Chen Yi, a twenty-three-year-old young man, was walking calmly through the streets of San Francisco when someone suddenly yanked him into a dark alley.
"Don't move. Hand over everything you have and nobody gets hurt." A cold voice cut through the silence as Chen Yi felt the tip of a blade pressed against his back.
"Alright, stay calm." he replied with a composure that was clearly not expected.
In one swift motion, Chen Yi spun around and drove his elbow into the attacker's face. He had practiced martial arts since childhood — reacting was instinct.
"What do you think you're doing?" the man shouted, lunging forward with the knife. Chen Yi tried to disarm him, but the attacker dodged and buried the blade into his stomach.
"T-This wasn't supposed to happen." the man said, his voice trembling, eyes wide with panic.
Seconds later, the alley was empty. The attacker had fled, leaving Chen Yi collapsed on the ground, slowly bleeding out. Nearby on the ground lay a pendant — most likely torn off during the struggle. It was a simple piece, but something about it seemed to pulse, almost alive.
Am I going to die here?
His mind was in turmoil, his face pale, but he kept calm and pressed his hand against the wound trying to stop the bleeding. Without much success.
That was when his hand touched the pendant.
Something inside his body changed instantly — as if an indescribable fire had been lit within his core. A wave of heat surged up his spine and exploded through his mind.
"Ahh— what is this? Where am I? Who... who am I?" Chen Yi exclaimed, bracing himself against the wall as a excruciating headache consumed him. Memories that were not his own flooded his mind in torrents — battles, thrones, skies that did not exist in this world.
"Hah... hah... hah." he breathed, gasping, trying to hold his focus.
Slowly, the storm settled.
"So that's it." he murmured quietly. "I reincarnated."
He sat down right there on the ground, naturally assuming the lotus position as if his body already knew what to do. He examined himself with eyes that now carried something different — short black hair, five feet six, brown eyes, an ordinary appearance in modern clothes.
"Not bad." he said, and there was a dry humor in those two words.
He moved his fingers into ancient signs and a faint energy began to flow into his body. The wound on his stomach started to close slowly, the bleeding easing.
"I am Emperor Zhao Ren, of the Xia Continent." he said to himself, his voice low and heavy with something between nostalgia and irony. "I reached the apex of cultivation, defeated death countless times, and now I have reincarnated in a place where spiritual energy is extremely scarce."
He looked up at the dark San Francisco sky for a moment.
"This is hilarious."
Chen Yi had been an ordinary young man. He worked, studied, and had recently married Pyn Ruan — a woman with brown skin, dark hair, brown eyes, and a smile that could disarm anyone. His life was stable. He had grown up in a good family, with means that allowed him to attend college and build a comfortable routine. In general, he was an ordinary person.
At least until that moment.
Zhao Ren, on the other hand, was everything Chen Yi was not.
He came from a world where cultivation was the reason for every living being's existence. Every mortal dreamed of one day breaking the shackles of mediocrity, awakening their spiritual core, and soaring through the skies as an immortal. Zhao Ren had been no different — but where others only dreamed, he had arrived. Ten thousand years of cultivation. The absolute pinnacle. A stage where no enemy posed a threat, where no treasure was out of reach, where every desire could be fulfilled with a simple gesture.
And that was precisely where everything crumbled.
Because when you have everything, what is left?
The loneliness that settles in the heart of a being who has transcended mortality is no ordinary thing — it is a deep and silent darkness that corrodes from within. For Zhao Ren, that loneliness had become inner demons rooted within his own spiritual core. A cruel irony: the man who had defeated enemies that made entire kingdoms tremble was being destroyed by emptiness.
Reincarnating had not been a defeat.
It had been the only choice that still made sense.
"Cars, motorcycles, planes, cell phones, physics, mathematics, science..." he murmured as he picked up the pendant from the ground, examining it between his fingers. "This world developed in a very different way. Could it be because of the lack of spiritual energy?"
He closed his hand around it.
"This pendant contained spiritual energy — that's why I awakened." he said, a trace of irony in his voice. "It took twenty-three years for me to have any interaction with spiritual energy in this world. That's almost insulting."
Chen Yi calmly began processing all the memories of those twenty-three years lived on Earth. He had reincarnated, but he was still Chen Yi — the fusion of both sets of memories left him slightly disoriented, mainly due to the complete absence of cultivators and the level of technological development in this world. Weaponry, science, medicine — everything had evolved along a path completely unlike any world Zhao Ren had known before. Every other world had spiritual energy. None had advanced this far by any other means.
Could it really be that there are no cultivators here?
"There must be some." he said, frowning. "When I was younger I read a lot of novels and manga about cultivation, and many of them got most things right. There's no way those authors created those stories without at least one of them having lived something similar."
Truth be told, Chen Yi was a full-blown otaku. Novels, manga, cultivation and immortal stories — he had consumed all of it with a dedication that now, looking back, felt less like coincidence and more like something inevitable.
"This body is already close to the peak of the Mortal Realm." he observed, doing one final internal check of his energy flow. "Soon I'll be able to enter the Qi Refining Realm, but the spiritual energy here is extremely low. That's going to be a problem."
He rose slowly, one hand still pressed against the wound that was already closing, and began walking toward the alley's exit.
"First things first — I'm going home." he said with a half smile at the corner of his mouth. "My girl must be waiting for me."