There was no light this deep into the cave, and yet the hand-shaped impression on the stone wall was clearly perceivable without having to use any qi over the eyes. Zeng Fei had come across it some minutes before, and a few seconds later, he was dead.

The original Zeng Fei’s, that was.

The Zeng Fei staring at the imprint now was an Earthling who’d awoken to find that his soul had transmigrated into this xianxia world without ever consulting him about the move.

But at least he had access to the original's memories, which revealed Zeng Fei to have been an orphan who’d been inducted into the Treading Infinity Sect four years ago despite having trash-like talent (the sect recruiter had been one short of meeting his quota and had really needed the bonus that year to pay off his debts).

This effectively translated into Zeng Fei being someone with no status, no resources, and no real connections either seeing as he’d spent almost all of his time at the sect cultivating in his room, even then only reaching the fifth layer of Qi Refining.

These memories also informed Zeng Fei that the original had believed the palm imprint to be the remnant of a high-rank cultivator’s technique, and it was in desperate hope of comprehending some of its profound power that the original had placed his hand over the imprint.

Within seconds he had died, having only obtained the insight that the stone wall was unpleasantly cold to touch.

In contrast, the transmigrator had straight-away viewed the imprint in an entirely different light: the hand-shaped depression reminded him of those sci-fi movies where high-security rooms had scanners outside that checked people’s fingerprints and irises before letting them in.

The fact that the original had died not-so-subtly implied that he was not on the entry list and should probably bugger off.

So he’d done exactly that, making his way out of the cave…

…and as a result walking face-first into an invisible barrier at the mouth of the cave.

No matter what he’d tried over the subsequent minutes, this barrier had refused to budge; the walls too had resisted his attempts at tunnelling his way out. There was no question of it: he was trapped.

As if that wasn’t bad enough, he quickly realised there were no food supplies or water in here either. Nor could he shout for help as the invisible barrier seemed to absorb all sound given he couldn’t hear a thing from outside.

Anyone else in this position would have crapped their pants by this point, but the original hadn’t worn any beneath his robes so Zeng Fei was safe from this.

His first course of action was to yell out the names of all the gods he could think of and beg for their forgiveness, just in case he had offended them somehow and this was their punishment. But nothing came about from this, so eventually he gave up.

And so, head aching from repeatedly kowtowing, he decided to finally use his brain to figure out a solution.

For one, he knew the original had sauntered into this cave, implying that the barrier had only activated after his entry. Could it be there was a condition he had to meet to be allowed out then?

But what…? The only interactable item inside this cave, the hand imprint, was a literal deathtrap.

Say, though, that it wasn’t actually a trap.

Given the xianxia setting, perhaps this cave was the inheritance room of an ancient cultivator, which was to say, A: the hand imprint itself was the test, likely one that scanned his innate talent, and B: he’d already been deemed unworthy and failed.

“…”

Zeng Fei glared at the imprint in silence, praying that this was not the case. Surely there had to be another interpretation?

Well, if the hand imprint wasn’t the test, then maybe the test was actually to see if he could figure out how to get out of here, ie the cave was an escape room. If so, the hand imprint could very well be a deliberate distraction to take his attention away from the true solution.

Meaning that there was probably also an entity watching and grading him right now, akin to the employees at escape rooms, only in his case it was the cultivator equivalent of Jigsaw who was gleefully slurping up the sight of him gradually breaking down.

Well, no more, as he’d figured it out.

Chuckling triumphantly for them to hear, Zeng Fei applied qi to his eyes and began stalking the cave floors and groping its walls in search of a secret mechanism.

In the time it took to eat a meal, he had covered the entire cave and found… nothing! The cave had been swept clean, with not even the odd pebble or patch of moss growth to be found.

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By this point, all Zeng Fei felt was the depression of defeat and the discomfiting sensation of a full bladder; at least one of those was manageable.

He was about to go relieve himself in the corner of the cave, away from the eyes of the creep, when an eureka idea occurred to him.

In sci-fi films, tech not working or suddenly malfunctioning was a problem that cropped up frequently. Solutions to this ranged from (ordered by most common to most out-there) turning the device off and on again, giving it a smack across the back, and pissing on it.

Okay, maybe he’d made up the last one, but hey, at least it’d clear some of his frustration with this bullshit escape room.

And so, without further ado, he walked up to the hand imprint and opened up his robes.

Revealing his gun to the clammy air, he felt he finally had something to threaten cultivator-Jigsaw with.

Accordingly, he adopted the tone of an arrogant young master: “I have shown you mercy so far, but if you keep pushing me…”

There was no response.

“Don’t think I’ll remain polite if you still refuse to reveal yourself…”

Still no response.

This was when an intrusive thought wriggled into Zeng Fei’s head and caused him to glance down: could it be cultivator-Jigsaw wasn’t scared because they were looking down on his tool…?

A surge of anger rushed to his head; although it wasn’t the transmigrator’s true tool, still, how dare they disrespect Zeng Fei’s totally functional and perfectly sized tool?

“You! It’s only like this because of the cold air! Don’t underestimate me!”

Fuelled by fury, his fire hose released with violent pressure onto hand imprint, causing a great deal of splashing.

Zeng Fei even had to take a step back to clear himself from the blast radius, shaking his head at the sight. “Sometimes I don’t know my own strength.”

When finally he’d finished emptying his bladder, he tied the belt back up his robes and wagged a finger in the air. “And if you think that’s all I can do, keep testing my patience and I’ll let you discover firsthand the true extent of my powers.”

As the last of his words sounded, an arched doorway - visible in the dark in the same way the hand imprint was - burst open next to the hand imprint, startling Zeng Fei. He scampered back in surprise and coughed into the sleeves of his robes at the flare-up of dust.

In truth, he hadn’t believed his own wild theories and had just been saying that stuff to relieve his frustration, to get the sense he was getting back at someone; so naturally, he was floored to find out that his crackpot theory was correct.

Maybe it was the threats that had done the trick, or perhaps the imprint really had malfunctioned after getting doused from his out-of-the-box thinking. Either way, he couldn’t help but grin from ear to ear at the knowledge he’d solved the impossible escape room!

Little did he know that his conjectures had been initially correct, then turned wrong, then become so violently wrong that they’d looped back around and become correct again.

Indeed, the original Zeng Fei had stumbled into an ancient Immortal’s inheritance room and awakened the spirit bound there that was in charge of assessing candidates’ worthiness of becoming the Immortal’s successor.

As guessed, the hand imprint had been testing him, though not his talent or cultivation but rather his character. The spirit had gained full access to Zeng Fei’s memories the moment he’d touched the imprint, and it had found his character wanting.

Orphaned early on in his life, Zeng Fei had been forced to turn to begging on the streets to survive. The daily hardships that followed had tempered his willpower, but also made him timid and distrustful of people.

His lucky break would come several years later when a sect recruiter noticed by chance that Zeng Fei possessed spiritual roots, even if they were inferior roots of the five elements - the slowest type to cultivate with and widely considered to be trash.

Still, Zeng Fei had managed to scrape through the entrance test and become an official Outer Sect Disciple of the Treading Infinity Sect, even if his talent constrained him to Foundation Establishment at best.

The fact he’d reached the fifth layer of Qi Refining in four years in spite of this was genuinely impressive, though less so when you realised his cultivation had been fuelled by a desperate and unfounded fear of being thrown back into his old life, and not out of a conviction to move forwards.

These were excusable flaws for a boy of sixteen and understandable given his life circumstances, but they also made him unworthy of becoming the Heavenly Demon Emperor’s successor, which was a role that required the resolve to face up to the entire universe by yourself.

The spirit had snuffed Zeng Fei’s life then - to prevent any risk of news about the Emperor’s inheritance leaking before a successor was chosen - while feeling envious that this boy could pass on so easily.

Except that he hadn’t…

The boy’s memories had shown zero awareness of reincarnation arts, nor had he hosted any additional souls or created any second bodies, so it had made no sense for him to get up shortly after his death the way that he had.

This was made all the more suspicious by the fact the revived Zeng Fei had gone on to display behaviour and habits distinct to the beggar boy from before.

(One may even go as far as to describe it as wild, audacious behaviour unbefitting of an Emperor, but bloody hell the spirit just wanted to die already, and to that end it was willing to show some leniency to promising candidates.)

As the spirit had continued to observe over the following minutes, it’d grown increasingly confident that the revived Zeng Fei shared a crucial trait with the Heavenly Demon Emperor himself, one that few had ever known about but that had also contributed massively to his prowess.

The spirit would have liked to have observed for a bit longer to have gone from 90% to 100% certainty on this, but it’d been forced to make an early decision when Zeng Fei had urinated all over the hand imprint and followed up with the threat of revealing the true extent of his powers if it kept dilly-dallying.

Naturally, it wasn’t that clean-up was an issue, but rather the fact that the rules governing the spirit forced it to watch everything the candidates did. Yes, everything. It wasn’t allowed to look away for even one moment…

Hence, it’d gone with its gut feeling that Zeng Fei, just like the Heavenly Demon Emperor, was an otherworlder who’d transmigrated into a vacant body…