitching. The ink was dripping off the text, the images twitching like corrupted video files.
He stood, heart beating fast.
The floor shifted.
No. Not the floor him.
His body felt like it weighed nothing. Or everything. His blood thickened in his veins, molten and heavy, and his lungs clenched like he was breathing liquid metal.
Then came the sound.
Not a voice. Not music. Just a sound like dry leaves brushing stone.
Whispers.
"You already walked the path. All you lacked was a body."
His knees gave out.
He collapsed. But he didn't hit the ground.
---
He woke up in dirt.
Actual dirt.
He could smell it loamy, wet, real.
The sky above was strange. Not polluted. Not gray. But high, blue, ancient. Too ancient. It made no sense.
His chest hurt. His body was… smaller?
He tried to sit up.
His limbs were lean. Calloused. His hands bore scars he didn't recognize. His fingers flexed with a reflex that wasn't his own. He looked to his side and saw a rusted blade, notched and old but familiar like a phantom limb.
His heart pounded.
Then the memories hit.
Not his memories. Not entirely.
A boy named Jin Mu. Seventeen. Orphan. Low-born. A disciple of the Howling Tiger Sect.
Average.
Completely, frustratingly average.
But now... Sim Gwan was him.
Or rather, Jin Mu was gone.
And he was something new.
Sim Gwan, the salaryman, had reincarnated.
Not as a heavenly child or a sword saint.
But into a disposable background cultivator of a fifth-rate sect. A nobody in a system stacked with monsters.
He sat in the dirt for a long time, processing nothing, thinking everything.
Then, a grin.
A slow, exhausted grin.
"…You've gotta be fucking kidding me."