The last thing Han Jin remembered was the rain. It wasn't the poetic, drizzling kind you see in movies; it was a Seattle deluge, the kind that turned the world into a grey, blurred mess and made every surface a slip-hazard. As a senior electrical engineer for the city's power grid, Jin shouldn't have been on a ladder at 3:00 AM. But a transformer had blown in a high-density district, and his junior tech was shaking too hard to climb.
"Don't touch the busbar, kid," Jin had muttered, his breath hitching in the cold. "Just hold the light."
Then, the world turned white.
There was no sound—only the sensation of his teeth vibrating in his skull and the smell of his own skin turning to carbon. For a heartbeat, Jin felt every electron in the grid rushing through his marrow, a violent, chaotic map of energy. Then, there was nothing.
Until the smell of ozone brought him back.
Jin's eyes snapped open. He expected the sterile white of a hospital ceiling or the dark void of the afterlife. Instead, he saw a sky the color of a fresh bruise. Swirling violet clouds churned overhead, thick with a static charge so heavy it made the hair on his arms stand straight up.
He tried to sit up, but his body felt like it had been disassembled and put back together by someone who didn't read the manual. His limbs were leaden, and his chest burned with a rhythmic, pulsing heat.
"Ugh... did the... did the transformer explode?" Jin croaked. He reached up to rub his face, but stopped dead.
These weren't his hands.
His hands were forty-five years old, scarred by soldering irons and calloused by decades of manual labor. These hands were pale, slender, and—judging by the lack of hair and the softness of the palms—belonged to a teenager who had never worked a day in his life.
"What the hell?"
[System Initialization: 1%... 5%...]
[Target Soul: Han Jin (Earth). Status: Transmigrated.]
[Host Body: Ling Jin. Status: Near-Death (Cardiac Arrest via Lightning Strike).]
A voice, cold and crystalline, echoed inside his skull. It wasn't a computer voice; it sounded like the grinding of tectonic plates, ancient and immensely tired.
"Who's there?" Jin scrambled backward, his heels catching on jagged rock. He realized he was sitting in a shallow crater atop a jagged mountain peak. "If this is a prank, it's expensive. Where am I?"
[15%... 40%... Synchronization in progress.]
[Warning: Host's soul is 'Too Grounded.' Adjusting conductivity...]
"Grounded? I'm an engineer, of course I'm grounded," Jin snapped, his old-world sarcasm surfacing as a defense mechanism.
Suddenly, a massive bolt of violet lightning tore through the sky, striking the center of the crater where he had just been lying. The shockwave tossed him five feet back. Jin hit the ground hard, the air driven from his lungs. As he gasped for breath, a phantom image flickered in his vision—a tall, regal figure standing amidst a sea of fallen gods, wielding a spear made of pure, white-hot plasma.
"Enoughsilence," the voice boomed again, but this time it had a face—or at least, a presence. A shimmering, translucent bird of prey, wreathed in sparks, manifested in the air before him. "I am the remnant of the Great Lord Tai-Zhu The Lightning God of the Seventh Firmament. And you... you are a scavenger from a world without Spirit."
Jin stared at the bird. "You're a bird. A talking, glowing bird."
"Iam a God!" the spirit shrieked, and a small spark jumped from its beak, nipping Jin's nose.
"Ow! Okay, okay. God. Bird-God. Got it." Jin sat up, clutching his chest. "So, I died. And now I'm... here? In this kid's body?"
[Synchronization Complete: 100%]
[User Profile Loaded: Ling Jin (17).]
[Affiliation: Ling Clan (Discarded Branch).]
[Cultivation Base: None (Spirit Veins Severed).]
"Wait, 'severed'?" Jin muttered. Memories that weren't his began to leak into his mind like ink in water.
He saw a grand hall. He saw a man with a cold, bearded face—his father, Lord Ling—looking at him with nothing but disgust. He felt the sting of a whip, the laughter of cousins, and the crushing weight of being "trash" in a world where strength was everything. This boy, the original Jin, had climbed this mountain during a forbidden storm, praying to the heavens for power.
The heavens had answered with a bolt of lightning that killed him instantly.
"He wanted power," Jin whispered, looking at the charred silk of his robes. "But he got a heart attack instead."
"He got ME," the voice of Tai-Zhu echoed. "But his soul was too weak to contain my essence. It shattered like cheap glass. You, however... your soul is strange. It is shaped by the understanding of the Flow. You do not fear the lightning; you respect its path."
Jin looked at his trembling hands. "I'm an engineer, Tai-Zhu. I don't pray to lightning; I harness it. I put it in boxes and make it run toasters."
The spirit bird landed on his shoulder, its claws feeling like needles of static. "Then harness me, Weaver of Toasters. The Long Clan is coming. They saw the 'Heaven's Punishment' strike this peak. They come to ensure the 'Disgrace' is truly dead."
Jin looked down the mountain path. Far below, torches were winding their way up the trail. A cold, pragmatic anger began to simmer in his gut. He had spent his first life being a cog in a corporate machine, fixing things for people who didn't know his name. He wasn't about to spend his second life being a doormat for some medieval aristocrats.
"Tai-Zhu," Jin said, his voice dropping an octave. "You said I have a system?"
[System Interface Active.]
[Current Task: Survive the Purification Party.]
[Reward: Basic Lightning Condensation Technique.]
"How do I use this?" Jin asked.
"Think of it like your 'circuits,'" Tai-Zhu whispered. "Stop trying to hold the power. Let it move through you. Resistance is what kills; Conductivity is what conquers."
Jin closed his eyes. He pictured the transformer at 3:00 AM. He pictured the flow of electrons, the beautiful, dangerous dance of potential and kinetic energy. He didn't try to "cultivate" like a monk; he mapped the body's nervous system like a blueprint.
*If my veins are the wires,* Jin thought, *then my heart is the generator.*
Suddenly, the screen in his mind flared.
[New Skill Learned: Ohm's Law (Passive).]
[Description: You can sense the electrical resistance in any living being or object.]
"Ohm's Law?" Jin let out a dry, hacking laugh. "You've got to be kidding me."
The sound of footsteps reached the crest of the hill. A group of men in armored robes emerged, led by a young man with a sneer that looked like it had been carved into his face.
"Well, well," the leader said, drawing a steel sword. "The heavens missed a spot. You're still breathing, cousin."
Jin didn't stand up. He just looked at the sword. Through his new "System" vision, he didn't see a blade. He saw a highly conductive medium of iron and carbon, held by a man with a very high moisture content.
"You're standing in a puddle, brother Mu," Jin said calmly.
The young man blinked. "What?"
"The rain," Jin pointed to the wet earth beneath the soldiers' feet. "Water is a terrible insulator. And you really shouldn't be holding a lightning rod in a storm."
"Have you finally lost your mind, trash?" Long Mu stepped forward, raising his sword. "I'll make this quick. Father doesn't want to pay for your funeral anyway."
Jin reached out and touched the ground.
"Tai-Zhu," he whispered. "Give me a spark."
The air on the peak didn't just turn cold; it turned heavy. To Jin, the world had shifted from a 3D landscape into a schematic. He saw the potential energy hanging in the clouds, the massive voltage difference between the sky and the iron-rich soil, and the perfect, fleshy conductors standing right in front of him.
"Give you a spark?" Tai-Zhu's voice cackled with a mixture of disbelief and sadistic glee. "Boy, I am the forge of the heavens. Don't just ask for a spark. Demand the flame."
[Warning: Physical body at 12% Integrity.]
[System Directive: Initiating 'Bio-Electric Overdrive'...]
Ling Mu didn't wait for an answer. He lunged, his steel blade whistling through the rain. To a normal seventeen-year-old, the move would have been a blur. But to Jin, whose brain was suddenly overclocked by a god-tier processor, Karl moved like he was underwater.
Jin didn't parry. He didn't even stand up. He simply leaned two inches to the left. The sword bit into the charred rock where his shoulder had been a millisecond before.
"Missed," Jin whispered.
He reached out, his fingers brushing the flat of Ling Mu's blade.
[Skill Triggered: Arc Discharge.]
[Output: 50,000 Volts. Amperage: Low (Non-lethal... mostly).]
CRACK.
A snap of violet light, loud as a gunshot, echoed across the peak. The electricity didn't just hit Ling Mu; it used his sword as a highway, racing up the metal and into his damp leather glove.
Ling Mu's entire body stiffened, his eyes bulging as his muscles locked in a tetanic seizure. He was thrown backward ten feet, his sword clattering away, glowing orange at the tip.
The guards froze. Their torches flickered in the wind, casting long, dancing shadows.
"What did you do?!" one of the men yelled, his hand trembling on his spear. "The trash... he used a talisman? No, there was no paper!"
"It wasn't a talisman," Jin said, slowly pushing himself to his feet. His legs felt like jelly, and his vision was swimming with red warnings from the System, but he kept his face a mask of bored indifference. "It's called a circuit. And you're all part of one."
He looked at the puddle they were standing in. It wasn't just rain; the mountain's soil was rich in magnetite. He could feel the magnetic fields tugging at his senses.
"They are coming for you again, Weaver," Tai-Zhu warned. "The one in the back—he has a Spirit Core. Fire element. He's going to cook your 'grounded' heart."
A tall, older guard stepped forward, his eyes narrowed. He didn't use a weapon; instead, his palms began to glow with a dull, flickering orange heat. "I don't know what trick you used, Ling Jin, but the Lord commanded your head. If the lightning didn't take it, my 'Embers of the Fallen' will."
The guard thrust his hands forward. A gout of flame, shaped like a hungry wolf, tore through the rain toward Jin.
[Threat Detected: Thermal Energy.]
[System Advice: Ionize the air. Create a Path of Least Resistance.]
Jin didn't know how to "cultivate," but he knew physics. Fire is plasma. Plasma is conductive.
He didn't run away from the fire. He stepped *into* it, raising his hand and pointing his index finger toward the swirling violet clouds above.
"Hey, Tai-Zhu," Jin thought. "You want to show them what 'Heaven's Punishment' actually looks like?"
"GLADLY."
Jin felt a sudden, violent vacuum in his chest, as if his soul were being used as a siphon. He wasn't the source of the power—he was the lightning rod. He channeled the static from the air, the friction of the wind, and the lingering charge of the previous strike.
Zap.
A thin, almost invisible needle of blue light shot from Jin's finger, piercing through the fire wolf and connecting directly with the low-hanging clouds. For a split second, there was a bridge.
And then, the sky fell.