The last thing Li Wei remembered was the rain.
Not poetic rain. Not the kind that cleanses the soul or sets the mood for a dramatic death scene. Just Shanghai rain: gray, miserable, and carrying enough industrial pollution to strip paint. He had been walking home from another twelve-hour shift, his neck aching from hunching over spreadsheets, his phone buzzing with WeChat messages from a boss who didn't believe in "after hours."
Then there was light. A lot of light. And a horn. And the very distinct sensation of his body becoming intimately acquainted with the front end of a delivery truck.
'Great' he'd thought, in that split second before unconsciousness. 'Even my death is mundane. Probably gonna get a bad review on the way i lived my life in hell.'
When he opened his eyes again, he expected a hospital. Or the pearly gates. Or, given his luck, just another gray waiting room with bad magazines.
Instead, he got snow.
Cold, biting, 'why-is-it-in-my-lungs' snow.
Li Wei shot upright, gasping. His body screamed in protest, not the pain of being hit by a truck, but the deep, bone-aching soreness of someone who had been lying on frozen ground for too long. He was in some kind of narrow canyon, ice coating every surface, the walls rising so high above him that the sky was just a thin blue line.
"What the..." His voice cracked. It sounded wrong. Higher in pitch and Younger.
He looked down at his hands. They weren't his hands. His hands had been office-soft, with calluses only from years of gaming. These hands were lean, corded with muscle, and covered in minor cuts and bruises. The clothes weren't his either, some kind of dark blue robe thing, torn in several places, with a faded embroidery of what looked like a snowflake or maybe a bird.
'Okay,' he thought, his mind latching onto the familiar process of logical analysis like a drowning man grabbing a life preserver. 'Okay. This is fine. This is... actually not fine at all. What the hell happened?'
then Memories that weren't his flooded in.
A boy named Chen Feng. Seventeen years old. Outer disciple of the Snow-Phoenix Sect. His family had once been important but they had backed the wrong faction in a political dispute a decade ago. Now they were nobodies. Chen Feng was nobodies. His "Soul Martial Spirit" was a joke: an incomplete moth with tattered wings that barely manifested, earning him the affectionate nickname "Mothboy".
The last thing Chen Feng remembered was a sect expedition. They had been culling low-grade Frost Rabbits when a Soul Beast Tide hit. He had been separated from the group. Pushed. No, deliberately shoved into a crevasse by someone who'd laughed as he fell.
Li Wei sat in the snow, processing this information dump.
"So," he said aloud, his voice echoing off the ice walls. "I got isekai'd. Into a crippled loser. In a cultivation world. During winter."
"Great. Fantastic. This is what I get for reading all those webnovels. The universe saw me coming and decided to give me the hard-mode experience." He stood up, brushing snow off his robe. "Okay. Assessment time. I'm in the body of a teenager with a trash spirit, stuck at the bottom of a frozen hole, with no food, no water, and probably no chance of rescue because the guy who pushed me here definitely isn't sending a search party."
He started pacing, partly to warm up, partly because thinking on his feet was literally the only skill his corporate job had given him.
"Cultivation world means levels. Ranks. Spirit Scholar, Spirit Warrior, Spirit Grandmaster. Chen Feng's memories have all that. To advance, you need to absorb Soul Essences from beasts. To get Soul Essences, you need to kill beasts. To kill beasts, you need power. Classic troupe."
He stopped pacing and looked up at the thin line of sky.
"The original owner was stuck at peak Spirit Scholar because his spirit was too weak to form a complete essence ring. So even if I somehow climb out of here, I'm still a cripple in a world where cripples get used as labor or target practice."
Li Wei laughed.
"You know what? This is actually impressive. Most isekai protagonists at least get a decent starting class. I got the 'waste of space' class with a 'certain death' opening scenario. If this were a game, I'd uninstall and leave a one-star review."
A gust of wind howled through the crevasse, carrying ice crystals that stung his face. The temperature was dropping. If he didn't find shelter soon, the cold would solve his problems permanently.
"Right. Priorities. Shelter first. Then food. Then figuring out how to not die." He squinted into the gloom. The crevasse wasn't just a straight drop, it sloped downward, leading deeper into the ice. There might be caves. There might be monsters. There might be...
His foot hit something that wasn't snow.
Li Wei looked down.
It was a bone. Human. Or human-ish. Frozen into the ice, partially exposed, with what looked like tattered cloth fragments still attached.
"Well," he said, his voice flat. "That's not ominous at all."
He stepped over the bone and kept walking. No point in freaking out. Dead people were just part of the scenery now, apparently.
The crevasse widened as he descended, the walls opening into a kind of natural cavern. The ice here was different, older, denser, with a blue so deep it looked almost black. And in the center of the cavern, half-buried in the frozen ground, was something that made Li Wei stop dead.
A cocoon.
It was huge...maybe three meters long...and it looked ancient. Its surface was covered in intricate patterns that seemed to shift when he wasn't looking directly at them. And despite the bone-deep cold of the cavern, the cocoon radiated a chill that was somehow worse. This was the cold of absolute zero. The cold of death. The cold of stillness.
Li Wei's instincts, honed by years of gaming, screamed at him: DO NOT TOUCH.
His curiosity, honed by years of being an idiot, screamed back: BUT WHAT IF IT GIVES YOU POWERS?
"Famous last words," he muttered, stepping closer.
The cocoon pulsed.
Not physically, there was no movement, no sound. But Li Wei felt it, deep in his chest, like a second heartbeat. The pulse was cold. Hungry. And it was calling to him.
Or rather, it was calling to Chen Feng's crippled spirit. He could feel the pathetic moth-thing inside him stirring for the first time, responding to the cocoon's summons like a lost child hearing its mother's voice.
"Oh no," Li Wei said. "Oh no no no. This is exactly how horror movies start. A guy finds ancient evil thing, thing offers power, guy takes power, thing eats his soul. I've seen this movie. It never ends well."
His feet kept moving.
The cocoon was right in front of him now. Up close, he could see that it wasn't completely intact, there was a crack running down one side, and through that crack, something gleamed. Something that looked like,
A wing.
Translucent. Delicate. Shinning with patterns of frost that seemed to contain entire galaxies.
Chen Feng's crippled spirit erupted from Li Wei's chest without his permission, a pathetic, tattered moth the size of his hand, its wings full of holes, its body barely solid. It flew toward the cocoon like a moth to flame and pressed itself against the crack.
The cocoon shattered.
Ice exploded outward. Li Wei was thrown backward, slamming into the cavern wall hard enough to see stars. When his vision cleared, the cocoon was gone. In its place, floating in the air, was a moth.
But not like Chen Feng's moth. This one was magnificent. Its wings stretched two meters from tip to tip, each one a masterpiece of frozen artistry, intricate patterns of frost that shifted and flowed like living things. Its body was the color of deepest winter, and its eyes... its eyes were empty. Not blank, but empty, like windows into a space where nothing moved, nothing lived, nothing ever would.
It looked at Li Wei.
He felt his soul freeze.
Then the moth dove, straight into his chest.
The pain was indescribable. It was like being frozen from the inside out, every cell in his body crystallizing, his blood turning to ice, his thoughts slowing to a crawl. He couldn't scream. He couldn't move. He could only feel as something ancient and powerful merged with Chen Feng's pathetic spirit, consuming it, transforming it, becoming it.
And through the pain, a voice spoke in his mind. Not words, exactly, but meaning. Pure concept.
[WINTER. STILLNESS. SILENCE. END.]
Then, just as suddenly as it began, the pain stopped.
Li Wei lay on the frozen ground, gasping, his body steaming in the cold air. He felt... different. Stronger. Colder. Like he had been reborn as something that didn't quite belong in the world of the living.
A blue screen flashed before his eyes.
[Ding! Dormant Soul Spark detected. Synchronizing with host consciousness...]
[Ding! Synchronization complete. The Winter Sovereign's Path System is now online.]
Li Wei stared at the screen.
Then he started laughing.
"Holy shit," he wheezed, tears freezing on his cheeks. "Holy shit. I actually got one. I got a system! All those hours grinding mobile games, all those wasted nights reading trash webnovels, it actually paid off!"
He scrambled to his feet, eyes wide, reading the screen again and again to make sure he wasn't hallucinating.
[System Functions:]
[Status] – View your current stats and cultivation.
[Quest Board] – Accept daily, weekly, and main storyline quests.
[System Workshop] – Combine materials to create equipment and skills.
[Shadow Monarch's Echo] – Extract and store echoes from defeated enemies.
[Shop] – Purchase items using Sovereign's Coins.
[New Quest Available!]
[Quest: Survive]
[Objective: Escape the Frozen Crevasse and establish a safe location.]
[Reward: 100 EXP, 50 Sovereign's Coins, Skill Book: "Basic Frost Resistance"]
[Failure:Death (permanent).]
"No pressure," Li Wei muttered. "Just a little permadeath quest to start my day."
He pulled up his status screen.
---
[STATUS]
Name: Li Wei
Cultivation:Spirit Scholar (Peak)
Soul Martial Spirit: Winter Still Moth (Mutated – Ancient Grade)
[Abilities:]
- Frost Aura (Passive): Emits cold that slows opponents and dulls senses.
- Cocoon of Stillness (Active): Envelop target in frozen time-space. Duration scales with Spirit Essence.
[Stats:]
- Strength: 8
- Agility: 7
- Endurance: 9
- Spirit Sense: 15
- Soul Essence: 120/120
[Sovereign's Coins: 0]
---
Li Wei studied the screen with intensity.
"Okay. Stats are trash across the board except Spirit Sense, which makes sense, cultivation world, perception matters more than muscles. The moth evolved from 'crippled joke' to 'Ancient Grade' whatever that means. And I've got two abilities."
He focused on the abilities, and more information flooded in.
Frost Aura: A constant field of cold extends roughly three meters from his body. Within this field, enemies move slower, think slower, and tire faster. Currently weak, useful for insects and small animals, barely noticeable to cultivators.
Cocoon of Stillness: By expending Soul Essence, he can encase a target (including himself) in a shell of frozen time. Inside the cocoon, nothing ages, nothing changes, nothing moves. Duration: currently 10 seconds max. Cost: 50 Soul Essence per use.
"Ten seconds of invincibility or imprisonment," Li Wei mused. "Expensive, but potentially fight-winning if used right. And the passive aura means I control the engagement range."
He nodded, satisfied. It wasn't a god-tier cheat, but it was a solid starter kit.
Now he just needed to not die.
The cavern stretched deeper into the ice, and from somewhere in the darkness, Li Wei heard a sound.
A growl. Low, hungry and Close.
He turned toward the sound, and two glowing red eyes blinked open in the darkness.
[Soul Beast Detected]
[Name: Frost Rabbit]
[Rank: Low-Grade]
"Oh, you've got to be kidding me," Li Wei breathed. "My first enemy is a rabbit!?"
The rabbit hopped forward into the dim light. It was the size of a large dog, its fur white as snow, its teeth long and sharp like icicles. Its eyes glowed with hunger.
Li Wei looked at the rabbit. The rabbit looked at Li Wei.
"Nice bunny" Li Wei said slowly, backing toward the wall. "Nice bunny. I'm sure you're very soft and huggable and definitely not trying to eat my face."
The rabbit growled again.
Then it lunged.