The world didn't end with a thunderclap or a cinematic flash. It ended with the thin, intimate smell of spilled beer and the embarrassing, small panic of being alive one instant and nowhere the next.
Li Wei had been an ordinary twenty-two-year-old in Shanghai—an IT worker who knew more about server configurations than sword forms, a consumer of midnight snacks and late-night webnovels. He knew the tropes with a parrot's familiarity: the boy who longed for adventure, the sudden accident, the isekai rebirth into a world of jade-skin goddesses and immortal sects. He had joked about them with friends. He had envied them from his couch. He had never seriously expected to step into one.
That evening he had drunk for reasons both obvious and ridiculous: a friend's wedding, a toast to someone else's new vows, and the small, foolish ache of being the only one who had never felt a woman's mouth against his. He staggered out onto a sticky street and, reckless and tipsy, raised his face to the neon stars and shouted at whatever haloed fate might be listening.
"Truck-kun," he slurred with a grin, "if you exist—send me somewhere better. Send me to immortals and jade beauties and—" he hiccuped, "—maybe, just maybe, a single real kiss."
The answer came not in a deity's voice but in an ordinary driver's horn and a terrible, folding silence. The truck was a thunderhead of metal and fate. The world turned, and then it did not.
He expected darkness. He expected a hospital bed, white coats, a blaring fluorescent halo. He opened his eyes and found instead the sight of a hand—slender, warm—hovering over him, and a soft gasp that smelled faintly of jasmine.
When his eyes focused, he realized the hand belonged to a woman leaning over his face, not a nurse, not the city's indifferent streetlights. She wore a plain white robe that framed her collarbones and left a sliver of neck exposed, and black hair spilled like silk over a shoulder. Her skin was pale as carved jade. Up close, the world narrowed into the curve of her throat and the soft edge of her lips.
"Junior Brother, are you awake?" she asked. Her voice was musical and low, the kind of voice someone used when they were trying to coax a child's fever down.
Li Wei's brain lagged behind his senses. He tried to remember his name, his apartment, his last line of code. None of them mattered in that corridor of suddenly heightened perception. Everything else fell away; the only thing concrete was the nearness of that face and the way his chest jumped like an animal terrified and thrilled at once.
And then, impossibly, a blue rectangle hovered in the air before his eyes—a shimmering interface superimposed over the girl's hair like an obscene little billboard meant only for him.
[HEAVENLY LUST SYSTEM — INITIALIZING]
Congratulations, Host. You have transmigrated to a cultivation realm.
Primary Path: Dao of Eternal Lust.
First Task: Steal a kiss from Senior Sister Xue Lian.
Reward: +100 Qi, Martial Technique: Heavenly Groping Hand.
The absurdity was almost enough to make him laugh. The blue light blinked, patient and clinical as a cashier's receipt. Li Wei's lips parted. "This is not possible," he said aloud, and the girl's lashes fluttered.
"You should rest," she murmured, as if she had not read the glowing prompt that dangled between them.
He shouldn't have. He should have done the mature thing: apologized, explained, accepted a doctor's bed. He should have sat up and asked where he was. But life in Shanghai had been a diet of repressed fantasies and dashed hopes. A fantasy had just handed him an absurd path on a blinking plate. It would have been criminally irresponsible not to at least try.
He reached out as if by habit—groping, really—for stability. His fingers brushed rose-smooth skin, then the slender wrist. The girl's pupils widened. She tried to pull away. He held on. Her robe shifted. For a halting half-second their faces were so close their breaths mixed.
It was not a cinematic, choreographed kiss. It was clumsy—the kind of accident that comes when two people's spatial coordinates collapse by accident. Her lips slid against his, an immediate shock of warmth and softness that rewired his chest.
[QUEST COMPLETE: Steal a kiss from Senior Sister Xue Lian]
Reward Granted: +100 Qi. Skill Unlocked: Heavenly Groping Hand (Novice).
Li Wei almost fell out of the bamboo bed. A warmth spread through him, not the hazy warmth of alcohol but a clean, humming current that threaded through his limbs. He felt more awake than he had since his last exam day in university. He felt powerful in a way that tasted like electric honey. He also felt, very acutely, the slap of a palm against his cheek—loud, legal, and filled with crisp disapproval.
The girl snapped back from him as if stung. Her face was a sudden storm of outrage. Snow-cold eyes blazed: Xue Lian's expression was not the kind of fury that could be mollified by cheap apologies. She gathered frosty qi in the palm of her hand, a thin halo of ice that promised retribution.
"You—" she hissed, voice like a blade. "You are outrageous."
Li Wei felt a rare combination of adrenaline and grin-fueled giddiness. He had just kissed a Senior Sister and been rewarded by a system that frankly sounded like it had been written by a horny deity. He tasted both guilt and triumph. "S-sorry!" he said, scarfing down shame like a salt-slick snack. "It was fate! The world pushed us together! —I mean—um—please forgive my clumsiness."
Xue Lian's hand descended, and a stinging slap landed on his cheek—firm and magistral. He flew back and smacked into the slat wall of the bamboo room. Pain flared, and the humor of the moment flickered like a candle caught in wind. He rubbed his cheek, bloodless and surprisingly pleased.
A new line on the blue interface appeared, as if amused by his resilience.
[NOTIFICATION]
Sub-Quest: Survive Senior Sister's Wrath. Hint: Activate newly unlocked skill in a non-fatal manner.
Li Wei blinked. It occurred to him that perhaps the system was not only about kissing. It expected him to use what it gave creatively. The Heavenly Groping Hand, despite its ridiculous name, hummed somewhere under his skin—a latent technique that could be weaponized or weaponized into comedy.
A few minutes later, while he was staggering upright and trying to salvage dignity from the tatters of a slap, the dormitory door creaked and a small figure entered, careful and unconcerned. She carried a tray of herbal porridge and looked for all the world like someone who had been born to be revered for her innocence.
She was younger—by look and manner—than Xue Lian. Soft-cheeked, wide-eyed, a shy ribbon braided into her hair. Li Wei's chest tightened. The system chimed its hungry little chime.
[SIDE QUEST AVAILABLE]
Comfort Junior Disciple Mei Ling.
Objective: Provide physical comfort—handhold, forehead contact, or kiss.
Reward: +50 Qi; Passive Skill: Playful Dao (+10 Charm).
Li Wei felt his grin harden into a wolfish curve of opportunity. He had kissed a Senior Sister; a flurry of consequences had arrived. The arrival of Mei Ling felt like a mercy and a cheat—innocent and accessible.
"Senior Brother, are you alright?" Mei Ling's voice was a bell. Concern knit her brow. She set the tray down on his knees with hands that shook ever so slightly.
He accepted the porridge in a way that was politely theatrical. "I think medical attention might be necessary," he said, voice intentionally weak.
Mei Ling blushed and stepped closer. The room narrowed into the arc of her collar and the steam curling between them. It was an obvious moment, the kind of scene webnovel protagonists lived for. The system offered an option; he could deflect, he could be honorable, he could be a hero of restraint. That would be boring. He was dispatched to a world where romance and cultivation were sold hand in hand. The rules had changed.
"Junior Sister Mei Ling," he said, warm and imploring, "please… help me sip this. I can't seem to lift my head on my own."
She obliged. Her fingers were smaller than he expected, warm and slightly sticky from the porridge. When her palm brushed his, the system chimed—no flourish, no apology.
[PARTIAL COMPLETE: Hand-hold & Forehead Contact]
Reward: +30 Qi. Passive: Playful Dao +5 Charm.
He feigned illness with amateur theatrics and leaned in, letting their foreheads meet in a healing motion the elders might accept as medicinal. The contact was brief, charged with a new kind of electricity. Mei Ling's breath came a fraction faster. For a moment Li Wei felt memory and instinct contort into something not wholly base—something protective. He felt a rush of heat that the system translated into Qi like a ledger tallying benefits.
But consequences rippled outwards. Word traveled faster than a cultivator's glance. By evening the courtyard thrummed with gossip: the cheek-slap incident, the curious technique that looked indecent but worked spectacularly, and the newcomer who had been seen with the shy junior disciple. The sect's elders were not blind; they were riverstones who had watched tiny ripples become deluge before.
He found himself in front of Master Han the next morning: a man whose face carried the patience of oak and the disappointment of a long-suffering teacher. Around him hovered the chill presence of Elder Ji, an inspector with an unforgiving jaw and an appetite for order.
"Li Wei," Master Han said plainly, "you will undergo one week of supervised training here under my guidance. You will have no social privileges. You shall offer a public apology at the morning assembly tomorrow. Any further unregulated intimacy and the punishment will be severe."
Li Wei bowed, serious because being seen as serious would placate the elders. He liked to think he understood the theater of authority. Punishment was a formality as long as he moved narrowly within the lines the leaders considered acceptable. The system had rewarded boldness and audacity; it had not rewarded stupidity. He would craft cleverness out of his transgressions.
Inside, the Heavenly Groping Hand pulsed like a private ember. The skill's name made him want to laugh out loud and then whisper it like a sacred thing. The interface offered the kind of hints a hungry player wanted: use charm, create bonds, accumulate Yin through intimate exchanges. The Dao it offered was not merely lust as wantonness; it was lust as fuel—an energy that could be condensed into cultivation.
That night, while the main halls exhaled and the outer disciples retired, Li Wei lay awake thinking. The slap burned but not enough to sour him; it had, in a strange way, validated the entire lunatic premise. He had been punished for taste of heaven; the world had given him an explicit contract to pursue that very taste.
But he also felt something unfamiliar, a quiet thread of accountability when his thoughts lingered on Mei Ling's trusting eyes. His perversion was not a shale of selfishness he could mine without consequence; there were human reactions, genuine trust, and the fragile warmth of someone who had wanted nothing more than to offer a bowl of porridge to an injured senior brother.
The next morning, he made good on the elders' demand. At assembly he bowed and spoke—careful, crisp, contrite. He made his apology literate and presentable: contrition, acceptance of punishment, and a promise to learn discipline. The elders nodded with the satisfaction of those who have seen theater executed properly. Li Wei had cleared a hurdle without breaking a bone.
Outside the assembly, a ripple of small opportunities tumbled his way like coins. Mei Ling avoided his eyes with an embarrassed serenity. Xue Lian watched him with the crystalline curiosity of ice. There were others—a blacksmithing trainee with muscle and blunt candor; a flute player who watched her own reflection in a pool and whispered along with the notes she played. Each one offered a different kind of attention, different colors of blush that the system recorded like qualitative data.
Two hours later, in the training yard where pines sighed and the master taught the slow circulations of breath, Li Wei's first real test arrived. A burly fellow named Bo Feng—loud, careless, with the appetite for trouble of calamitous geese—charged him after a petty taunt. The moment demanded a reflex. Li Wei had learned the Heavenly Groping Hand only in its nascent, ridiculous-sounding stage, but the skill itself hummed with concealed utility.
He raised his palm in what appeared to be a flippant motion. The technique responded—subtle, smooth—manifesting not as crude contact but as an invisible cushioning qi that dampened Bo Feng's force. Bo Feng's charge dissolved into a graceless tumble onto his backside, robes askew and pride bruised. Laughter rolled; some scorned, others clapped. A defensive move whose choreography looked risqué had worked.
Not everyone laughed. Master Han's eyes lingered. He liked technique that solved problems; he disliked technique that might unravel discipline. But he did not punish Li Wei outright. That would have been to refuse the obvious purity beneath the perverted name: effectiveness.
By dusk, the system blinked another notice, this one almost intimate in its encouragement.
[SIDE-QUEST UNLOCK: Charm Three Disciples in One Day]
Reward: +80 Qi; Charm +15.
It was a small, mischievous job—and one he executed with the theatrical arrogance of a man who had nothing to lose. The flustered blacksmith earned an accidental dusting of powder on her cheek when he distracted her with a line about borrowing strength. The flute player offered a shy laugh and a bitten lip after he complimented her tone and played an awkward, tender riff on her flute. Xue Lian—silent, austere Xue Lian—was the real quarry. He approached her with contrived humility, then offered an offhand compliment about her braid's unusual knot. For a single instant the cold veneer cracked; she flushed faintly and turned away. Li Wei felt the system purr with success.
All the small victories translated into Qi and, more dangerously, into glances from the elders. He had to keep walking a line narrow as a knife—bold enough to earn rewards, careful enough not to invite the ire that could shave the edges from him.
That night, before sleep took him, he stared at the blue rectangle that haunted his vision and made its promises like a merchant hawking the forbidden fruit. It listed long-term tasks: increase renown in the sect, enter the internal tournaments, build a harem of bonds strong enough to anchor higher levels of Yin absorption. It mentioned a thing that made his pulse quicken and his brain click into keener focus: dual cultivation. The system hinted that synchronized, consensual intimacy could create enormous bursts of Qi—enough to lift a man across steps of cultivation faster than any number of hours sweating under a master's gaze.
The implications trembled at the edges of his conscience. This Dao was not merely an excuse for selfishness; it was a method. If he did this carefully, if he honed charm into art, if he kept the trust of those he touched rather than exploit it, then he could become more than a brat indulging fantasies. He could become a cultivator capable of moving through the world with influence.
Li Wei rolled onto his side and smiled into the dark. The slap still smarted when he closed his eyes, a reminder that this was more than a fantasy. It was a world with rules, where each sin carried cost and reward. He would take that calculus and make a life from it.
"Perverted Immortal," he whispered, a private endorsement. "Let's see how high this Dao can carry me."
Outside, the cult-like hush of the sect folded around an odd kind of possibility: a man who had been nothing more than a laugh track in his former life, now poised to write his own legend—one kiss at a time.
End of chapter 1