The ceiling was wrong.
Four years of renting the same shoebox apartment in Chengdu meant knowing the exact geography of the water stains above my bed. There was a hairline crack near the cheap light fixture that looked like a jagged smile. The streetlamp outside always burned out at three in the morning, leaving the corners to swallow the room.
This ceiling was made of dark, heavy lacquered wood. Deep gouges in the wood formed ascending phoenixes around the main crossbeams, their wings sharp enough to catch the dust.
It was too expensive. It made my stomach turn.
"Okay," I said.
The sound didn't belong to me. It vibrated lower in the chest, the kind of unhurried, heavy resonance of a man who never had to raise his voice to be heard.
"Okay," I tried again, testing the resonance.
I pushed myself up. I shifted my weight, and the body caught its own balance before my brain even sent the signal. No hesitation. Just lethal, silent momentum. I held up my hands. Long, pale fingers. Calluses thick on the webbing between thumb and forefinger from years of sword grips. A fresh, half-healed slash slicing diagonally across the left palm.
I pressed those hands flat against the mattress. The silk sheets were cold.
"I'm dead," I told the empty room. "Or I transmigrated. Given the woodwork, we're leaning heavily toward transmigrated."
Then the memories arrived.
Not a gentle surfacing. A structural collapse.
Wei Liang. Twenty-four years old. Sect Master of the Azure Void Sect. Three days ago, Elder Zhao Feng of the Crimson Scale Sect had caved his chest in over a border dispute. He had crawled back to this room and died of violent qi deviation.
But before his heart stopped, he had opened a door. The remnants of his cultivation had formed a summoning array, reaching across the void for a replacement. He didn't pull a warrior. He pulled a foreigner blind to the rules. He wanted someone too ignorant to know they were already dead.
"You idiot," I whispered to the ghost fading in the back of my mind. "You pulled a guy whose greatest strategic victory was debugging a legacy payment gateway."
A clean, semi-translucent blue rectangle snapped into existence behind my retinas. It looked like a cross between a xianxia jade slip and a legacy payment gateway.
[ SECT MEMBERS: 2. SPIRIT STONE DEBT: 4,000. ASSASSINATION CONTRACTS: 3. ]
The blue text burned against my corneas. I blinked, but it stayed.
[ CURRENT DISCIPLES: 1 (RATING: ABYSMAL). AMBIENT QI ABSORPTION: 0.0%. ]
Zero. I stared at the zero.
[ HOST CAN ONLY CULTIVATE VIA SOUL BOND FORMATION. CURRENT BONDS: 0. ] [ Welcome. Please try not to die immediately ]
I read the last line twice.
Please try not to die immediately.
My legs carried me to the window. Wei Liang's heart beat at a slow, infuriating sixty beats per minute. I was terrified, but his muscles refused to acknowledge it. They folded my hands neatly behind my back without my permission. Inside, my thoughts were a dial tone. I couldn't string two words together.
I looked out over my new empire.
The Azure Void Sect was less a martial institution and more a sprawling, quiet graveyard. Moss choked the shattered flagstones of the training courts. Three of the outer pavilions had roofs caved in like crushed ribs. The spirit stone pathways tracing the compound were dead and grey, starved of Qi.
In the central courtyard, someone was sweeping.
He was nineteen, maybe twenty. Round-faced, soft around the middle, moving the broom with the enthusiasm of a hostage digging his own trench. Zhou Bao. Zhou Fatty. The memories provided the name effortlessly. He was the only disciple left. Everyone else ran when the debt collectors started breaking legs last month. He didn't. He just looked at the broken main gates every evening and quietly swept closer to the main hall.
He looked up. He caught sight of me standing at the second-floor window.
The broom slipped from his hands. His jaw worked, trying to form a word, before his shoulders simply caved in. He started crying. Quiet, ugly, shoulder-heaving sobs.
I stared down at him. My brain ran the calculations. I thought about going down there. A pat on the shoulder, maybe an explanation about transmigration and a speech about modern teamwork. It sounded great in my head.
If I acted like the guy who debugged payment gateways, someone would put a sword through my neck by sunset.
I adjusted the angle of my jaw to catch the morning light. I let the cold, unreadable authority of the dead Sect Master bleed into my posture.
"Prepare the sect," I said. The voice rolled across the courtyard, carrying the cold finality of a closing tomb. "For war."
Zhou Bao wailed aloud.
Wrong choice. The kid thought I was going to use him as a meat shield.
I held the cold stare. I didn't flinch. I didn't blink.
Eventually, the crying reduced to wet hiccups. He bowed so low his forehead practically scraped the dirt. "Yes, Sect Master," he whispered.
"Good."
I stepped away from the window before my face could twitch. Assess the damage first. Find a ledger. And a sword. Mostly the sword.
I made it exactly four steps down the dark wooden corridor.
"You."
The voice didn't come from the air. It bypassed my ears entirely, detonating directly inside the center of my skull. It carried the weight of grinding tectonic plates and the specific, grinding exhaustion of a god forced to deal with middle management.
I stopped walking. My left shoulder started shaking. Just the shoulder. I didn't know what my shoulder knew that the rest of my body hadn't figured out yet.
"You are the new host."
I waited.
"I endured the indignity of waiting," the voice rumbled, vibrating the floorboards. "Maintained the formations. Preserved the bloodline through eleven generations, waiting for a conqueror who could bear the weight of the heavens."
A pause heavy enough to crack stone.
"And they sent me you."
I looked at the peeling paint on the corridor wall. I considered running. I considered throwing myself out the window I had just stood in front of.
"Hello," I said.
Silence. The floorboards stopped vibrating. The air simply hung there.
"I am," the voice said, sounding like it was speaking through gritted teeth, "the Primordial Dao-Emperor of Ten Thousand Bonds. First Creator of the Soul Cultivation Array. Vanquisher of the Seven Celestial Courts. The being whose name alone caused the Heavenly Dao to—"
"I'm going to call you Old Geezer," I said.
The hallway temperature dropped four degrees. My breath plumed slightly in the air.
"I will unseal your dantian," Old Geezer whispered, "for exactly long enough for you to die with dignity."
"Right," I said, keeping my pace toward the main hall. "Except if you could kill me, I'd already be dead. You need a host. I need instructions. Let's save the threats for the people actually trying to burn this place down."
A pause. Then a sound echoed in my skull like old stone dragging across iron.
"You form authentic bonds with women," he spat, as if the words themselves offended him. "Their soul's cultivation law bleeds into yours. The deeper the tie, the more of their law you steal. It is infuriatingly simple."
I pushed open the heavy double doors of the main hall. Dust fell from the rusted iron hinges.
"And you cannot fake it," Old Geezer warned, the pressure in my skull spiking. "The array detects authenticity. Any attempt to lie, any attempt to form a bond purely for the transaction of power, will result in a Qi backlash that feels like swallowing hot coals."
"Understood."
"You absorb zero ambient Qi. A mortal rock has better spiritual affinity. Without my array, your predecessor's residual energy evaporates in six months, and your heart stops beating."
"Also understood."
Old Geezer let out a dry, rattling chuckle. "And the Heavenly Dao already felt the array turn on. It will send a divine executioner to kill you within the month."
I pulled out the chair at the head of the dusty council table. The wood groaned. "Thirty days," I said to the empty room. "No Qi. No sword skills. Who is in the region?"
"That is not how I expected this conversation to go."
"Northern range," he muttered after a long pause. "Glacier Sect. Shen Yuebing. Stage Seven Core Formation. She freezes the blood of anyone who steps within ten paces of her."
"Why bring her up?"
"Because," Old Geezer said, his voice dropping to a whisper, "she carries a bloodline I recognized three thousand years ago. If anyone can see the array's signature, it is her."
I looked at the empty chair immediately to my right. In the inherited memories, that chair belonged to the first elder. Blood from three months ago still stained the wood near the armrest. Nobody had scrubbed it off.
"Then I suppose," I said, pushing myself up from the table and straightening my collar, "she'd better come here."
I walked out of the hall and back into the morning sun.
Zhou Bao froze mid-sweep. He stared at me as I approached the shattered main gate.
"Sect Master," he squeaked. "Where are you going?"
I didn't stop walking. I stepped out into a world that was actively trying to erase me. I had nothing. My left shoulder was still shaking slightly.
"To collect a debt," I said.
I didn't feel ready.
I went anyway.