Li Yi is without thought. Just like in a dreamless sleep. Or maybe it’s actual death.
“Big Brother Si. BIG BROTHER SI!” Li Yi jolts to life as a strong tug on his sleeve pulls him forward.
Suddenly, Li Yi realised that a little girl who is of the same height as him is now staring at him angrily.
“Is playing with us so boring?! Just say so and we won’t!” Pouting angrily, the girl runs off to join a group of children playing nearby.
Without knowing what to do or say, Li Yi looks at his surroundings to find himself in a large garden. Behind himself stood a large mansion, which reminded Li Yi of those he had seen before in drawings of ancient Chinese mansions. To the left were children playing on a large grass patch with hoops and bean bags. And to the right was a large pond and a pavilion with some uncles and aunties talking over tea inside.
But in front of Li Yi was a clear view of the ocean. As the only thing that resembles a common view to Li Yi, he walked towards it thoughtlessly. Only when he got closer to the cliff edge did Li Yi notice a stone platform in front.
Li Yi squints his eyes in surprise as he realised that a modern table accompanied with chairs and tea set was on the platform before him. In addition to that, a strangely dressed man is seated on one of the chairs while swirling a cup of tea in his hand.
“Who are you?” Li Yi asked blankly.
The man who was looking at the ocean turns to face Li Yi. An equally strange mask covers his face, but a glint of light from the eye sockets makes Li Yi shiver in fear.
“It is too soon.”
The moment the man ended his sentence, Li Yi’s head started aching horribly. The view in front of him distorts, and the headache is accompanied with flashes of countless pictures. With the pain from the headache, Li Yi lost all sense of time while being mentally bombarded with what he feels to be memories.
“AAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRGGGGGGGHHHHHHHH…... !!!”
The painful headache stops abruptly. With his eyes wide open, Li Yi looks straightforward to see a shocked girl drop her dagger.
“BLOODY HELL. WHAT IS WITH ALL THE NOISE BACK THERE!” comes an angry shout as the girl scrambles to her feet to apologise and announce that the dumb kid just woke up.
“Am I the dumb kid?” wondered Li Yi as the girl now turns around to glare at him.
In one swift motion, she bends forward to pick up her dagger and charges at Li Yi. In the blink of an eye, she is now right front of Li Yi with the dagger stabbed at the wooden board next to his head.
“Listen, you little curse doll. Don’t cause me trouble the moment you wake up. In fact, don’t ever cause me any trouble or this dagger will go through your head the next time even if you are worth...”
She pauses for a bit and looks like she wants to say something else. Before she does, a questioning look appears on her face as she leans forward a little more.
“Hey. are you even listening?” the girl asks with a surprisingly concerned look.
“So my name is Wu Si.” says Li Yi with an understanding expression on his face.
“Huh? Why do I care about your name? Do you even know the situation you are in now, kid?” the girl says in an annoyed tone.
The blank look that was on Li Yi’s face the entire time now changed to a surprised one.
“What kid? Aren’t you the kid with that board?” answers Li Yi.
A look of confusion first appeared on the girl’s face, followed by extreme anger as she pulls the dagger out and plunges it at Li Yi’s throat.
Just when Li Yi realises his mistake in angering the girl, he noticed that she was moving rather slowly. Furthermore, Li Yi felt his body itching to guard itself as if it was very used to things like this. Letting nature take its course, Li Yi let his body move based on its instincts.
“Huh?” was all the girl could say again when she found herself with one arm up in the air. The dagger clanks down harmlessly on the wooden flooring behind.
Li Yi too, was surprised by this, and didn’t know how to react till a tight slap struck him across the face. The girl who slapped him turns around quickly, picking up her dagger before jumping out of the wooden cart.
Only at this point did Li Yi recall his body’s motion. He had used one arm to push her arms upwards before using the other to knock the dagger out of her hands. In the process, he also stood up, doing the same to the girl as he had grabbed onto her wrist. By the time he was done, the two were physically very close to each other…
However, this was not important to Li Yi right now. The headache he had just now, and the odd experience which he now came to understand was a dream, gave him the memories of the previous owner of this body!
This person that Li Yi now is was called Wu Si. He is now twelve years old, but has an unbelievably complicated family background. To be exact, Wu Si was a very successful young master but hated by the gods at the same time!
From birth, his parents discovered that Wu Si had a devious birthright in his body. Wu Si would passively take the luck of things around him and turn it into his own. While this was good for Wu Si, it meant that nothing around him was safe from having their luck drained. Anyone with such a body was known as a cursed child and would normally be killed for the better good.
But Wu Si was born into a very powerful family. In order to keep this a secret, his father killed the family’s divine priest who watched over his birth and discovered his ability. That truth was then covered up as an accident and a new divine priest was hired, except this one was specifically weak in order not to reveal Wu Si’s secret.
As such, Wu Si managed to live and was personally trained by his parents in the various disciplines of the world. However, even his parents could only guide him for so long before his curse played its part on them. When Wu Si was eight years old, the Emperor summoned his parents to join an expedition to look for some long lost relic in the desolate lands of the empire.
This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
They had no choice but to go...and never returned. In their place, some relatives invited Wu Si to stay with them. Discovering how talented Wu Si was, they happily looked after him and even got him to train their own children.
Needless to say, misfortune soon befell them. Their children either fell sick or met with a horrible accident, crippling them for years or even life. Even the adult had some misfortune befall them, although not as bad as the children.
When this happened at first, Wu Si would just be invited to stay at another relative’s place. But as time when by, this trend of misfortune became prevalent enough for his relatives to treat him as a jinx.
He was eleven years old by then, and had long noticed this himself. Not wanting to impose on anyone else, Wu Si moved back to his family home. Upon returning, Wu Si continued training himself while looking through the records in his study room.
Wu Si was young, but he was no fool. After seeing so many books about sealing birthrights and luck draining, Wu Si figured out that he had to be a cursed child. At the same time, Wu Si was still a child. The thought that he had killed his own parents, crippled his cousins, and will continue to bring misfortune to all around him devastated him.
He fired the family attendants, and went into the first secluded training of his life. As he trained, he wondered why he was cursed from birth, why the gods had oyed with him by giving him a golden spoon from birth, only take everything else from him. Was he meant to be alone?
Unfortunately for Wu Si, the Wu family’s cultivation techniques was largely based on humanly bonds like trust and strength through numbers. Wu Si’s thoughts not only deviated from that, it went against everything he had learned from young.
As a result, Wu SI deviated and went down the devil’s path while training. Going on a violent rampage, Wu Si destroyed his house, and wrecked havoc out on the streets before making his way out of the city in a berserk rage. By the time he woke up, his body was in badly wounded and was somewhere in the middle of the forest.
Wu Si wasn’t sure why no one stopped him, but he wasn’t too keen on going back to find out why. Like a frightful child who just made a seemingly unforgivable mistake, Wu Si ran till his reached a small village.
The first to spot him were an elderly couple, who were shocked to see such a horribly injured child. Thinking that he escaped from bandits, they kindly took him in and care for him till he recovered. Knowing that he was cursed, Wu Si tried repeatedly to leave but was restrained each time by the sad look on the elderly couple’s face.
Eventually, Wu Si settled in and helped them whenever he could, planning to leave quietly one day when he accumulated some traveling funds. But the village was too small. Wu Si had no way to earn much and had almost nothing extra to keep after contributing his earnings to the elderly couple.
One day, a soldier on horseback rode into the village, announcing that an examiner would soon come by the village and all children were to report to him to be examined for talent. Wu Si had a bad feeling about this, but when the elderly couple encouraged him to, he decided to go even if he was discovered.
Obviously, the examiner had to be a divine priest of some standing to be an examiner for talent. Although he could not tell immediately, he noticed that Wu Si was abnormal, and called him out to perform extra tests. When he conducted the spirit signalling ritual, countless evil spirits showed up and darken the skies.
Everyone was horrified and frightened. If not for the fact a master warrior was guarding the examiner, the testing grounds would have been cursed. After forcefully destroying the spirit altar, the divine priest used various curses to weaken Wu Si and got the master warrior to maim him by severing his tendons and destroying his cultivation base.
With no other talent discovered in the village, the examiner’s party did not stay any longer and Wu Si’s fate was left to the villagers. The divine priest did not say much about what was exactly wrong with Wu Si, but the villagers were frightened enough from what they saw to know that Wu Si was bad luck and probably an evil spirit that they needed to chase away.
At the same time, they didn’t want to kill him within the village or even go close to him for that matter. After some discussion, the village chief ordered the two useless oafs in the village to carry the injured Wu Si to the nearby valley and toss him away.
With the two oafs being useless as they were, Wu Si was instead left to die a few days ago in the nearby ruins. This led to the incident a while back, where a bunch of children playing in the ruins found Wu Si, and attacked him for the “evils” he had committed back in the village based on what their parents had told them.
These “evils” was of course everything bad that has happened to them. Be it the village being poor all the time to the children in the village not being recognised as talented by the examiner, and many other trivial matters that occurred even before Wu Si arrived at the village.
Wu Si didn’t know this, and was actually finally on the verge of death as he cursed his fate for the last time. When he actually died, Li Yi took over his body and through some otherworldly means, recovered it to the point before Wu Si was maimed.
There are so many other things about Wu Si that Li Yi now knew about and wanted to time to carefully consider, but now was not the time.
“Yan-er, I thought you said that one little village boy could never cause you any trouble. Not to mention a cursed...”
The girl from before has returned with a burly man. The man looks at Li Yi briefly before nodding in an approving manner. The girl refuses to look Li Yi, but instead throws a some rags that looks like crude clothes over to Li Yi.
“He is well built for a twelve year old. And should make for a convincing tool in the next job. I admit you have good taste, Yan-er, but that is just still too small.” says the burly man in a teasing manner.
The girl’s fist smashes the side of the wooden cart, punching a hole in it. The burly man laughs heartily, and walks back in the direction he came from.
“If you are not dressed and off this cart in the next ten breaths, I will waste you like you should have been.” says the girl called Yan-er in a deathly cold voice.
Li Yi looks down for the first time, and finally understood that he had been naked and covered by nothing more than a sack till he stood up earlier.