“To think, this is how I would die… Surrounded by all my friends and family. Heh. I only wish that it wasn’t in such circumstances.” Lee Gu laughed a bit.

“Well it was taking you too long to go, I’d like my inheritance early, Grandfather.” His grandson mocked him.

“You have many valuable resources, I need them to break through, Gu…” His friend Feng Hei, now old and decrepit looking compared to him, responded, tears in his eyes.

“While I love you… I do love money so much more.” His lover laughed, pulling a necklace up to look at.

“Damn. For greed? I could have just given you all these things. You never asked…” Lee Gu felt his blood seeping out of the wounds he had taken when the trio had attacked him initially.

He had been stabbed in a few spots but only one was actually dangerous, of course that was the one with poison on it as well. It had landed in his chest, not hitting an organ through a heavenly miracle, but the poison was too strong for Lee Gu to do anything about without outside help, which he had doubts that these three would let him retrieve any antidote.

By the time he had fully assessed his situation, he was already kneeling. His breathing grew ever more rough.Slowly his eyes began to fail him, then his organs, first the liver, then the kidneys, and intestines, finally his lungs, and slowly, ever. so. Slowly… His heart… and last but not least his brain.

Lee Gu, Age 579, Manifest stage 9. Killed by his family and friends out of material greed.

_______________________________________________________________

Lee Gu opened his eyes, and immediately felt himself around, or at least tried to.

He could feel his arms, once mighty enough to lift up half a mountain each, now were too weak to even be properly controlled. He found his legs in the same situation and attempted to let out a frustrated grunt, but all that occurred was a squeak.

The man let out a sigh, and tried to take stock in his head after a moment to calm himself. He moved his arms again, this time looking at them to see what they did, rather than trying to do something in particular, that was when he noticed the second peculiarity about his body. Those hands of his were small and uncalloused. He was no fool, He knew what had happened to him.

Lee Gu… Was reincarnated.

___________________________________________________________________

Lee Gu found himself in a strange place. He had found himself in the care of a multitude of different people, at first the cultivator had thought that he had wound up in a sect training course, where even babies were not spared.

This was proven unlikely as he was treated well and not a single person had a weapon, nor the callouses to show extensive usage of a weapon.

Then he thought perhaps he was reborn as a noble. Possible, given the multiple people almost all of whom wore the same clothes.

He wasn’t really sure, but he had noticed that this place was very peculiar in the way that everyone who interacted with him wore gloves.

This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

Was he diseased? How bad was it? It must be something that could be spread through touch if not a single person touched him without gloves!

Of course, once he saw the other babies littering the room (all in cribs organized properly), he dismissed that. After all, surely if it was that easy to transmit he’d be separated from the rest.

Though he was still confused, Lee Gu decided to simply wait, and while waiting, he decided to try his cultivation technique.

It had occurred to him that it was possible that his technique would no longer work depending on whether this world had the same laws as his old world did when it came to the laws of reality, or as the really old folks used to call it, Dao.

Invoking his cultivation technique, he found that, yes, in fact, it did work. So he spent some time cultivating his first strand of Qi, it would get easier once he had accumulated at least a bit, but for now it took Lee Gu around what felt like 3 hours for his first strand. Once he had obtained this first strand, he then felt around his Qi Paths to figure out how much purifying he would need to do to pass the first step of his cultivation technique, which was to soak and saturate yourself with Qi.

Lee Gu looked internally at himself and found only disappointment, he had only one Qi path that functioned at all, and even that only barely worked, everything else was horribly clogged, it would take him at least a decade of work to get his Qi paths to the point he had them cleaned in his previous life, and even that was relatively subpar compared to the really strong people.

No, he would make his Qi Paths perfect this time. It would only benefit him if he cleaned them all to perfection before ascending into the first step of the Immortal Path. Once he took that first step, he would no longer be able to clean his Qi Paths.

He then reached outwards, into the world around him using the thin strand of Qi he had obtained, and found out why it had taken so long. It was like he was in a desert. Qi was one of the main byproducts of living creatures, and yet he could only feel Qi from other humans, impure and filthy. There was not a single strand from a plant, or rather they were extremely rare in comparison to the rest. He could only vaguely feel the pure Qi, as his Spiritual Sense was still too small to reach anywhere actually far away, only within a few feet of him.

Lee Gu went back to cultivating, as he had begun to realize that not a lot of interesting things would be happening for a while, aside from being able to look around the room and marvel at the strange design of it all that is.

A long time went by, probably around a week to a week and a half by Lee Gus' estimation. By this point he had managed to clean up around a third of his Qi Paths into a usable state, not anywhere close to good, but usable at least. Lee Gu was cultivating at this time when he heard the door open and a woman with gloves picked him up, and took him out of the room.

Now this had happened a couple of times, only for him to be poked and prodded by a man or a woman who was apparently superior to the ones who took him there. This time was different however.

This time he was handed to a young woman who was standing next to a man who was probably 3-4 years older than her, both of them were quite good looking, the woman had fair skin and blonde hair while the man had brown hair and what Lee Gu would describe as a farmers skin tone, a tan that could only come from working in the sun for long periods of time.

The blonde woman was smiling at him and muttering some sort of gibberish in a rather annoying tone. Lee Gu knew what she was doing as his wife had done the same when she had been around. Baby talk.

Lee Gu knew that the gibberish was probably the language that the people here spoke, but had yet to be exposed to it long enough to catch anything. He would hopefully be able to rectify that situation sooner rather than later.

The other thing he had taken note of were the lights and architecture of this place. The lights were no mere braziers or torches, but they also weren’t crystals of Qi or magical lights either. They were strange shaped glass that emitted light, and they could come in a few shapes as he had seen, some like tubes with bulbous ends, others as simply long, and bright, tubes, more yet that seemed to only be a circle on the ceiling.

Moreover it seemed like the strange luminance source was everywhere. Either this world was leagues ahead of his old world, or his family was extravagantly wealthy. Lee Gu was hoping for both.