The fragmented snowflakes on his eyelashes slid down, and Ling Yan closed his eyes again due to the discomfort.
The strong wind felt like it was laced with razor blades, striking his numb face, and slowly he began to feel the pain.
Ling Yan's entire body was stiff, and his heartbeat was extremely slow.
He knew these were the signs of a person on the verge of death.
[Mei.]
Mei was his unique spiritual entity, a psychic beast with an intelligent system.
Ling Yan tried to communicate with Mei using his consciousness. After three attempts, Mei's weak voice echoed in his mental world.
[I'm here, Boss.]
Receiving Mei's reply, Ling Yan breathed a slight sigh of relief.
[What's the situation now?]
After asking, Ling Yan opened his eyes again.
He wiggled his stiff fingers, and as the senses in his body gradually returned, he discovered that he was currently in a world of ice and snow.
The distant sky was like a draped curtain, a hazy gray.
Deep night was approaching.
The howling wind carried fragments of residual snow, swirling and scraping towards the pitch-black cliff not far away.
Ling Yan remained seated in the snow, his hands hanging at his sides, his back leaning against a hard object, one leg extended straight, the other bent at the knee.
After a moment of thought, he concluded that this must be "the state of the body before death."
[Boss, I can't connect to Prison Star's main system. We shouldn't be on Prison Star anymore.]
[Check where this is.]
Ling Yan furrowed his stiff brows and, after giving Mei an instruction, tried to turn his face to see the surroundings.
His neck creaked, and it was with difficulty that he turned his head, seeing about a dozen corpses around him, each frozen in their final pose.
Bright red blood had seeped into the ice and snow, and under the light cast from behind Ling Yan, the ground appeared mottled with varying shades.
He continued to turn his neck, looking down at his own body.
He was wearing black clothing, and there was a hole stabbed into his abdomen, the blood already frozen into red ice shards.
Ling Yan pried off the ice shards and tossed them aside, his fingers touching his stomach, finding no wound.
Strange.
At this moment, Mei's voice sounded again, seeming to have regained some vitality.
[Boss, I found it! You are currently inside a book called 'To the Realm of Flesh'.]
Mei's reply stunned Ling Yan for a second—
[What?]
Next, Mei opened the door to a new world for Ling Yan.
He, the strongest star police officer in the entire galaxy, who had never once glanced at online novels, would actually one day enter a novel world controlled by an unknown intelligent system due to the weak interference of a small meteoroid stream.
This was simply absurd!
At this moment, because of his arrival, his originally stiff body had completely regained its vitality, and the fatal wound had also healed.
Ling Yan helplessly scratched his brow.
[Can we establish a connection with this intelligent system?]
[I've tried, Boss, but the other party is refusing access.]
Hmm? So willful?
[Then, introduce the background of this novel. What kind of character am I? It looks like there was just a massacre?]
[Sorry, Boss, I couldn't find your identity information in the book.]
[How is that possible? Isn't this the world within the novel?]
Mei patiently explained the current situation to Ling Yan.
He had transmigrated into a very insignificant cannon fodder character.
This cannon fodder character had no positive descriptions from the original author, and because he was masked, even his appearance wasn't mentioned. He appeared for only a dozen or so words before dying.
[Regarding your identity, there are only these words: 'Betrayed the Guardian General Mu Yuan and was counter-killed by the General.']
Ling Yan's expression at this moment was indistinguishable from the black mask on his face.
[What about the rest? The story background, the novel's genre, etc...?]
"Heh-ah, heh-ah-ha! General Mu is awake! Didn't expect this, did you? Today you've finally fallen into my hands! Hehehe! Let's have some fun together, let me take good care of you!"
Ling Yan was still communicating with Mei in his mind when a sudden, extremely lewd, duck-like voice sounded from behind him.
Ling Yan's eyes sharpened, and he quickly changed his posture.
He half-knelt in the snow, reaching out to support himself against the wooden wall he had been leaning on.
He raised his head, his gaze looking upwards, and discovered that the original cannon fodder character had been killed in front of a wooden house.
Ling Yan cautiously peered upwards, and through the window, he saw a bloated middle-aged man taking off his pants, impatiently wanting to pounce onto the bed.
And on the bed, a man with fair skin, bound hand and foot, gagged, blindfolded, and dressed in thin gauze, was hanging.
[A man?]
Ling Yan raised an eyebrow:
[The plot gets this exciting right from the start?]
Mei's voice was unhurried and steady:
[Forgot to tell you, Boss, the novel you transmigrated into is an unfinished work that was locked by the system. The genre is xuanhuan danmei, and it was locked because—it was too explicit.]
Although Ling Yan didn't quite grasp the meaning of "danmei" and "too explicit," judging from the scene before him, it wasn't hard to deduce that it involved the physical and was rather risqué.
He watched as the middle-aged man had already pulled his pants down to his ankles, then with two vigorous kicks, sent them flying to the side before clumsily climbing onto the bed, his bare backside exposed.
Ling Yan had no time for further contemplation. Whatever kind of story this was, stopping the immediate criminal act was paramount.
With a swift movement, Ling Yan vaulted through the window frame and landed silently inside the wooden hut.
"General Mu, I've come for you... Ouch!"
Ling Yan's long arm shot out, grabbing the man's shoulder and flipping him from the bed onto the floor, landing him squarely on his back.
Simultaneously, in his mind, he accessed his [Police Equipment Space].
Unexpectedly, within this book, the space seemed unaffected and still fully functional.
A corner of Ling Yan's lips curled up. His eyes flashed, and he quickly retrieved a taser net ball, throwing it at the naked man.
The metallic sphere silently unfurled, forming a crackling, electric net that firmly ensnared the middle-aged man.
Then, the net rapidly contracted, clamping onto the man's body and slowly merging into his skin until it vanished completely.
The man on the ground writhed like a silkworm, his body convulsing intensely from the electric shocks.
When the net disappeared, his eyes had rolled back, and he was still.
Ling Yan touched his own face mask. Mei's voice echoed in his mind:
[Boss, since there was no physical description of the cannon fodder character you transmigrated into, I automatically projected your original appearance.]
[Mm.]
Since no one in this book would recognize him anyway, Ling Yan gave an affirmative response.
After confirming that his mask properly concealed his face, Ling Yan looked towards the man on the bed.
After a brief hesitation, he stepped onto the bed.
The man on the bed was kneeling, his hands suspended by red silk. Judging by the obvious marks on his wrists, he had been tied for quite some time.
He was barely clothed, with only a thin layer of red gauze draped over him. His skin was exceptionally pale, yet not smooth, revealing the marks of years of battle, the most prominent being a vicious scar on the lower left side of his abdomen.
The man's eyes were covered, and his mouth was gagged. Beads of sweat clung to his forehead, and his face had an unnatural flush. He was breathing heavily, appearing on the verge of suffocation.
Ling Yan wasted no more time, removing the cloth from his eyes and mouth and freeing his hands.
Unexpectedly, the man on the bed, having been suspended for so long, was completely drained of strength and fell towards Ling Yan.