Great Xuan, Xuanjing, the Grand Preceptor's estate.
The wine was Jiangnan's finest, aged twenty years in ceramic jars buried beneath plum trees. Castor held the cup between weathered fingers, feeling the liquid's warmth seep into joints that had begun to ache with the changing seasons.
Seventy years old
The number should have felt like a burden, but tonight, surveying the hall packed with officials in their finest silk robes, he felt only the particular satisfaction of a game well-played.
Governor Chen stood near the eastern wall, laughing too loudly at Minister Wu's joke—the same Minister Wu whose daughter Chen had tried to keep him from bedding three years ago.
Both men wore smiles that didn't reach their eyes, the hatred beneath their cordiality as familiar to Castor as his own reflection. They'd learned, as everyone in this room had learned, that opposing the Grand Preceptor meant career suicide at best, actual suicide at worst.
Nearly every high-ranking minister and noble in Great Xuan had come tonight. Some out of genuine respect. Most out of fear. A few out of the desperate hope that proximity to power might change their fortunes.
Castor preferred the latter. Desperate people were predictable.
He wasn't born to this world—that truth had become just another tool in his arsenal. Fifty years ago, he'd woken in the body of a destitute scholar with nothing but memories of another life, another world, another name.
Castor Gupta. Dead at twenty-five, killed by a man whose wife he'd been fucking. The irony of dying in one world for his vices only to exploit them for power in another had amused him for approximately a week before he'd gotten to work.
In that first life here, he'd wasted decades trying to be someone else. Failing civil examinations. Playing merchant. Dying in bed at sixty-three, mediocre and forgotten.
But that death had gifted him something: Return to Truth. The ability to turn lived experience into simulation, to restart from the moment of his transmigration with all his memories intact.
This was his second life in Great Xuan, and he'd spent it like a chess grandmaster who'd memorized his opponent's every move.
At twenty, he'd seduced the provincial magistrate's lonely wife—not for pleasure, though that had been pleasant enough, but for the access to her husband's seal. The documents he'd forged with it had secured him a posting as a junior court official.
At twenty-five, he'd identified Minister Zhao's gambling addiction and positioned himself as the sympathetic friend extending loans. By thirty, Zhao owed him so much money and so many favors that refusing to recommend him for promotion would have meant exposure.
At forty, he'd orchestrated the downfall of three rival officials by the simple expedient of introducing their wives to each other—the resulting scandal when they'd discovered they were all sleeping with the same man had been spectacular.
The ability to read people, to find the pressure points in any relationship, to make them want what you wanted them to want.
By fifty, he'd become the Emperor's tutor. By sixty, the Grand Preceptor, the man behind the throne. The Emperor was a puppet who didn't even realize he was dancing on strings.
Castor stroked his beard—grown long and white in the fashion of prestigious scholars—and drained the wine cup.
The alcohol burned down his throat, a sensation that reminded him he was still flesh and blood despite feeling more like a spider at the center of an empire-spanning web.
"A toast to the Grand Preceptor's health and longevity!"
The officials raised their cups in unison, voices blending into a cacophony of forced enthusiasm. Castor smiled benevolently, playing the part they expected: the wise elder statesman, the guiding hand of the empire.
If they knew what he'd done to achieve this moment—the blackmail, the seductions, the carefully orchestrated "accidents"—half would vomit. The other half would try to kill him.
Fortunately, they were all idiots.
A commotion erupted outside, voices rising in confused excitement. Castor's smile didn't waver, but irritation sparked through him.
He'd given explicit instructions that nothing was to disturb tonight's banquet. Heads would roll for this interruption.
"Look! Fire falling from the heavens!"
"An auspicious omen on the Grand Preceptor's birthday!"
"Wait—is it getting closer?"
The hall fell silent. Officials exchanged glances, uncertain whether to continue celebrating or investigate. Castor set down his cup with deliberate care—never show concern, even when you feel it—and walked toward the courtyard entrance. His gait was measured, dignified, giving no hint of the curiosity burning through him.
The night air hit his face, cool against wine-flushed skin. He stepped into the courtyard where servants and lesser officials had gathered, all craning their necks toward the sky.
Castor followed their gaze, and for the first time in fifty years, he felt genuine surprise.
Two streaks of silver light tore across the heavens, one pursuing the other with impossible speed. They moved like comets, leaving trails of luminescence that burned against the darkness. Beautiful. Terrifying. Wrong—physics didn't work that way, his memories of Earth insisted, even as his eyes confirmed what he was seeing.
The lights grew larger, closer. In seconds, they reached Xuanjing and stopped, hovering directly above the city as if the laws of motion had simply ceased to apply.
Then a voice spoke, and Castor's blood turned to ice.
It came from everywhere and nowhere, resonating not just in his ears but in his chest, his bones, the air itself. The sound of a god addressing insects.
"Dao Xuanzi! Do not push me too far!"
Around him, servants dropped to their knees. Officials stumbled backward. Someone was crying, the sound high and broken.
Castor stood motionless, his mind racing through impossible calculations. That word—the word he'd spent decades searching for, the obsession that had consumed his first life here—suddenly burst from the depths of memory where he'd buried it under pragmatism and political maneuvering.
Cultivators.
"How..." The whisper escaped his lips before he could stop it.
In his first life, he'd searched everywhere. Sent expeditions to the frozen northern seas, to the endless southern oceans, to the Abyssal Chasm in the east, to the infinite mountain ranges in the west. He'd questioned every traveling monk, every hermit, every charlatan claiming supernatural powers.
Nothing.
Not a single trace of genuine immortal cultivation in all of Great Xuan.
He'd given up. Accepted that this world was as mundane as Earth had been, that his memories of reading xianxia novels were just fantasies with no bearing on reality. He'd redirected his efforts toward achievable goals: power, wealth, control.
And now, in his twilight years, when his body was beginning its slow decay toward death despite all the premium medicines and healthy young concubines warming his bed—now the heavens decided to mock him.
Another voice thundered from above, different from the first but equally inhuman in its power:
"Kou Hong! Did you truly think fleeing to the Immortal Forsaken Land would save you? Hand over the core formation method you stole, or this ends only with one of us dead!"
Immortal Forsaken Land. Castor's mind seized on the phrase. That's what they called this place. The mortal realm where he'd built his empire was nothing but a refuge for fleeing cultivators, a backwater so insignificant it didn't even have a proper name.
The first voice—Kou Hong—laughed, and the sound held a manic edge that Castor recognized from a dozen political opponents he'd driven to desperation.
"Ridiculous! For a hundred years, I've been trapped at Foundation Establishment. My time is nearly up, and I'll soon be reduced to dry bones. All I lacked was the method to form my Golden Core. Now that I finally have it, you expect me to just give it up?"
One hundred years. Castor's seventy-year-old body suddenly felt infantile. What would he do with a century? Two centuries? Immortality itself?
Everything he'd achieved here—meaningless. He'd been playing checkers while gods played chess on a board he couldn't even see.
"Exactly!" Dao Xuanzi's voice carried the weight of resignation. "Only one can walk this path to the Golden Core realm. There are countless methods, yet more cultivators than ever remain stuck at Foundation Establishment!"
The tone shifted, hardening into something vicious: "And so, with this core formation method before me, how could I possibly let you go? How could I not push you too far?"
Castor's analytical mind, honed by decades of political maneuvering, caught the implication immediately.
Scarcity.
Competition.
The same dynamics that drove court politics, but with stakes infinitely higher. These weren't benevolent immortal sages from the novels—these were desperate creatures fighting over scraps of power.
Exploitable, some part of him thought reflexively. Everything is exploitable if you understand the leverage points.
"Then let us settle this!" Kou Hong's laugh turned wild. "How pitiful—a hundred years of brotherhood, only to end up fighting for survival!"
Dao Xuanzi's response was lost in a sudden spike of alarm that Castor felt ripple through the air like heat before a lightning strike.
"I know I'm no match for you," Kou Hong said, and now his voice carried the peculiar calm of a man who'd already accepted death. Castor had heard that tone before, in Rajesh Khanna's voice just before the gunshots.
"I don't think I'll be able to escape today. But tell me, Dao Xuanzi—with so many mortals gathered here, can you withstand the concentration of Immortal-Mortal Miasma?"
"Kou Hong! What are you planning?!"
"Just seizing my last chance to live!"
Castor's body moved before his mind fully processed the threat. He lunged sideways, some primal survival instinct overriding seventy-year-old reflexes—
The world exploded in crimson.
The sound came first: a crack like reality itself shattering, so loud it went beyond hearing into pure sensation. Then pressure—enormous, crushing, slamming him into the ground. Heat washed over him in waves, searing exposed skin. The smell of burning wood, burning cloth, burning flesh flooded his nostrils.
He tried to scream, but had no air. Tried to move, but his body wouldn't obey. His vision was nothing but red shot through with black, fragmenting like broken glass.
Not again, some distant part of his mind thought. I don't die like this again—
Then darkness swallowed him whole.
***
Pain dragged him back to consciousness.
Not the sharp, immediate agony of injury—this was duller, deeper. The pain of a body pushed past its limits, of organs struggling to function, of blood moving sluggishly through damaged vessels.
Castor had experienced many unpleasant sensations in his seventy years, but nothing quite like this sense of fundamental wrongness, as if his body had become a house with cracked foundations.
He coughed, and something hot and wet splattered from his lips.
Blood.
The taste was copper and salt, sickeningly intimate.
His eyes opened to darkness. For a terrifying moment he thought he'd gone blind, but then details emerged: the faint red glow of dying embers, the silhouette of a collapsed beam, stars visible through what used to be a roof.
Night. Still night. How long had he been unconscious? Minutes? Hours?
Castor's mind began cataloguing damage with clinical detachment.
His hearing—there was a high-pitched ringing that wouldn't stop, overlaying everything else.
His left arm responded sluggishly when he commanded it to move. Ribs—at least three broken, judging by the grinding sensation when he breathed. His legs seemed functional, though his left ankle screamed protest when he shifted weight onto it.
He was alive. That fact felt simultaneously miraculous and grotesque.
With agonizing slowness, Castor pushed himself up. His palm pressed into something soft and yielding—he jerked back instinctively, then looked down.
Minister Wu's face stared back at him, or what remained of it. The left half was gone, burned away to reveal bone and teeth in a rictus grin. The man's expensive silk robes had melted into his flesh.
Castor's stomach convulsed, but he forced down the bile. Vomiting with broken ribs would be excruciating.
He dragged himself away from the corpse, using his functional arm and legs to crawl through debris.
The Grand Preceptor's estate—his monument to fifty years of careful manipulation and ruthless ambition—had become a charnel house. Bodies lay everywhere, in pieces or whole, burned or crushed.
He recognized Governor Chen by his jade ring, still attached to a severed hand. Lady Xia, one of his concubines, was pinned beneath a fallen pillar, her beautiful face frozen in an expression of disbelief.
His five sons. Where were his five sons?
The thought came and went, carrying surprisingly little emotional weight. They'd been useful political tools—proof of his virility, potential successors to manage—but he'd never felt what he supposed fathers were meant to feel. Castor Gupta's memories held no paternal instincts, and Castor had never bothered to develop them.
Still, they'd been his. He'd invested time and resources in their education and positioning. And now some immortal bastard's tantrum had erased that investment like wiping figures from an abacus.
Castor dragged himself through the wreckage until he reached what had been the estate's outer wall. Most of it had collapsed, offering an unobstructed view of Xuanjing beyond.
The city was dying.
Fires burned in every direction, painting the night sky in shades of orange and red. Buildings that had stood for centuries were reduced to rubble.
The broad avenue where merchants had hawked their wares this morning was now a canyon of destruction, bodies scattered like discarded dolls. The Grand Temple's distinctive pagoda, visible from anywhere in the city, had toppled. Half of it lay across the market district, crushing everything beneath.
The screaming had mostly stopped. That was somehow worse than if it had continued. It meant there weren't enough survivors left to scream.
Castor's enhanced hearing—damaged as it was—caught fragments: distant sobbing, the crackle of flames, the occasional crash of a weakened structure finally collapsing. And beneath it all, that persistent ringing, a reminder that the explosion had done permanent damage.
He should feel something. Horror. Grief. Rage. Something.
Instead, he felt... clarity.
For fifty years, he'd played politics. Master manipulator, pulling strings, accumulating power for its own sake because power was the only goal that made sense in a world without immortality.
He'd told himself that controlling an empire was achievement enough. That bedding other men's wives and watching them squirm with guilt was satisfaction enough. That wealth and prestige could compensate for the gnawing awareness of his own mortality.
All lies.
He'd given up on cultivation after his first life's fruitless search. Convinced himself it was pragmatic, rational. But the truth—the truth he could admit now with his empire in ruins and his body broken—was that he'd been afraid. Afraid of wasting another lifetime chasing a dream that didn't exist.
And now two cultivators had casually obliterated everything he'd built while arguing over a technique like children fighting over a toy.
"Fu-hu-hu... Ah-ha-ha-ha-ha! Hahahahaha!!!"
Castor started laughing.
The sound came out wet and ragged, interspersed with coughs that sent agony through his broken ribs.
But he couldn't stop.
The absurdity of it—the cosmic joke—was too perfect. He'd spent decades accumulating mortal power while immortals existed just beyond his perception, treating his entire world as a garbage dump where they could fight without consequences.
The Immortal Forsaken Land.
They'd called it that. As if this entire realm of millions of people was nothing but a convenient wasteland.
His laughter died as abruptly as it had started.
In its place came something colder, sharper.
The same calculating focus that had carried him from destitute scholar to Grand Preceptor, now redirected toward a new target.
He slumped against the broken wall, body screaming protest, and stared at the burning city.
Somewhere in this destruction were answers. Those two cultivators had come from somewhere. That "Abyssal Chasm in the east" Kou Hong had mentioned—perhaps that was the gateway. And they'd spoken of Foundation Establishment, Golden Core, cultivation methods that only one person could use...
Information. He needed information. And then he needed to survive long enough to use Return to Truth, to virtualize this entire life and return to age twenty with everything he'd learned.
But first, he needed to ensure there would be anything left to learn from.
With tremendous effort, Castor forced himself upright. His legs shook, threatening to collapse, but he locked his knees and stayed standing. He was still the Grand Preceptor. Still the most powerful man in Great Xuan—or what remained of it. That had to count for something.
He stumbled through the ruined estate, searching for survivors. Found three servants huddled in what remained of the kitchen, their faces blank with shock.
A junior official who'd been near the latrines when the explosion hit, relatively unscathed but catatonic. A dozen guards from the outer perimeter, their posts far enough from the epicenter to survive.
Castor gathered them through sheer force of presence, despite looking like a corpse himself. When he tried to speak and found his damaged hearing made communication nearly impossible, he grabbed charcoal and parchment from the ruins and wrote orders instead.
His calligraphy was shaky, characters malformed by trembling hands, but legible enough:
"Gather all survivors. Restore order. I am still Grand Preceptor. Obey or die.'
Simple. Direct. The only language that mattered when civilization had just collapsed.
The guards responded to the familiar structure of command. They fanned out into the burning city, finding other survivors, organizing them into groups. Castor positioned himself at the garrison camp outside Xuanjing's walls—far enough from the destruction to be functional, close enough to maintain control.
Over the following days, a grim picture emerged. Xuanjing's population of roughly two hundred thousand had been reduced to perhaps ten thousand. Every high-ranking official who'd attended his birthday banquet was dead. The Emperor himself had perished in his palace, along with most of the imperial family. The entire governmental apparatus of Great Xuan had been decapitated in a single night.
Which meant Castor, as the surviving Grand Preceptor, was now the de facto ruler of what remained.
He threw himself into the work with mechanical precision.
Dispatched messengers to surrounding provinces, demanding grain shipments and relief supplies. Ordered the systematic clearing of rubble and disposal of bodies—the latter a necessity to prevent plague.
Established martial law and authorized his guards to execute looters on sight.
Reorganized the surviving bureaucracy, promoting junior officials to positions they were grotesquely unqualified for simply because there was no one else.
It took a month before Xuanjing stopped looking like the end of the world and started resembling something that might, eventually, become a city again.
Castor worked through it all with his hearing damaged, communicating through written orders and hand signals. His broken ribs healed poorly, leaving him with constant low-grade pain that he ignored. His ankle never fully recovered, giving him a slight limp. He didn't care. Physical discomfort was temporary. The knowledge he was gathering—that was permanent.
Once the immediate crisis was managed, he turned his attention to investigation.
He sent out agents to question every survivor who'd witnessed the cultivators' arrival. Compiled testimonies. Cross-referenced accounts. Built a picture of the event from dozens of fragmentary perspectives.
The conclusion was frustratingly simple: both cultivators had appeared from the east, from the direction of the Abyssal Chasm. After their devastating attack, they'd continued their chase eastward, vanishing into the distance.
Three months of investigation yielded nothing more concrete. No secret cultivation sects hidden in Great Xuan's borders. No mysterious immortals living among mortals. Just two powerful beings who'd used his world as a battlefield and then departed, leaving devastation in their wake.
Castor stood in his rebuilt office—smaller than his previous quarters, utilitarian rather than opulent—and stared at the map of Great Xuan on his wall. The Abyssal Chasm was marked on the eastern border, a geographical feature he'd sent expeditions to explore in his first life. They'd found nothing but a massive canyon system, dangerous and impassable.
Clearly, they hadn't looked hard enough.
Or perhaps you needed to be a cultivator yourself to perceive whatever gateway existed there.
Which brought him back to the central problem: in a world where cultivation existed, he remained mortal. Powerful by mortal standards, yes. But compared to beings who could destroy cities casually? He was an ant pretending to be a tiger.
Not for long, he thought.
He'd rebuilt enough. Learned enough. This life had given him the confirmation he'd needed: immortals existed, they came from the east, and they viewed his world with contempt.
Castor returned to his private chambers—sparse and functional, nothing like his former opulence—and sat on the simple wooden bed. His body ached with the persistent pain of poorly healed injuries and advancing age. Seventy years old, and he'd wasted this entire life on mortal concerns.
"Return to Truth"
The ability responded immediately, a sensation like touching something just beyond the edge of perception. Reality wavered, taking on that peculiar out-of-focus quality that meant the boundary between truth and falsehood was thinning.
[When truth becomes falsehood, falsehood becomes truth.]
The words appeared in his mind's eye, glowing with soft luminescence. Then the screen manifested, translucent and ethereal, covered in flowing script:
[Charging complete.]
[Virtualize current scenario and return to the initial anchor point?]
Beside the text, images flickered past in rapid succession.
Fifty years of his second life compressed into moments: his calculated rise through the bureaucracy, the seductions and blackmail, the political maneuverings, the accumulation of power that had meant everything until it meant nothing.
And there, near the end: two figures of silver light hovering over Xuanjing, gods arguing over scraps while mortals burned below.
Castor studied the images with detached analysis.
This life hadn't been wasted, exactly.
He'd learned crucial information. Confirmed cultivation's existence. Identified the Abyssal Chasm as a key location. Understood that the cultivation world operated on principles of scarcity and competition, that immortals could be as petty and desperate as mortals, just with more destructive capabilities.
Most importantly, he'd learned their names: Dao Xuanzi and Kou Hong. Foundation Establishment cultivators fighting over a Golden Core formation method.
In his next life, he'd be ready for them. He'd find them before they found Xuanjing. He'd learn what they knew.
He'd become what they were, and then surpass them.
Without hesitation, Castor selected "Yes."
The screen flashed. The images of his second life froze, suspended like insects in amber. Then they began to crack, fracturing into countless luminous shards that exploded inward, flooding his consciousness with crystallized memory.
Fifty years of experience compressed into pure information. Every manipulation. Every seduction. Every political calculation. Every mistake and triumph. All of it preserved perfectly, ready to be accessed in his next life.
The last thing he saw before the virtualization completed was the frozen image of Dao Xuanzi and Kou Hong, locked in their fatal confrontation above his burning city.
I'll be waiting for you, he thought, his consciousness fragmenting. Fifty years from now, when you come to Xuanjing again, I'll be ready.
Wealth and power in the mortal world—he'd achieved both and found them hollow. Empty victories in a game that didn't matter.
But immortality? The ability to cultivate, to transcend mortal limitations, to become something more than prey for beings who casually destroyed cities?
That was worth pursuing. That was worth everything.
In my next life, Castor's final coherent thought echoed as the virtualization pulled him under, I won't just seek immortals.
I'll hunt them.
The world dissolved. His second life became simulation, became false, became nothing but data to be carried forward. Consciousness collapsed inward, spiraling down through layers of existence until it reached the anchor point: age twenty, the moment of his transmigration, the blank slate where everything began again.
And in that darkness before rebirth, he who had lived twice and died three times—smiled with savage anticipation.
The game was just beginning.
---
CHAPTER END