Unfortunate Transmig Chapter 2: A Cosmic Joke

Chapter 2: A Cosmic Joke

2

A Cosmic Joke

I

Hao Zhen awoke with a groan. He scowled. His whole body hurt, and he didnt rember his bed being this hardor this prickly. Prickly. Like grass. He blinked, and his gaze focused. Branches and leaves hung above him. A canopy. He was under a tree?

He shakily stood up. His body protestedfor so reason he felt exhaustedbut he wasnt about to sleep in this unfamiliar place. He was in a forest, he quickly ascertained. A mont later it ca to himthe mission. Right. He had left the sect on a mission.

While thinking, he kept looking around, and as he did, he caught sight of sothing blue. He blinked. Not sothingsoone.

A body wearing blue robes. Tian Jins robesTian Jins body.

Hao Zhens drowsiness fled him as if scared away. Yesterdays events, which had been trying to recall, rushed through his mind. Finding Tian Jin and Ke Li, being suddenly assailed by ungodly pain, being sent flying by Tian Jins punch, and finally feeling an all-consuming pain that rendered him unconscious

He hurried over to Tian Jins body and checked on his condition. The taller boy was alivehis chest slowly rising and falling, his skin fair instead of the deathly pale it had been yesterday. If anything, Tian Jin looked like he was in a painting, with his long black hair loosely spread out beneath him and his face set in a peaceful, relaxed expression.

Hao Zhen slowly breathed out, thoughts churning in his head. He doubted Ke Li would have left without ensuring that Tian Jin was dead. This could only an that the inner disciple had failed. So what happened to him?

Hao Zhens gaze fell on a tree on the opposite side of the clearing. Held up against its bark was a corpse, the hilt of a sword sticking out of his chestthe rest of it no doubt buried into the bark of the tree. The corpses head was hanging down, so he couldnt see its face, but Hao Zhen recognized the white robes it wore.

That answered his question. Hao Zhen looked away; it wasnt a pretty sight to behold.

Tian Jin had, sohow, turned the tables on Ke Li and killed him. But how? Hao Zhen groaned. The mission had really gone south, hadnt it? In hindsight, he should have expected this. Tian Jins presence was already a major red flag. How that hadnt occurred to him, he had no

Hao Zhen blinked. Red flag? What did that even an?

A sign that sothing bad was about to happen.

Right. He nodded to himself. That was what it ant. So why No. Wait. How did he know what it ant? He didnt rember ever hearing that term before. And then he rembered: he hadnt heard it; he had co across it while browsing the

Internet.

He had found it on the internet. The internet. His eyes widened. He didnt know that termor did he?

His vision swam. He felt his thoughts slow to a crawl, and then

mories. mories flooded into his head, tearing through his thoughts, piercing his mind like ice-cold needles, fighting for relevance. He stumbled backward and fell onto the ground, clutching his head, a storm of alien mories burrowing into him.

It ended as abruptly as it began. Hao Zhen gasped as the swirl of mories in his mind subsided. Closing his eyes, he took a mont to calm himself down, trying to understand what had just happened. Then, slowly, he felt his mind rearrange itself, adapting to the new mories, and as he reviewed them, he soon found the centerpiece that held them together.

Amyas Auclair.

A na. His na. Sohow.

Hao Zhen took in a deep breath and tried his best not to panic. These mories he had just received werent new, but oldthe oldest mories he had. Although they seed foreign at first, the deeper he looked, the more he absorbed, and the more he felt himself resonate with them.

Earth. Transmigration. Another world.

Those were the words at the forefront of his mind. They echoed throughout his thoughts, guiding him from mory to mory, from thought to thought. He just stood there, thinking, recalling, adapting. With every mory he assimilated, the faster he assimilated the remaining ones, and before long, he was taking in one mory after the other without stopping.

A while later, Hao Zhen opened his eyes. He was still in the forest, it was still morning, but nothing looked the sa. More questions than he could count plagued him. There was just too much he wantedtoo much he neededto know.

Transmigration. In his current life, as Hao Zhen, he had never heard the word, but he was familiar with reincarnation, which could be considered a type of transmigration. Children were taught about the Cycle of Reincarnation, a process that all souls underwent after the death of the body. And as far as Hao Zhen could tell, these new mories inside his head belonged to his previous incarnation. He couldnt think of a way to confirm it, but they at least felt like they were his. If that was indeed the case, then sothing had happened, and he had sohow managed to recover the mories of his previous incarnation. He couldnt tell what had caused it, but that wasnt his main concern at the mont.

He reviewed what he rembered about his previous incarnation. Amyas Auclair. That was his naor at least it used to be. He could rember almost everything about his old lifehis family, his friends, his sisterbut only until a certain day. He had been at ho, cooking dinner in the kitchen And then his life as Hao Zhen began: his mother dying, his father remarrying, only to also die a few years down the line, the abuse from his stepmother and stepbrother, running away from ho, and finally joining the Blazing Light Sect.

Hao Zhen couldnt rember how, exactly, he had wound up in this world. Did he die and sohow reincarnate? Was there a way to go back to Earth? He paused. Did he even want to go back? And who was he? Monts ago this would have been a stupid question, but as the mories of what he believed to be his previous incarnation burrowed into him and took root, he couldnt help but ask himself Was he Amyas Auclair, or was he Hao Zhen?

That thought gave him a pause. Was he even still sixteen years old? As Amyas, he had also lived to sixteen, so he now technically had thirty-two years worth of mories in his head. He didnt feel any older, so he reckoned that his ntal age hadnt changed, but it still felt strange.

Hao Zhen groaned. Great. Just what he neededan identity crisis. Yet another thing he would have to worry about later.

He set his previous life and his transmigration aside for the mont. After receiving these new mories, Hao Zhen was forced to reevaluate the world he had grown up in and spent the last sixteen years in.

Absurd. That was the only word he could use to describe it. There wasnt any other way to think of itnot after rembering his previous life, knowing what he now knew. He found himself questioning many of the things he had taken for granted all his life. The world itself, the people, the powers they had Particularly the people. Including him. Particularly him.

Everything else aside, he should have turned around and left the mont he learned that Tian Jin was his teammate. Everyone knew that Tian Jin had powerful enemies, and that trouble seed to find him wherever he went. He couldnt understand how soone as careful as him had missed all of that.

Then there was what happened last night. In hindsight, he realized how stupid he had been. He had pretty much just stood there as if he were a sitting duck, waiting for Ke Li to make his move, even though Ke Li had been visibly straining to keep Tian Jin under control. Sure, that could have been an act, but it was still better than nothing. The situation had been obvious from the start. He should have at least tried sothingto run away, to attack first, to help Tian Jin. He should have acted instead of just reacting when it was too late. That made him think a little further back, and he felt a sinking feeling in his stomach, realizing that this wasnt simply a case of hindsight being twenty-twenty.

He was a cautiousoverly cautious, according to many people he knewperson. So how co he just rushed over without thinking twice when he saw the red cloud from Tian Jins spiritual flare? How co he just threw caution to the wind?

Now that he thought about it, he should have realized that sothing wasnt quite right about Ke Lis friendliness. Hao Zhen frowned, realizing that he had found Ke Lis behavior odd. He rembered thinking about how Ke Lis behavior was so unlike the kind of behavior usually expected from inner disciples. The problem was that he had then simply waved it off as Ke Li being an exception. Instead of being suspicious, he had just taken Ke Lis highly irregular behavior for granted.

Hao Zhen had been acting completely out of characterinconsistently, incongruously.

That thought opened the floodgates of his mind. He recalled bizarre events one after the othersituations in which people, now that he was looking back, had just acted completely illogically and inconsistently. It was as if a fog that had clouded his mind all his life had just cleared up, and for the first ti, he was actually seeing the world for what it was.

Just as alarming was that the world he now lived in closely resembled that of a certain genre of novels he used to read back when he was Amyas.

Hao Zhen, as well as all the other mbers of the Blazing Light Sect, was a spiritual cultivator: soone who practiced spiritual cultivation, which was the act of cultivating the soul through magical ans. More specifically, Hao Zhen was a redsoula cultivator at the first realm of cultivation, the Red Spiritual Realm, red being the color of spiritual energy of the lowest grade.

Cultivation was divided into six realms, and whenever a cultivator advanced to the next realm, the color of their soul would change as it turned into spiritual matter of a higher grade. Each realm was further divided into eleven levels.

What cultivators cultivated was their crux: a fist-sized orb of concentrated spiritual energy that could only be found inside the soul of magical beings, spiritual energy being a magical substance that was usually physically intangible, visible only through the use of Spiritual Sight. Cultivation essentially boiled down to absorbing magical energy into the crux, increasing its density, and whenever the crux reached a certain level of spiritual density, the cultivator would advance to the next level.

The spiritual energy comprising a cultivators crux emanated spiritual power, and it was precisely this spiritual power that cultivators used to perform spiritual techniques, power magical artifacts, and do all sorts of other magical things.

Cultivation, spiritual energy, magical powers, and sectsall of these elents were common both to the world he had been born in as Hao Zhen and to cultivation novels. Although there were a few differences, mostly with regard to the terminology, this world was eerily similar to the setting of those novels. Even the Common Tongue, the only language spoken in this world as far as he knew, closely resembled the Chinese language from Earth, in which most cultivation novels were written.

Hao Zhen felt a shiver run down his spine No. He shook his head. No way. That was too much. The implications

Yet it was right in front of his eyes. He couldnt deny it. It fit perfectly. The world resembled the setting of cultivation novels, and the people resembled the characters. It was like so sort of cosmic joke.

The more he thought about it, the more similaritiesthe more proofhe found. He slowly exhaled. Did that an that he was inside a novel, then? Had he transmigrated into a fictional world?

No. He shook his head. That wasnt necessarily the case. This world had magic and monsters. People could grow almost infinitely stronger through cultivation. Clearly, this world followed different rules, and these rules affected how people behaved. That it resembled cultivation novels so much could very likely be a simple coincidence. Werent there theories about parallel universes back in his old world?

Parallel universes. Alternate realities. That could explain everything. It was an easier pill to swallow than being inside a novel. He had simply sohow wound up in a different universeone that operated based on different rules. Yes. Hao Zhen nodded to himself. That was it. By rembering his previous life, he must have sohow broken those rulesor at least beco an exception to them.

ntal crisis averted, Hao Zhen turned around. He could think about the rest later. He had to wake up Tian Jin and figure out what to do. His eyes fell on Tian Jin, and just as he was about to walk over to the unconscious boy, he froze in place.

Tian Jin. Tian Jin. He had entered the sect two months ago, getting first place in the entrance examination. Nobody knew his background or where he was from. He was devilishly handso, suprely talented, and had caught the eye of several elders. On top of the had, he had sohow managed to get on the bad side of a pri disciplean existence that an outer disciple would usually never have any contact withwho had then sched to have Tian Jin killed. Sohow, however, Tian Jin had managed to triumph over an inner disciple, who was stronger by at least an entire level, despite having been in a seemingly hopeless situation.

Hao Zhen faltered. He missed his next step and almost fell to the ground.

No way. No. Nope. Nah. Uh-uh.

Then and there, Hao Zhen ca dangerously close to having a ntal breakdown.