Joseph stood over his own dead body, holding the blade that slew him. He looked at the cultivator robes he had just worn minutes before, now torn with the huge gash that had ended his life. He remembered buying the robes just days ago.
It was truly a bizarre situation. First; he had been transmigrated into the body of Chao Heng, a body cleansing cultivator of the Azure Skies Sect. Chao Heng had gotten into an altercation with another cultivator, Jing Bao. Jing Bao had crippled Chao Heng, who had then woken up as Joseph.
So far, everything followed the tropes that Joseph could remember from the cultivation novels he had read. Joseph, in the body of Chao Heng, had made the miraculous recovery from certain death, stunning everyone.
But where the normal plot would have culminated in him winning the rematch against his nemesis Jing Bao in an epic fight concluding book 1, Jing Bao had re-challenged him days after his recovery, before Joseph had any chance to find his footing in this new world.
Which lead to today’s duel, where Joseph, in the body of Chao Heng, had been killed. It hadn’t been a contest or fair fight at all - Joseph was a typical 21st century nerdy city kid who’d never experienced much violence in his life at all. Jing Bao had been a martial artist who had trained from the day he could walk.
But now Joseph was put in the body of Jing Bao.
How it all was supposed to make any kind of sense was unclear to Joseph. His plan had been to stay under the radar, evade anyone with special features, colored hair or any other protagonist or supporting cast-looking features, and cultivate in peace. While the whole deal with immortality sounded nice, you could only enjoy it if you stayed alive.
But now he was looking at his own dead body in a daze. The crowd of disciples was roaring around him, celebrating his victory, but he felt very small and disconnected at that moment.
He knew he needed to escape the situation with haste. Although transmigrating into Chao Hengs’ body had given him an influx of memories, allowing Joseph to smoothly pretend to be him, he’d gained no such advantage when his body had been switched again.
He bowed stiffly to the Juror whose name he’d already had forgotten and speed walked out of the arena. On the way, multiple people tried to stop him, but he ignored them, pushing shoulders and hands away.
When he first had arrived, he had researched if body-snatching and demonic cultivators were a thing. The last thing he had wanted was to be tried for practicing demonic techniques, so he had behaved like Chao Heng based on the memories he had been supplied with. He had quickly found out that his concerns were realistic. Demonic cultivators were very much an active part of the cultivation world.
Now that he had switched bodies again, the danger had only increased. If he didn’t know the names of Jing Bao’s closest friends, he stood little chance of successfully fooling anyone.
He finally arrived at Jing Bao’s residence, a tiny shack, the same as for all the other outer disciples. Joseph was lucky enough that he could even remember where Jing Bao had lived.
After he closed the door, his shoulders relaxed and he could breathe freely again.
“Hey, Jing Bao, why did you run away? I don’t really care to be fair, but now that this quarrel is finally done, can you concentrate on your cultivation? You promised me to go into seclusion if I teach you that sword technique to kill that bug.”
Joseph looked up. There, floating in front of him, was a head. No physical body, just a floating, see-through, green glowing decapitated head. He tried to touch the ghost, but his hand passed right through.
“What are you staring at, boy? Stunned by my handsome visage?”
He let out a breath. He knew this trope too. No wonder that he was slain that easily. It turned out that Jing Bao had main character energy and was haunted by a pocket grandpa. This would complicate things.
He had wondered why Jing Bao always seemed to talk to himself. Since all the cultivators seemed a little insane, he hadn’t really thought about it too deeply before.
“Boy, stop ignoring me. You are behaving really strangely right now.”
Joseph finally took a proper look at the ghost. It was an old man with a well-manicured beard and sharp eyes. Just based on his appearance, Joseph could see that this man fit the “old monster” trope.
“Apologies senior. Taking a life for the first time must have affected me more than I thought,” Joseph lied.
The old ghost’s eyes formed into slits. “You aren’t Jing Bao. Who are you? Jing Bao took another life before this. That’s how I got attached to this waste of space. He’d never run from his moment of success like some idiotic kid who hadn’t seen death before.”
Joseph straightened his shoulders. “Apologies again, senior. This one didn’t want to draw any unnecessary attention.”
“Stop speaking like you have no backbone, brat. I can see right through your act. Just tell me who you are!”
“My name is Chao Heng, senior.” Joseph bowed again. Politeness was never a bad strategy.
“By the heavens, can you stop lying! I can feel your spirit brat, there is no use hiding the truth. Youngsters shouldn’t trick the old.”
Joseph relaxed in defeat. He wasn’t the best at pretending to be someone else. If the floating head didn’t lie, he was forced to tell the truth, anyway. And Joseph was kind of exhausted after days of pretending to play some enraged meathead that got into a life or death conflict over a random girl that had paid no attention to either Chao Heng or Jing Bao.
Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.
“I’m Joseph. I don’t know what happened, but a few days ago, I woke up in Chao Heng’s body. I was previously from a world called Middle Earth. When Jing Bao killed Chao Heng, I seemed to have switched bodies again. It wasn’t intentional, I swear.”
“Jo-Shifu? Master Jo? You are ten thousand years too early to call yourself Master in front of me, brat. Also stop testing me. Even if you say you aren’t from here, you aren’t from that middle dirt place.”
“Apologies senior. I had to, just to be safe that you weren’t lying.”
The floating head snorted. “At least you aren’t a meat head like the last two guys.”
“Last two?”
“Yeah, I was originally attached to my great-great-great-great-grandson twice removed. When he got killed by Jing Bao, somehow I was attached to Jing Bao’s spirit instead. That guy was dumber than a brick. It’s a wonder he got accepted by this third rate sect at all.”
The explanation made sense to me. Somehow Jing Bao had stolen the cheat of the floating head’s grandson. And when he killed Chao Bao, the “cheat”, which was Joseph himself, got transferred to Jing Bao. The side effect being that Jing Bao somehow went missing in the process.
While the hypothesis that Joseph was a cheat was somewhat shaky, it made sense to him. After all, he had some knowledge about cultivation novels, and the world seemed to follow those rules. After all, he had died fighting over a jade beauty with someone that could be called a young master.
“Thank you for the explanation, senior. You said that you could see my spirit? Do you still see Jing Bao’s spirit somewhere?”
“When Jing Bao killed you, his spirit got ousted from the body. In this form, I can’t see the spiritual beyond the body of the host. Now brat, tell me what you want. I have knowledge of all the things you could ever want. Form a spirit pact with me, and it can be yours one day!”
Joseph thought for a moment. He knew that pocket grandpa ghosts couldn’t be trusted. They either wanted to take over your body, get you to build them a new body, or wanted revenge for some stupid conflict that happened millennia ago.
But he needed help. His previous strategy of staying low had let to his death and now he knew even less than before about the previous bodies’ owner. If he went out into the sect, they would quickly discover that he wasn’t the same person anymore. They’d think he took over the body by forceful means, marking him as a demonic cultivator. That would be game over.
He was interested in cultivation. Having read all kinds of stories in the genre, he wanted to have all the typical experiences. He had dreamed of slaying young masters because he dared; he wanted to see Mt. Tai (if it was a real place in this universe), marry a Jade Beauty (One would be enough, he didn’t understand why anyone would want more than one spouse, his girlfriend back at home had been trouble enough) and most of all, he wanted to know if the whole enlightenment and dao stuff was actually real. He hadn’t even gotten to experience Qi so far. After all, he was still in the body cleansing stage.
Previously, he’d been scared of taking any active steps, but that hadn’t worked. But with a personal teacher that knew ancient techniques not seen in thousands of years? His chances of achieving immortality had gone through the roof.
Still, he needed to find out what type of pocket grandpa the ghost was.
“Could you tell me who you were, senior? And what would that contract entail? What happens when I break the contract?”
“Brat, you are standing before the Grand Elder of the Falling Stars Sect, Grandmaster Alchemist of the Wastes, First Rank Slayer of the Second Demon War, Mo Li Bei.”
Those titles sounded impressive, but Joseph had neither heard of that Sect, the Wastes, and as far as I knew, Demons hadn’t been sighted for thousands of years.
“If you break the contract, your spirit will get shredded and you’ll die, so nothing too bad. And I merely want you to kill all descendants of my brother Mo Li Tai. Don’t worry, if you ascend to the core formation stage, I can show you how to identify them by spirit. There shouldn’t be more than a hundred thousand by now.”
Great. Just a small genocide, nothing more.
“Are there any alternatives? I could create a new body for you, for example? Then you could hunt them down yourself?”
“I don’t know of such a technique. And if I don’t know it, it doesn’t exist, brat.”
“Maybe someone invented it in the meantime?”
Mo Li Bei’s head laughed. It was an uncanny effect, since it floated up and down, like someone doing deep a deep belly laugh, but the body was missing.
“Brat, the older something is, the more powerful. All newer techniques are worse, useless derivatives of older ones. You’d need a soul transferal technique which works on other souls than yours, which would be one of the worst demonic techniques imaginable. Such a thing doesn’t exist. Even the demons in my time didn’t have such a thing. The idea is ridiculous. What do they teach the youngsters these days?”
Joseph was pretty sure such a technique existed. It was a staple of cultivation stories, after all.
“Can we add it to the contract as a stipulation? If you have a body, I want to be free from your vengeance.”
His bet was that he could find such a technique before he was forced to slaughter thousands of people. Even then, typically spirit contracts were breakable under certain conditions, as far as he knew.
“You can add your useless condition if you want. But in exchange, no slacking. Both of my last contractors were useless wastrels. You seem like a decent brat, but it isn’t like I can choose.” Mo Li Bai spat onto the floor. The spit was glowing with the same ethereal green and vanished before hitting the ground.
“Also, I don’t want to be forced to kill them on sight. If they still have some old masters supporting them in hiding, I need to prepare your revenge carefully, or I’ll die early.”
“Seems fine, hurry up. Here’s the spirit contract. It’s backed by the heavens, so you can’t break it easily.”
The ghost head retched, before he spit out a wad of paper that quickly unfolded. It had the same ethereal green glow as the head. Joseph tried to grab it, but his hand just moved through. He was forced to lean in slightly to read the tiny script. It was written in the local language, which he could read thanks to Chao Heng’s memories.
“If you don’t agree, you’ll be stuck with me anyway. I’ll haunt you day and night until you accept. It isn’t like I can speak with anyone else...”
Joseph ignored the head and read the contract. Growing up on earth, he knew that you needed to read all contracts you signed. Except general terms and conditions. No one reads nearly sixteen pages of legalese just to create an account to thank authors for the new chapter.
It was plain language and seemed to contain everything they had spoken about. And it was even less than a page. Joseph smiled. This would do nicely.
“How do I sign?”
“Just drop some blood on it.”
He looked around himself before finding a small kitchen knife. He cut his finger and spilled a drop of blood onto the contract.
The contract lit up before two chains started to appear from the paper. One of them headed for Joseph’s neck, sneaking around it like a snake trying to choke him. It didn’t hurt and the chain just vanished into him.
The other one hit the ghostly head right into the forehead before entering into it. When both chains were secured at their targets, the middle left from the contract and created a direct connection between the two.
“Okay, brat. Now let’s quickly get you through the realms so you can start killing.”
The floating head smiled ominously.
Joseph sighted.
“Well, there are a few issues we have to address first. First, I am currently stuck in a body I don’t know anything about, so as soon as I step out of this shack and speak with someone who knew Jing Bao, they’ll accuse me of demonic cultivation. Secondly, since my spirit is from a world without Qi, it seems like I lack any kinds of meridians, so I’m a mortal cripple. And third, you forgot to add that your body has to be physical. Since a floating spiritual head is technically a form of spiritual body, I already fulfilled my side of the contract.”
Mo Li Bei’s grin dropped.