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 remember 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 some reason he felt exhaustedbut he wasnt about to sleep in this unfamiliar place. He was in a forest, he quickly ascertained. A moment later it came to himthe mission. Right. He had left the sect on a mission.The source of this content nov(el)bi((n))

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

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 mean 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, somehow, 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 mean?

A sign that something bad was about to happen.

Right. He nodded to himself. That was what it meant. So why No. Wait. How did he know what it meant? He didnt remember ever hearing that term before. And then he remembered: he hadnt heard it; he had come 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?

Now that he thought about it, he should have realized that something wasnt quite right about Ke Lis friendliness. Hao Zhen frowned, realizing that he had found Ke Lis behavior odd. He remembered 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 time, 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 members of the Blazing Light Sect, was a spiritual cultivator: someone who practiced spiritual cultivation, which was the act of cultivating the soul through magical means. 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 elements 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 some sort of cosmic joke.

The more he thought about it, the more similaritiesthe more proofhe found. He slowly exhaled. Did that mean 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 somehow wound up in a different universeone that operated based on different rules. Yes. Hao Zhen nodded to himself. That was it. By remembering his previous life, he must have somehow broken those rulesor at least become an exception to them.

Mental 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 handsome, supremely talented, and had caught the eye of several elders. On top of the had, he had somehow managed to get on the bad side of a prime disciplean existence that an outer disciple would usually never have any contact withwho had then schemed to have Tian Jin killed. Somehow, 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 came dangerously close to having a mental breakdown.