Pain was the herald of his return to existence. It wasn't the sharp, localized pain of broken bones he might have expected. This was a deep, all encompassing ache that seemed to emanate from within his very marrow. Every muscle fiber screamed in protest, every joint felt rusted shut. It was the profound weakness of a body that had given up.
Slowly, other senses filtered through the fog. The air smelled of dried herbs and something medicinal, layered over the scent of old, sun-baked wood. He felt the scratch of a coarse, abrasive blanket against his skin. He tried to move his fingers, and the effort felt monumental. They felt foreign, thin and unfamiliar, and their response was so sluggish it was unnerving.
With a groan that seemed to tear its way out of his throat, he forced his eyelids open. They were heavy, as if weighted down. The world was a blur at first, then sharpened into a simple, rustic scene. He was in a small room, the walls constructed of dark, rough-hewn logs. Faint, weak sunlight filtered through a single window, which wasn't glazed with glass but with a thin, oiled paper that glowed with a soft, amber light. A simple wooden table and a stool sat in one corner. This wasn't a hospital. This wasn't anywhere he knew.
A shadow fell over him. He blinked, his vision clearing further. A woman stood by the bed, her face etched with exhaustion and worry. She looked to be in her forties, with streaks of grey in her dark, tied back hair. Her features were kind but marked by deep lines of concern. When she saw his eyes were open, a gasp escaped her lips.
"Aryan? Oh, gods, you're awake!" she whispered. The language she spoke was unfamiliar, yet as the words reached him, he understood them as clearly as his native Hindi. She reached out a trembling, warm hand and gently brushed the hair from his forehead. "My son... you gave your mother such a fright."
Aryan? Son?
The words were like a key turning in a lock in his mind. The moment her hand touched his skin, a dam broke. A tsunami of memories, both alien and intimate, crashed through his consciousness. It was a deluge of information, an entire lifetime of experiences that were not his own, and the mental whiplash was agonizing.
He saw flashes of a young boy's life. The eighteen years of Aryan Rathore.
The memories weren't just seen they were felt. The sting of shame as the other youths of Devgarh spat the name 'Trash Aryan'. The suffocating silence at the dinner table, thick with the unspoken disappointment of his father, Vikram. The way his older brother, Rohan, looked past him as if he were a piece of furniture. Only the love from his sister, Meera, and this woman—his mother, Priya—felt like a fragile warmth in the cold of his failure.
Then, he saw the end. Aryan's end. A desperate, foolish gamble in this very room.
Worn down by years of frustration, the boy had forcefully tried to break through to the second layer of the Qi Condensation Realm. He had pushed the meager wisps of energy—Qi, the memories supplied—through his weak, undeveloped meridians. He relived the searing, tearing agony as those channels ruptured, feeling his life force extinguish like a candle in a storm.
The original Aryan Rathore was dead.
Amit Agarwal, the software engineer from Delhi, was gone.
He was Aryan now, a soul poured into the empty shell of a failed life. The realization wasn't a stone in his gut it was an anchor, dragging him down into a new kind of hell. A second chance? This wasn't a second chance. This was a second-hand sentence, a life term in a prison of failure he hadn't built.
As he drowned in the darkness of this second-hand sentence, something cut through the noise. It wasn't a sensation or a sound from the outside world. It was an impossibly cold, clear stream that simply manifested within him, utterly alien to the 'Qi' of this world. It was ancient, complex, and utterly indifferent to his despair.
A voice, genderless and serene, echoed not in his ears, but inside his mind.
[Anomalous Primordial Energy detected in the host's soul.]
Aryan's eyes widened. The voice was calm, mechanical, like a machine.
[Energy signature is compatible. Commencing binding process... 10%... 50%... 70%... 99%...]
[Binding complete. Welcome, Host.]
[Supreme Immortal System activated!]
Before he could even question his sanity, a translucent blue screen materialized before his eyes, floating in the air a few feet from his face. It was a construct of light and data that only he could see, its text perfectly sharp and clear.
•••STATUS•••
Name: Aryan Rathore
Age: 18
Race: Human
Bloodline: None
Body Constitution: Fragile Mortal Body (Critically Damaged)
Current Cultivation Realm: Qi Condensation Realm - Layer 1 (Stagnant)
Cultivation Technique: Basic Qi Breathing Art (Mortal Grade)
Spiritual Roots: Low-Grade (Inferior)
It was a brutal, clinical assessment of his new reality. Every line confirmed what Aryan's memories had told him. By every metric of this world, he was, quite simply, trash. A dead end.
His mother, oblivious to the miraculous and terrifying event unfolding before his eyes, was dabbing his forehead with a damp cloth. "Don't try to speak, my son. Just rest. The healer said you were lucky to be alive."
Lucky? He had died. Twice. Then, a new line of text appeared on the blue panel, a message that was about to change everything.
[Host's physical vessel is critically damaged and inefficient. An optimal foundation is required for System integrity. Mandatory Body Reconstruction commencing.]
A tremor of pure dread shot down Aryan's spine.
[Warning: This process will be excruciating. The host is advised to endure. The rewards will be worth the price.]
Before the last word could fully register, it began. It was a pain unlike anything he had ever imagined. It was not the crushing force of the truck, nor the sharp, internal agony of a failed cultivation.
This was a destructive, purifying fire igniting in every single cell of his body. It was the sensation of being un-made. A white-hot forge ignited in the marrow of his bones, boiling his blood and rendering his bones to incandescent dust. His muscles weren't torn but un-woven, thread by thread, while his organs dissolved into a searing, primordial slurry. He was being erased to be rewritten.
A scream died in his throat, choked into a strangled gasp. His back arched off the bed, his body convulsing violently.
"Aryan!" his mother cried out in terror, her hands hovering over him, unsure of what to do.
To her, it looked like a fatal seizure. But to Aryan, whose consciousness was being consumed in a white-hot vortex of pain, it was the first, brutal price of his new life. It was the agony of rebirth.