Chương 1: No Root. No Dao.

Please Choose Your Class: [1. Martial Warrior] [2. Arcana Mage] [3. Heavenly Cultivator] Huh? Where is this?

A cold, abyssal sound pierced through his skull—not heard, but felt, reverberating in the hollow behind his eyes like the echo of a bell struck in a tomb.

A transparent blue screen floated in the void before him, its edges razor-sharp and unnatural against the smothering black that pressed in from all sides.

He blinked. Or thought he did. There was no sensation of eyelids closing, no flicker of darkness, no moisture on his corneas. Just the terrible awareness of trying and feeling nothing in return.

Confusion knotted somewhere in his chest—or where his chest should have been. The absence was worse than pain. The screen pulsed again, its light intensifying with what felt almost like impatience, casting no shadows in the absolute void.

Heavenly Cultivator.

He picked. The words formed in his mind without breath, without voice, pulled from him by some force he couldn't name.

Then, nothing.

The screen dissolved like mist over a grave, pixels scattering into the darkness like ash caught in an unfelt wind. Darkness swallowed him whole again, thick and suffocating, pressing against him from all directions with the weight of earth.

What the fuck?

He tried to shout, but his jaw wouldn't move. His tongue lay dead in his mouth. Instinct clamped down—quiet, you idiot, you're on the battlefield.

Right. The trench. Mud caked under his nails, thick and cold. The stench of cordite and iron, sharp enough to make his eyes water.

Did a tank just shell my position?

He tried to remember, grasping at the fraying threads of his last moments. The final image surfaced like a body in deep water—his comrade's face, eyes wide and white-rimmed, pupils blown with terror, mouth stretched open in a scream he never finished.

Flecks of spittle frozen at the corners of his lips. And before that… pressure. A punch to the sternum that wasn't a punch. The sensation of his ribcage folding inward, bones bending in ways they were never meant to.

Ah… the bullet.

His heartbeat had stopped.

He'd felt it—that terrible moment when the rhythm faltered, stuttered, and went silent. The world tilting sideways in slow motion, his boots scraping uselessly at dirt that wouldn't hold him, cold spreading from his ribs outward like frost crystallizing across a windowpane.

Each vein turning to ice, one by one.

Am I dead?

The thought tasted bitter on a tongue he couldn't feel. Ridiculous. Obvious. Yet somehow still incomprehensible.

But I'm still young… The protest rose unbidden. I haven't even married. Haven't taken that trip I kept planning. There's a whole reading list I never finished… Mom's homemade dumplings I'll never taste again…

He wanted to laugh. Or curse. The absurdity of it—dying with such mundane regrets.

Damn. Died for my country. The thought came wrapped in layers of irony he was too tired to unpeel. What an… honor.

The sarcasm curdled in his mind, leaving behind only emptiness.

But then— Sensation snapped back like a rubber band pulled too tight and released.

Bone cracked—wet, splintering pops that jolted through his spine like electricity, each vertebra grinding against the next.

Cold air licked across skin that shouldn't exist, raising goosebumps, tickling the fine hairs on his arms until they stood on end. His eyelids peeled open with agonizing slowness, the dried blood at the corners cracking, heavy as iron shutters rusted shut.

Light stabbed into his retinas.

Overhead, the sun bled. Darkness gnawed at its edges like a hungry mouth, swallowing it whole in a slow, terrible eclipse. The sky had turned the color of old bruises—purple and yellow and sick.

…

He was falling.

No—plunging. Like a broken puppet with severed strings, the body tumbled through open air with sickening weightlessness.

His limbs flailed uselessly, unresponsive to any command his mind tried to send. Stone blurred past in streaks of gray and brown. The reek of rot and copper thickened with every breath he didn't mean to take, coating his tongue, filling his lungs.

The Charnel Abyss yawned beneath him—a canyon-wide wound in the earth where the great Sects above disposed of their mistakes.

The unwanted. The failed. The betrayed. Shattered pagodas jutted from the cliffside like broken teeth, their once-elegant curves now jagged and crumbling. Bodies tangled in the rubble, limbs twisted at angles that defied anatomy, robes fluttering like funeral shrouds in the updraft from below.

Blood poured from his chest. Warm. Sticky. It soaked through torn robes—silk that had once been white, now stained crimson and brown—and dripped into the void below, leaving a trail like breadcrumbs marking his descent.

And with the blood came memories.

Not his.

The realization struck with the force of vertigo. These thoughts, these images—they belonged to someone else. They crashed into his consciousness like waves breaking against rocks, foreign and violent and impossible to stop.

A flash: kneeling on cold stone, smooth jade that bit into his knees with numbing chill. An elder's face loomed above, features carved from marble—smooth as polished jade, ageless, beautiful in the way poisonous flowers are beautiful.

His lips curled in false concern, the corners of his mouth lifted just enough to seem sympathetic while his eyes remained flat and cold as a snake's. Words like honey dripped from those perfect lips, each syllable masking poison.

"For the good of the Sect, we must make sacrifices."

Then—pain.

Fingers plunging into his ribcage. Not cutting, not stabbing—tearing. Flesh parting like wet paper, ribs spreading with the crack of green wood. Bone splitting, the sound echoing in his skull. The wet, awful squelch as something vital was ripped free, roots and all, like pulling a plant from soft earth.

His spiritual root.

Gone.

The phantom sensation blazed through him—a hollowness worse than any wound, an absence that went deeper than flesh, deeper than bone. They had torn out the very foundation of his being, the seed of his potential, and left him empty. A husk. A failure.

It hurt…

As the memories settled like shards of glass in his skull, each one cutting, pain flared white-hot in his chest. The wound wasn't just physical—it echoed, a phantom agony carved into the flesh by someone else's suffering that was now somehow, impossibly, his own.

Another flash: The same Sect Elder. Robes pristine and snow-white. Hands folded behind his back, posture relaxed, as if discussing the weather. His voice came calm, measured, utterly devoid of emotion—which made it somehow worse than if he'd screamed.

"Break him."

Two words. Delivered with the casual indifference of ordering tea.

Disciples closed in—faces he recognized with a jolt of betrayal that stabbed deeper than any blade.

Seniors who'd shared meals, who'd laughed at his jokes, who'd clasped his shoulder in camaraderie. Juniors he'd sparred with, whose forms he'd corrected with patient hands.

Their grins stretched too wide now, eyes bright with something worse than cruelty. Glee. The intoxication of power over the powerless. The joy of the strong crushing the weak without consequence.

Bones snapped. First the left arm—crack, like dry bamboo underfoot in autumn. The joint gave with a wet pop that vibrated up into his shoulder.

Then the right leg, hands gripping above and below the knee, twisting until the joint popped loose from its socket with a sound like tearing fabric. Each break punctuated by laughter, by casual conversation, as if he were nothing more than a training dummy. Less than human. An object to practice on.

He'd watched. Half-dead, drowning in his own blood. Eyes swollen shut from the beating, but still aware—consciousness refusing to grant him the mercy of darkness. Aware of every moment, every sound, every casual joke made at his expense.

Then the final indignity: hands gripping his broken limbs, fingers digging into fractured bone and torn muscle. Swinging him once—building momentum. Twice—lifting him higher.

—and hurling him into the pit like garbage.

...

Ah…

A broken body. A ripped-out spiritual root. Bones shattered in multiple places, organs failing, blood pressure dropping.

He waited for rage. For the hot, choking fury of betrayal that should consume him. For the desire for revenge that drove every protagonist he'd ever read about.

Nothing came.

Only the cold pressure of falling air, peeling his eyelids back until they dried, pulling at his cheeks, forcing his mouth into a rictus grin. The wind screaming past his ears. The darkness below rushing up to meet him.

No cultivation. No spiritual root. A gaping hole in my chest. Limbs that won't obey.

So… I transmigrated into a dead body.

The thought settled with grim finality, heavy as a tombstone.

Does that mean I'll die twice?

Sarcastic laughter bubbled up in his mind—silent, bitter, tinged with hysteria he refused to voice.

Of course. He'd read enough web novels during downtime in the barracks, sprawled in his bunk with a cracked phone screen, killing time between patrols. Transmigration, second chances, golden fingers, systems that granted limitless power.

But this?

His jaw twitched, trying to grit teeth that barely held together, several already loosened by blows to his face. The wound in his chest throbbed with every non-existent heartbeat, blood pumping out in rhythmic spurts.

Darkness rushed up to meet him. The bottom of the abyss, invisible but approaching fast. No end in sight, and yet somehow inevitable. The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

...

[Warning: Soul merging with host vessel.] The blue screen flickered back into existence with no warning, materializing in the air before his plummeting face. Words scrolled past with mechanical indifference, each line appearing with a soft ping that somehow cut through the roar of wind.

[Error: Selected Class 'Heavenly Cultivator' requires a Spiritual Root.] [Error: Host vessel's Spiritual Root has been ripped out.] [ERROR: Critical incompatibility detected.] And of course. The famous system.

He stared at it, vision blurring at the edges. Wanted to laugh. Couldn't. Didn't have the breath for it.

What's the point?

Falling from this height—terminal velocity reached, body accelerating toward inevitable impact—who could survive? Even with a system, even with divine intervention, the laws of physics were merciless.

The abyss swallowed sound. Swallowed hope. Swallowed everything.

…

THUD.

The impact drove every last breath from his lungs in a single violent expulsion. A groan leaked through his clenched jaw, wet and animal and involuntary—the sound of meat hitting stone.

But it wasn't stone.

His broken body slammed into something soft. Something that gave beneath his weight with awful, organic compliance. The sensation was wrong—too yielding, too wet, too familiar in the way only human flesh could be.

The stench hit immediately, a physical assault that made his empty stomach convulse. Rot so thick it coated his tongue, crawled down his throat, filled his sinuses.

Decay, old blood gone black and sticky, the sickly-sweet reek of flesh left too long in humid air. Maggots and bile and the particular smell of bowels ruptured and exposed to air.

He forced his eyes open, vision swimming.

A mountain of corpses.

Bodies piled ten, twenty, thirty deep. Limbs jutted at wrong angles, bones snapped and protruding through mottled skin.

Faces half-melted, features sliding off skulls like wax, eyes hollow or missing entirely—picked clean by carrion birds or simply rotted away. Mouths frozen open in eternal screams. Robes stained black with old gore, the colors and emblems of a dozen different Sects all reduced to the same filthy brown.

And scattered among the bodies like seeds in soil—flying swords. Snapped blades, their once-gleaming metal now rusted and pitted.

Hilts still clutched in skeletal hands, grips worn smooth by years of practice before being discarded along with their owners. Talismans burned to ash, their protective formations failed or exhausted. Remnants of a cultivation world's casualties, the detritus of power and ambition.

He lay there, chest heaving with shallow, rattling breaths. Blood pooled beneath him, warm at first, then cooling rapidly in the chill air of the abyss. It mixed with the filth, with the decomposition fluid of a hundred corpses, creating a soup of death he was slowly sinking into.

But…

The hopeless thoughts—the quiet surrender, the acceptance of death—faded.

His fingers twitched.

Not much. Just a tremor, barely visible. But it was something. Voluntary movement. Proof that signals still traveled from brain to extremity.

The dim, hollow gaze in his eyes reignited.

A flicker. Small. Stubborn. The same spark that had kept him breathing in the trenches, that had dragged him through mud and blood and artillery fire.

I'm alive.

That single thought was enough. The pilot light of survival, refusing to be extinguished. He forced his eyes to focus, squinting past the haze of pain and blood loss, taking inventory with the cold precision drilled into him by military training.

Blood loss: critical.

The wound in his chest pulsed wetly with each shallow breath, edges ragged where fingers had torn through flesh. Dark blood pooled beneath him, viscous and warm, soaking into the rot below. He could feel it leaving him, life draining away with each heartbeat. The pool was spreading, already six inches across.

Spine: fractured.

He couldn't feel his legs. Not numbness—absence. Like they'd been severed cleanly at the waist, sensation ending in a hard line across his lower back. He tried to wiggle his toes and felt nothing, sent the command into a void that swallowed it whole.

Breathing: shallow.

Each inhale scraped like broken glass dragging through his throat, wet and rattling. His right lung was compromised—punctured or collapsed, filling slowly with blood. Every breath brought a fresh spike of agony, ribs grinding against torn tissue.

Left arm: compound fracture. Right arm: barely functional. Internal bleeding: extensive.

He had less than half an incense stick of time before he bled out. By some miracle—or curse—the blow had missed the major arteries. The aorta remained intact, the vena cava still whole. But the lung was compromised, the diaphragm torn, blood filling his chest cavity.

Five minutes. Maybe less.

He frowned, the expression pulling at torn skin on his cheek where someone's fist had split it open.

Alive. But barely. And slipping fast.

His vision darkened at the edges, consciousness flickering like a candle in a strong wind.

What can I do?

His gaze flicked to the empty air where the blue screen had been, searching desperately for its artificial glow.

System… are you there?

Silence.

No flicker. No error message. No helpful prompt or quest notification. Nothing but the sound of his own labored breathing and the distant drip of water echoing off stone.

Hope dimmed like a candle snuffed between wet fingers, smoke curling into darkness.

But he didn't panic.

Panic meant faster heartbeat. Faster heartbeat meant faster bleed-out, pressure dropping, consciousness fading.

Military training overrode instinct—slow the breathing, assess the situation, prioritize, act. He'd lived through worse. Had watched friends die and kept moving. Had stitched his own wounds in a foxhole while mortars fell like rain.

If there was no golden finger, he'd rely on himself.

Legs?

Dead weight. He couldn't even twitch his toes, couldn't feel the pressure of the corpses beneath his calves. The fall had shattered something vital in his spine—vertebrae crushed or severed, nerves destroyed beyond function.

Left arm?

Snapped clean at the elbow. Bone jutted awkwardly beneath torn silk, a shard of white pressing against fabric, pressing into the soft rot beneath him. The hand dangled at an unnatural angle, fingers curled into a useless claw. Completely useless.

Right arm?

He flexed, sending the command down with desperate focus.

Pain screamed up his shoulder, white-hot and vicious—but the fingers curled. Barely. Trembling with the effort, muscles spasming, but responding. The thumb touched the index finger. Movement. Control.

One working limb.

He had one shot.

Since sitting up was impossible—his core muscles unresponsive, his spine fractured—he used what remained: his senses.

The smell hit first, overpowering even in his diminished state. Sulfur, thick and acrid, mingling with the copper tang of old blood and the sickly-sweet rot of bodies left too long in damp air.

It coated his tongue like oil, clung to the back of his throat, made him want to gag but he couldn't spare the energy. Beneath it all, something else—the mineral smell of deep earth, cold and ancient.

Sound next. Silence, mostly—oppressive, the kind of quiet that pressed on eardrums and made them ache. Broken only by the faint drip-drip-drip of something wet echoing off stone far above, each drop taking seconds to fall.

No wind. No birds. No rustle of leaves or distant voices. Just the hollow quiet of a grave, thick enough to suffocate.

He tilted his head back with agonizing slowness, ignoring the scrape of broken ribs shifting beneath skin, the sensation of bone ends grinding together.

The sky was a thin slit of sickly gray, barely visible between jagged cliffs that rose on either side like the walls of a tomb. Narrow. Distant. A thousand feet up, maybe more. He was at the very bottom of the gorge, in the deepest part of the wound where light barely reached.

Beneath him, uneven lumps pressed into his back—human ribcages, brittle and cracked, caving under his weight with soft crunches. A skull rolled against his shoulder blade, empty sockets somehow accusatory.

Cold steel kissed his left side, hard and unyielding. A broken sword, half-buried in the mass, its blade shattered three inches from the hilt.

A corpse dump.

He was lying among discarded failures. The unwanted. The betrayed. This was where cultivation's beautiful facade ended—where the jade palaces and flowing silk gave way to rot and bones.

Four minutes left.

His vision blurred at the edges, darkness creeping inward like ink spreading on wet paper, seeping from the corners toward the center.

If I bleed out here, at least I won't have to pay taxes in this life.

The thought almost made him smile, lips twitching in something that might have been amusement in another situation. His last thoughts, and they were about bureaucracy. Absurd. Perfect.

...

Then— The blue screen violently glitched.

It flickered back into existence without warning, materializing in his fading vision like a migraine aura.

Words stuttered, pixels fragmenting and reforming in jagged bursts that hurt to look at. Static hissed in his ears—or maybe his skull, vibrating his teeth, setting his molars on edge.

The light burned against his dimming vision, too bright, too sharp, like staring at a welder's torch.

The text was wrong. Corrupted. Letters bleeding into each other, reforming, shifting.

[Spiritual Root: NONE] [Heavenly Alignment: NULL] [Daoless Vessel Confirmed] [System Initializing…]