"Hmmmm... should I really take this exam?" Lin Chen muttered, staring at his reflection in the copper mirror.
His face was streaked with grime, and the light-blue robes he wore were almost the same color as the dirt on the floor.
Dust clung to every crease and fold, making him look like he had crawled out of a collapsed house. Honestly, he looked more like a roadside beggar than a scholar. Even his face wasn't spared, blotched with smears of dirt that made him look worse.
He frowned at the mess of hair sticking out in every direction and scratched the back of his head. "I don't even know what half of the exam is about…"
To understand why he was so confused, let's rewind a bit.
The truth was—this wasn't his body. Well, he is Lin Chen now, technically, but not the original.
He used to be an ordinary guy on Earth, just your average overworked salaryman. One moment, he was staring blankly at his computer screen at 3 a.m., and the next… bam. His eyes opened, and he found himself in the body of a young man who had just died.
Died from over-exercise, too, apparently. Irony really loved kicking people when they were down.
And now he was stuck in a completely different world. But not just any fantasy world—no, of course it had to be the cultivation kind.
The kind filled with immortal sects, soul beasts, and martial arts techniques with names so ridiculous you couldn't help but remember them: Ninefold Heaven Splitting Palm, Mystic Phoenix Rebirth Art, and probably fifty others that sound like someone had just mashed a thesaurus into a sword manual.
And don't even get him started on the people. Arrogant young masters with egos bigger than mountains, whose brains seemed to shrink in exact inverse proportion to their wealth.
Protagonists who casually wipe out armies and then pause to deliver long, flowery speeches about justice, fate, or destiny.
Cultivators who could literally destroy cities, yet still quarrel over nothing like toddlers fighting for a toy.
It was a world where the life of an ordinary person—heck, a lowly handman—was worth less than an ant's.
Yep. That kind of world.
And now, here he was—stuck in this new identity he'd been given. Honestly, it was the most useless template of all, which made him seriously wonder if he should even bother with the upcoming sect entrance exam.
"…Maybe I should just run away and open a noodle stall instead," he grumbled, shaking his head.
From the fragments of this body's memory, he already knew what kind of body he had inherited.
No talent. No genius bloodline. No hidden artifact sealed in the Dantian. And no big family backing him—he was an orphan.
This body was just… average. Plain, ordinary, forgettable.
Apparently, the original Lin Chen had joined the Starfall Sword Sect not as a disciple, but as a handyman. The lowest of the lowest. Below the outer disciples, below the inner disciples, and way below the direct disciples who were trained personally under the elders.
Handymen were basically servants. They swept floors, carried water, cleaned latrines, and mopped up after the so-called "young talents." To most cultivators in the sect, handymen weren't even worth a glance.
But somehow, the original Lin Chen had been unbelievably determined.
Even without cultivation talent, without a family, without any real ability to sense Essence Qi, he pushed himself relentlessly.
Why? Because even handymen had one chance: if they could cultivate to the first realm—Root Vein Awakening—they could qualify as outer disciples.
But this body… well, talent wasn't exactly in the cards. It was a mortal body, barely fit for cultivation.
Even after nearly nine years of trying, the original Lin Chen hadn't sensed a trace of Essence Qi. He'd pushed himself to the limit, over-exercised, and died trying. And now… that was the body he was stuck in.
The only thing that remained from the original's memory was a rough idea of how cultivation worked in this world. Not a complete picture—just enough to know the basics.
There were realms of cultivation. Nine stages in each realm, each one supposedly harder than the last.
The first was Root Vein Awakening, the starting point for anyone even thinking about cultivation. This was when a person's spiritual roots were unlocked, letting them sense Essence Qi for the first time. Without it, no cultivation could even begin.
The second stage was Essence Forging. Here, the body was tempered, hardened, and refined. Raw energy collected from the surrounding world was condensed into usable essence, and the better one did it, the stronger their foundation for the stages ahead.
Then came Pulse Convergence, where everything inside—the meridians, the dantian, the flow of Qi-had to be stabilized and harmonized. One wrong move could mean internal injuries, or worse, wasting years of effort.
And that was it. Beyond that, Lin Chen's memories were simply cut off. The original owner didn't know what came next. I mean… what use was knowing it? Not like he could cultivate it anyway.
"Seriously," Lin Chen groaned, rubbing his sore shoulders and stretching his stiff fingers. He could still feel the aches from the original owner's over-exercise, a dull, lingering pain that made him wince every time he moved. "The guy literally exercised himself to death. That's how hard he tried."
All of it, just to awaken his spiritual roots and escape the fate of being a servant forever. And it wasn't like he was alone.
In this world, there were countless people like him—ordinary mortals, born with nothing, dreaming of cultivation but failing because talent didn't come with every heartbeat.
Some gave up, some died quietly in obscurity, and some… pushed themselves too far, like the original Lin Chen.
"Root Vein Awakening, huh…" Lin Chen muttered, staring down at his hands. Thin. Calloused. Trembling slightly from fatigue. "And I'm supposed to take an entrance exam looking like this?"
The Starfall Sword Sect was no joke. A first-rate sect, respected far and wide, and it held its outer disciple exam only once every two years.
Handymen could participate -- if they had awakened their spiritual roots. It wasn't kindness, a favor, or a pat on the back.
It was a test. A brutal filter designed to separate the hopeless from the barely useful, to see who actually had a chance at cultivation and who was just wasting everyone's time.
He sighed and collapsed backwards onto the straw mat, staring at the rotting ceiling of the hut. Unlike the original body, he had some sense in his head. He knew where to stop, how not to push himself into the same over-exercised grave the original Lin Chen had.
"No system. No cheats. No master falling from the sky," he muttered, the words tasting bitter on his tongue. He paused, then added, even more bitterly, "Not even a jade slip with some secret technique stuffed under my pillow."
He rolled onto his side, propping his head on an elbow, and letting his gaze wander across the dingy room. Maybe… just maybe… leaving the sect and starting a small business—selling noodles or something else—would be smarter than trying to cultivate.
It seemed like a dead end anyway. A grind with a high chance of ending in death, disappointment, or both.
His stomach rumbled, probably agreeing with him. At least the noodles would fill it. At least they wouldn't try to kill him if he made a mistake. Cultivation? That was a whole other level of pain, risk, and frustration.
He groaned, covering his face with one hand. "Yeah… maybe noodle stall life isn't so bad after all."
Then, out of the corner of his eye, Lin Chen caught a flicker—something small, almost like a stray reflection, but it moved differently. Like a notification icon lighting up on a forgotten device. He frowned.
"Huh? What's that?" he muttered, blinking rapidly. The small symbol suddenly expanded, forming a translucent, floating interface that hovered in the air before him. Sharp, clear, and impossibly real, like a hologram projected right out of nowhere.
The display had an elegant frame. Minimalist. Efficient. Unmistakably familiar.
[Aiva Artificial Intelligence Interface — v1 Official]
His pulse skipped a beat. No way…
He sat up, rubbing his eyes as if it might disappear. But it didn't. That was his AI project. The half-baked framework he'd been coding late nights back on Earth.
The experimental deep learning model he'd trained in whatever spare cloud GPU hours he could scrape together, barely able to afford the credits.