Chapter 1: The First Death
Smoke. Screaming. The crackle of flames eating wood.
I jerked awake on hard ground, head pounding like someone had used it for a drum. The sky above was the wrong color—too blue, too bright, no pollution haze. My hands didn't look right either. Too calloused, too thin, nails crusted with dirt I'd never accumulated.
Where the hell am I?
A wagon exploded twenty feet away. Not metaphorically. Actual explosion—wood shrapnel and burning cloth spinning through the air. A man stumbled past me, sword buried in his chest, mouth working soundlessly. He collapsed face-first into the dirt.
I tried to stand. My legs betrayed me, tangled in unfamiliar robes. The body moved wrong, joints at slightly different angles than I remembered. Memories crashed into my skull—two sets, colliding like freight trains.
My life. Mid-thirties, software engineer, dead-end job, apartment full of takeout containers. I'd been reading something before bed. A webcomic. Chinese cultivation story. Demon emperor reincarnating as a servant, something about face-slapping and...
The other memories were thinner, fragmentary. This body's memories. A caravan guard's son. Seventeen years old. No cultivation. Completely mortal in a world where power mattered and weakness meant death.
Oh. Oh fuck.
I'd transmigrated. Like in those stories. Except I was nobody important, in a world I barely remembered, and—
A man in leather armor charged toward me, curved sword raised. Bandit. Had to be. The merchant caravan was burning, bodies everywhere, and this bastard was grinning like he'd won the lottery.
I tried to run.
The body didn't cooperate. Too slow, too uncoordinated. I stumbled over a corpse, went down hard on my knees. Pain shot up my legs—sharp and real and wrong because this wasn't supposed to happen to me. I was a bystander. I was—
The sword punched through my chest.
Cold. That was the first thing. Not pain. Just cold spreading from the entry wound, freezing my lungs mid-breath. I looked down stupidly at the blade sticking out of my sternum, blood soaking my robes. Dark red. Almost black.
The bandit twisted the sword.
Now I felt it. Fire and ice and every nerve ending screaming at once. I opened my mouth to scream but no sound came out. Just blood, bubbling up my throat, hot copper taste flooding my mouth.
The bandit yanked the sword free. I collapsed sideways, vision tunneling. The sky spun above me. So blue. So utterly indifferent.
My heartbeat slowed. Once. Twice.
Stopped.
Darkness swallowed everything. Not unconsciousness. Deeper than that. A void that pulled me down and down and down, consciousness unraveling like thread from a spool. Terror clawed at me—primal, absolute. This was it. I was dying. Actually dying. Not in a hospital bed with morphine and family. Alone in the dirt with a hole in my chest.
The void consumed me.
Then—light.
White light, searing and absolute, cutting through the darkness like a blade. Words appeared in my vision, burning themselves into my awareness:
[RETURNER'S MIRROR ACTIVATED]
[Death Registered: Bandit Leader, Qi Condensation Peak]
[Skill Acquisition: Processing...]
[Copied: Swift Shadow Step - Green Rank]
[Regression Initiating...]
[Timeline Reset: -24 Hours]
The void shattered.
I gasped awake in my bedroll, hands clawing at my chest. No wound. No blood. Just intact skin beneath rough cloth. My heart hammered against my ribs, alive and whole and beating.
Predawn light filtered through the canvas wagon cover above me. Quiet. Peaceful. No screams. No fire.
I pressed my palm against my sternum, fingers trembling. The memory was crystal clear—the blade sliding between ribs, the cold spreading through my lungs, the final moment of terror before nothing. But I was alive. Breathing. Twenty-four hours before the raid.
What the hell just happened?
Knowledge flooded my mind unbidden, like someone had dumped a file directly into my brain. Swift Shadow Step. A movement technique. Low-grade, basic, the kind of skill beginner cultivators learned to move faster in combat. I could see it in my mind's eye—the qi circulation pattern, the specific muscle movements, the way energy was supposed to flow through meridians in the legs.
Except I had no qi. No cultivation base. The technique was there, complete and perfect, but trying to use it would be like revving an engine with no fuel.
I sat up slowly, bedroll rustling. Around me, the caravan slept. Merchants bundled in blankets, guards snoring by dying campfires. Peaceful. Unaware that in roughly sixteen hours, bandits would slaughter most of them.
My hands were still shaking. I clenched them into fists, forcing them still.
Okay. Okay. Think.
I'd died. Completely, actually died. Then something—some ability I didn't know I had—pulled me back twenty-four hours. And gave me a skill from the man who killed me.
The fragmented memories from my reading flickered. Regression novels. Time loop stories. Protagonist gets a second chance, uses foreknowledge to win. Except those protagonists usually got cool systems, overpowered abilities, maybe a harem of beautiful cultivators throwing themselves at them.
I got... what? One basic skill I couldn't even use, and the lovely memory of bleeding out in the dirt?
I pulled my knees to my chest, breathing slowly. The fear was still there, lurking under my ribs. The memory of dying. But underneath the fear, something else stirred.
I came back.
Whatever this ability was, it had pulled me from actual death. Reset time. Given me a skill as a consolation prize.
If I died again, would it work twice?
The thought made my stomach clench. Testing it meant dying again. Experiencing that void, that terror, that awful moment when everything stopped.
But if it did work...
I looked around the sleeping caravan. These people were dead. In sixteen hours, the Bandit Leader and his crew would hit this caravan like a hammer. I'd seen it. Lived it. Died in it.
Unless I changed something.
Or unless I died again. And again. And again, if that's what it took to figure out the rules of whatever cosmic joke had dropped me in this world.
I pulled out the thin knife from my belt—the original body's only weapon. Tested the edge against my thumb. Sharp enough.
Am I really considering this?
The alternative was waiting around, hoping sixteen hours would be enough to warn the guards, prepare defenses, somehow convince mortal merchants to fight off Qi Condensation bandits.
Or I could die. Learn more. Come back with knowledge.
I stared at the knife for a long moment. My reflection wavered in the blade—a stranger's face, young and scared and completely out of his depth.
I'm going to regret this.
I put the knife away. Not yet. First, I needed to see the raid happen again—this time paying attention. The Bandit Leader wasn't alone. There was a lieutenant, other bandits. If I could die to each of them, copy their skills, steal their items...
The thought crystalized into certainty.
Death wasn't the end anymore. It was a tool. A weapon. The only weapon a powerless transmigrator had in a world of cultivators.
I lay back in my bedroll, staring at the canvas ceiling. Sleep wouldn't come. The memory of dying was too fresh, too vivid. Instead, I replayed everything. The raid's timing. The Bandit Leader's technique. The way he'd moved—faster than any mortal, qi-enhanced speed.
Swift Shadow Step. If I could use it, I'd be faster. Not fast enough to fight him, but maybe fast enough to survive long enough to learn more.
Sixteen hours.
Sixteen hours until the raid. Sixteen hours until I'd die again.
I spent them watching. Memorizing. The guards' patrol patterns. Which merchants carried weapons. The layout of the wagons. Every detail I'd missed the first time through.
When the sun began to set, painting the sky orange and red, I felt my pulse quicken. Soon. Very soon.
The Bandit Leader hit us an hour after sunset.
He came from the east, just like before. Twenty men, maybe more in the darkness. The guards died fast—outmatched, unprepared. The merchants scattered like frightened chickens.
I didn't run this time. I stood in the open, watching the Bandit Leader cut through a guard like paper. Watching his technique. The way he moved. The flow of qi I couldn't sense but could infer from his impossible speed.
He saw me. Grinned. That same grin from before.
"Shoulda run, boy."
The sword came up.
I didn't close my eyes this time. I watched the blade descend, watched it pierce my chest, watched my blood spray across the dirt.
The cold hit. The darkness swallowed me.
And then—
[RETURNER'S MIRROR ACTIVATED]
[Death Registered: Bandit Leader, Qi Condensation Peak]
[Previous killer detected. Skill already copied.]
[Item Acquisition Available...]
Different message. New options.
I fell into the void again, but this time I wasn't afraid.
This time, I was learning.
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