The hidden chamber did not smell of the grave. It smelled of sin.
The air inside the tomb was heavy, humid, and thick with a scent that assaulted the senses, a cloying mix of crushed peaches, sweat, and female musk. It was an aroma so potent it made the blood boil, and the loins tighten, even as the body began to fail.
Grandmaster Xu, once the feared "Blood-Hand Grandmaster," dragged himself across the rose-gold floor tiles.
He was a ruin of a man. His physical body, withered by four hundred and four years of time and the devastating backlash of a forbidden blood-burning technique, looked like dried leather stretched over brittle bone.
But even in this state, if one looked closely at his skeletal features, they would see... nothing special.
"Two lives..." Xu rasped, spitting a clot of black blood onto the pristine floor. "Two lives wasted."
His mind drifted back, past the centuries of slaughter, to a small, dark room on a blue planet called Earth.
In his first life, he had been a nobody. A NEET. A shut-in who spent his days rotting in front of a screen, reading webnovels about domineering cultivators and jade beauties, fantasizing about a world where strength mattered more than social skills. He died there, unnoticed, choking on a convenience store onigiri.
When he woke up in this cultivation world, his second life, he thought it was his time. He thought he was the protagonist.
But Reality was a cruel mistress, and she had no interest in sleeping with him.
"Mediocre roots..." he wheezed, his fingernails scraping against the tiles. "And this... this damnable face."
He hadn't been reborn as a handsome Young Master with skin like jade. He had been reborn looking exactly as he did on Earth: plain, average, forgettable. It was a face that women looked past, never at.
He had no heaven-defying talent. No grandfather spirit in a ring. No beautiful senior sisters swooning over his potential. He was just "Disciple B," destined to be cannon fodder.
'If the Heavens won't give it to me,' he had decided, his heart turning black, 'I will tear it from their throat.'
He abandoned the Orthodox path. He turned to the Unorthodox.
He butchered thousands to fuel the forbidden scripture he had chanced upon, the Blood-Burning Art. He forced his cultivation upward through sheer violence, burning his own life force and the blood of his enemies to bridge the gap of talent.
He succeeded. He defied his destiny and brute-forced his way into the Nascent Soul realm.
For a brief moment, he tasted respect. He felt powerful. He tasted the jade beauties. But he soon realized the terrifying truth. He was not able to advance further.
The forbidden arts had exacted their price. He had burned his potential to ash just to reach this stage. His foundation was ruined, his road forward severed. He spent decades stuck at the peak of the Nascent Soul realm, watching helplessly as those "true geniuses", born with silver spoons and perfect bodies, soared past him into the higher realms, leaving him behind in the dust.
He became a bitter, stagnant old man. A false expert.
"I traded my future for a moment of strength," Xu whispered, the irony tasting like ash in his mouth. "And I ended up trapped in a cage of my own making."
Desperation clawed at his sanity. He refused to rot and die like this.
That was when he caught a whisper of a rumor, a legend of an ancient inheritance that defied the logic of the heavens.
Dual Cultivation. The path of the Primal Desire Immortal.
It was the only thing that could repair a ruined foundation. The only path that didn't require talent, but hunger.
So he spent the last hundred years of his life searching. He hunted for it like a starving dog, ignoring his sect, ignoring the world, driven by a singular, mad obsession.
Now...
In the center of the chamber, bathed in a dual-toned light of creamy lunar white and deep, heated solar gold, stood the altar. Floating above it was a jade tablet, the answer to four hundred years of celibate rage.
The Primordial Yin-Yang Inheritance.
It was the legacy of the Primal Desire Immortal. A technique that didn't require talent. It didn't require hard work. It required lust. It promised the ability to reshape the bones, to mold the flesh into perfection, and to cultivate by plundering the Yin essence of women.
"Vitality... Charisma... Power..." Xu whispered.
He reached the altar. His skeletal hand, shaking with palsy, reached up.
"I will not be a background character again."
His fingertips grazed the cold, smooth surface of the jade.
Thrum.
It wasn't a shock. It was a climax.
A wave of pleasure, pure and undiluted, slammed through his dying meridians. It was a sensation of such intense, mind-breaking ecstasy that his back arched involuntarily. The jade tablet didn't just recognize him; it penetrated his soul, sensing a heart filled with two lifetimes of unfulfilled hunger.
'Heaven is cold, but the flesh is warm.
Yin craves the fullness of Yang.
Yang hungers to consume Yin.
In the friction of opposites, the Golden Elixir is forged.'
Xu stared into the swirling pink miasma, his vision swimming with tears of blood. The ancient seal script suspended in the air burned into his retinas, mocking him with every stroke.
It promised everything he had ever craved in his miserable, four-hundred-year existence: a peerless physique, a face that could charm the heavens, and a cultivation speed that defied the Dao. It was the cure for his twisted spine, his scarred, toad-like visage, and the lifetime of rejection that had turned him into a monster.
But the Heavens were cruel. They had given him the key to the palace only after the walls had already collapsed.
"No..."
The word was a wet, gurgling rasp, tearing from a throat clogged with necrotic blood.
His heart gave a final, erratic stutter, like a bird thrashing against a cage before going still. The cold grip of death tightened around his chest, silencing the thrum of his remaining spiritual energy.
"Not... like this..." he wheezed, his soul trembling with an indignity greater than death.
His vision blurred. The "Blood-Hand Grandmaster", the terror of the empires, the ugly cripple who had slaughtered thousands just to survive another day, crumpled to his knees. His gnarled, withered fingers clawed desperately at the air, trying to grasp the pink mist, trying to steal just one more second from the Reaper.
"I found it... it's mine!"
Gravity claimed him. His lifeless husk hit the cold stone floor with a hollow thud, his eyes wide open, staring at a future he would never live.
Infinite darkness swallowed his consciousness.
But the darkness did not hold him.
In the void of death, the Jade Tablet glowed. It did not release his soul. Instead, it latched onto it. The swirling pink and gold energy wrapped around his spirit like a predatory vine, refusing to let the cycle of reincarnation wash his memories away.
Xu's consciousness, which should have dissipated, was violently yanked downward.
He felt a rushing sensation, a vertigo that spanned universes. The bitterness of the NEET and the rage of the Grandmaster fused together into a singular, diamond-hard point of will.
He was falling. Falling away from the tomb, away from his old body, and plunging toward a new world, a new city, and a fresh corpse that was still warm.
"Third time is the charm," the Tablet seemed to whisper into his soul.