Confusion and disbelief washed over me in a suffocating wave. I stood up, surprising myself at how much effort it took to do so. Everything, from the simplest movement of my hands and fingers, felt burdensome. I dug into so much of my reservoir of strength with each movement that I was scared I would launch my desk away from me.
I tried to take a step, but instead fell on my face, my glasses clattering on the ground. Panic overcame me as I reached for them to see if the lenses had broken. To my relief, they hadn’t.
“What the hell is going on with you, Tianming?” I looked up, and sitting on top of his desk was Zhang Wenhao, the Golden Hero, whose chest had once been dug through by a fist. He had black hair now, and all that betrayed his future destiny was his powerful build. Next to him stood Brass Fist Xu Leifeng, whose neck had been broken by a simple squeeze, and Spear Aficionado Wang Qiang, who had been decapitated most brutally.
I reached for Samadhi in panic, forcing my breathing to stabilise so that my mind could reach a state of maximum consciousness.
A foot stepped on my back, but I ignored it. I had experienced worse things trying to shake my meditative focus. Still, it was strange how long it was taking for that otherworldly state to encompass me.
Then I got kicked.
My Samadhi never came, but I had managed to calm myself down at least, enough to get up and defend myself. Leifeng, the short and stocky football athlete, laughed at me. He had been the one to kick me, no doubt. He always was the more physical of the three. He had to be. Wenhao always made sure to never get in any physical altercations as his status as a martial artist and national athlete hinged on his good behavior.
I put them out of my mind and considered what was really important. I was back on earth, in my final year of high school.
And as I looked around my chemistry classroom, I recognized every face as the people that had transmigrated with me to the Central Plains.
I looked at the doorway and saw it as my saviour.
This was my chance. I could turn my back against my mission now without any guilt, see my mother and father again for the first time in over a decade, and continue living a normal life.
The others would fumble their way to power in the Central Plains to the detriment of every martial artist and inhabitant there, whose hopes had been entirely misplaced from the get-go.
I needn’t involve myself at all.
And I would be a coward for it.
Leifeng’s leer was malicious, and he prattled to his friends about something or other that I couldn’t quite find myself paying attention to, or even caring about at all. After all…
These were just children, weren’t they?
I frowned. Why had I let children make my life so miserable back in the normal world?
I shook my head at that. It was obvious why. I had been a child myself. I could change things for myself just as easily now.
Why stop there?
I could change things for everyone.
Save the Central Plains from the Heavenly Demon, and from the selfishness of my classmates.
I took a breath, shedding my misgivings and doubts. I didn’t have any inner energy or any connections to Laws or Divinities that would allow me to enter a true Samadhi, but that wasn’t necessary in the face of what I did have: the mind of a thirty-three year old that had lived his entire life as an ascetic and laborer, as a common man and martial artist, a peasant and a warrior.
I was too old for this shit.
“You’re eighteen years old,” I said to Leifeng. He stopped prattling to make a questioning sound at me, which I ignored. “When are you going to grow up? The real world isn’t kind to idiots that think with their fists, you know.”
Leifeng ran up to me, winding back for a punch. “What the hell are you talking about, you retarded—”
Before he could complete his attack, I neatly sidestepped his hit and slapped him. “Is that any way to treat your comrade?” I couldn’t help my irritation. I grabbed his hair and pulled his head down in a forced bow. “Apologize right now, you—”
He made to attack me, a telegraphed move that I didn’t entertain for even a second. I just pushed his head lower so it would hit my knee. Then I threw him down on the ground, still holding his hair, before stomping him gently, but purposefully, to give him bruises but not broken bones or dislocations. Angry as I was, he was still a child. Just a really fucking impudent one.
Wenhao shouted at me. “You want to die, is that it?”
My rage abated as quickly as it came, and a flash of guilt washed over me at the rough handling, but in the end it was unavoidable. Leifeng was a part of this coming new world and whether or not he was an otherworldly hero, he could stand to benefit from the discipline that the jianghu instilled in all its disciples.
The same discipline that none of my classmates had received.
Which led to all of them going their own way, some of them even going as far as to collaborate with the Heavenly Demon.
No. Not again.
“Sit down,” I said absently to Wenhao, who was breathing heavily, his anger slowly reaching a crescendo. Meanwhile, all I could think about was what my plan was going to be going forward.
And then in a snap, the classroom disappeared along with all the objects therein, replaced by an infinite expanse of whiteness.
All my classmates had arranged themselves in a loose semi-circle around the spectacle that was this fight. I could see a couple that were further away, walking along what used to be the hallway, blocked away from the classroom by a wall.
It seemed that even leaving the classroom couldn’t spare everyone from this chemistry class getting transmigrated.
Was I wrong in not warning them? Perhaps. Would they have listened? Most certainly not. And even if I had warned them, evidently it would not have worked.
But I should have warned them because that would have been the right thing to do.
Soon, like we were in a poorly rendered simulation, our surroundings began to take shape. The floor beneath us became beige tiles, slowly stretching out. Feet grew from the tiles, into legs and then bodies. People became visible, and in a flash, the entire world appeared.
And so did the wind, a weak little gust that still managed to buffet all of us because of how unexpected it was.
Around us in what was clearly an expansive courtyard rowed with men and women dressed in hanfu and magua of all kind.
And nearest to us, standing a step ahead of ten men and one woman, was a man wearing blue robes with a pattern of white blossoms. His white beard was immaculate, a narrow, yet voluminous bit of hair that hung like a waterfall, connecting to an equally white mustache. His hair was tied into a shoulder length ponytail, held together by a golden pin. The Martial Arts Alliance leader.
“You must have many questions,” he began, speaking a flavour of Chinese that was just within our sphere of comprehension. As I had found out in my years working under the Alliance’s interests, the Grand Array they had used to summon us could pierce through the veil of the infinite cosmos, honing in on candidates for summoning that best fit certain criteria.
The Alliance valued a youthful body from a pure world with no internal or external heavenly energy to speak of, and equivalent ethnicities and language skills that would make integration far easier on all parties.
The Alliance Leader spoke in vain. No one was listening to him. Everyone was busy clumping towards each other, looking around in fear and budding horror. The girls screamed, the guys cursed and spoke over each other. Not before long, they had finally found themselves in a dense little grouping.
The Alliance Leader released a pulse of his energy, the pressure enough to wash everything but his power out of the minds of every one of us, including me. I had no resistance to this mental incursion to speak of, so I too was forced to end my train of thought and focus on him.
“Who speaks for you?” the Alliance Leader asked.
“Me!” said Wenhao, in a past life, after several long seconds of hesitation on all parties. He had been the first to shake himself out from his fear-induced stupor, and that had set the tone for the rest of our years training.
Wenhao always took the first step. That had earned him respect. My respect, too. After all, there was nothing quite like seeing bravery in a peer, nothing more inspiring, and Wenhao had been an inspiration to all of us.
Even if he had given me a hard time, I never thought twice about putting it all behind me to work for the greater good.
And then the Civil War had happened. And every single one of us so-called heroes had put everything of real importance aside for a battle to measure who was the greatest.
The truth was, Wenhao was a child. He was eighteen, and in the Central Plains, that meant he was well enough into his adulthood to marry, but back on Earth, he was a child. And too much weight had been placed on his little shoulders, and in the end, he had been found wanting.
That was no problem. I would shield my junior from this burdensome fate this time around. He deserved a better fate than to become the monster that he became.
“Me,” I said, a second after the Alliance Leader asked. I bowed ninety degrees and gave a martial salute, fist pressed up against an open hand pointed up diagonally. “Greetings, Martial Alliance Leader. My name is Li Tianming. I am eighteen years old. So are the rest of my cohort.”
“Stand straight, Li Tianming,” the Alliance Leader said, his voice betraying a hint of warmth. “I am impressed by your composure. Rather than bore you with details that you all lack the context to fully appreciate, I would like for you to ask me the questions that you and your cohort would like answers to the most.”
Fear and confusion kept my classmates quiet, and I was grateful for that. I half-expected Wenhao to put up a fight, but I realized that it didn’t make sense for a Wenhao just out of Earth. The older Wenhao was an unholy mixture of Central Plains and Earth, an extremist with regards to the law of the jungle, challenging anything that challenged the notion that he was at the top of the world.
This Wenhao was just an athlete with an overinflated ego. Even someone like him would be caught off-guard by his new situation.
“I believe I speak for everyone,” I said. “When I ask the following questions: Where are we? Why are we here? Can we go back? If we cannot, what are our options for the future?”
The Alliance Leader’s eyebrows shot up, and a bemused grin formed on his face. “Young man, you certainly strike at the heart of the matter. These are not the questions that your cohort would think to ask at this very moment, but they certainly are the right questions nonetheless. Very well, I will be brief: You are in the Central Plains, a vast country no-doubt different from yours in many ways. Because we are not certain how your world appears, I cannot rightly say how different it is. You will find out these differences in time, and during this transition, we will do everything in your power to ease your worries. Why you are here is intertwined with your options for your future, so I shall jump to your third question instead,” his expression turned grave, betraying a hint of somberness in the brief glistening in his eyes. “You cannot go back. You will be here for the rest of your lives.”
A collective gasp was let out by the group, and even I felt another stab of guilt at not having warned them. “This need not be an unpleasant experience for you, however. You have one of two options currently: to integrate into our culture, receiving a monthly allotment of money that will have you living in relative comfort, in perpetuity, for as long as our sects still stand. You will be socially integrated into any community that chooses to accept you. You girls will be able to marry into a family with ease. As for the men, it will be slightly difficult for yourselves to find matches considering your lack of background, but the sects will sponsor you and increase your monthly allotment if you end up with a spouse, allowing you both to live in relative comfort. As for the second option,” the Alliance Leader paused, taking a moment to look at all our faces. “You can learn martial arts, and fulfill the purpose for which we summoned you here in the first place.”
The others murmured, and the Alliance Leader let them. I grew irritated at that. I turned to the group and said “Everyone, please calm down.”
Evidently, that was Wenhao’s last straw. He stomped over to me. “What gives you the right to take the lead and order us around, Tianming? How dare you? You’re an underachiever with mediocre grades and no friends and you dare put on airs now?” Wenhao looked to the Alliance Leader and bowed his head in an insolent show of respect that made me tempted to smash his forehead down on the tilestone, if only to save his life from the consequences of the disrespect he was showing, but that had the chance of killing him as he stood, so I refrained. Besides, they would still be receiving grace from the fact that their situation was highly stressful at the moment. No need to be paranoid. “Alliance Leader, this kid is a fraud. I am the one that speaks for this class.”
You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.
A part of me was impressed by Wenhao for doing this. It took an extraordinary boy to be this hungry for power, even in a situation where he was disadvantaged to the extreme. Yet Wenhao still thought on his feet, identified the true authority that was the Alliance Leader, and beseeched him for additional personal power. Well done, Wenhao. I would be proud, too, if I didn’t find this sort of behavior abhorrent on principle.
In another life, he would have succeeded. In another life, he did succeed.
I bowed to the Alliance Leader. “This lowly one has a proposal to make.”
“Speak,” the Alliance Leader said in amusement. He wasn’t one for obsequious speech as I had come to find out, but he was always charmed by juniors that were respectful.
“This one surmises that this be a martial society,” I said, slipping into a more ancient register with practised ease, sounding just like him now. “In that case, may this one establish authority in his cohort with martial skill?”
The Alliance Leader sighed, but he raised his hand. “Cohesiveness is necessary in this juncture. If your challenger cannot stand to see you assume authority, then the answer is obvious. A battle until the participant’s back touches the ground, if only to get this matter out of the way with the utmost haste.”
I stood straight and faced Wenhao, whose eyes were wide. “We’re meant to fight? Tianming,” he tilted his head with a grave expression. “Have you gone mad? I will destroy you.”
And he would. If I was the old Tianming, at least.
Wenhao was a national athlete, the only actual practitioner of martial arts in the old world, and that had given him a substantial leg-up in this new world, one that none of us ever managed to properly bridge.
It was him that had properly tenderised the Heavenly Demon and opened him up to defeat from our less capable classmates. Without his effort, everyone would have died.
Even now, he had a decent chance of winning. I was shorter than him by eight centimetres, weighed fifteen kilograms less than him, had no access to my internal energy, and only had my martial training to go on, which had not been trained into my body yet. I bore every disadvantage in this fight except for one: the experience of martial arts in the Central Plains.
Wenhao’s body moved in an elementary melody. All bodies moved in certain melodies. Untrained peasants and farmers who only knew the simple repetitive movements of their crafts were the drum beats that made up the lower world. Martial artists, however, moved in more sophisticated melodies. A beginner just learning martial arts would be akin to someone playing Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.
The likes of the Alliance Leader were equivalent to the third movement of the Moonlight Sonata.
And Wenhao was Fur Elise’s first movement played at half tempo. Nowhere near as technically demanding, but still impressive.
Only problem was, I knew that melody like the back of my hand.
“On the count of three, you will start,” the Alliance Leader said. “One, two, three!”
Wenhao rushed towards me.
In social media, videos circulated of old and fat martial arts masters from the West, who seemed to have built a cult around the myth of supernatural martial arts that was stolen from my country’s history. It always looked so goofy to me to see these out-of-shape and old men throw invisible balls of energy at their brainwashed students, who seemed to genuinely be affected by these esoteric powers.
Sometimes, they would just use minimal force and slapping gestures to widely derail attacks and toss their disciples off their feet like they were masters of some kind of force redirection martial arts.
To an outside viewer, this might have looked the same.
I threw my hands forward in a clumsy and unrecognisable imitation of the Shaolin gentle grapple form, the fifth one and the second most appropriate one for the situation—a deliberate choice to throw off any watchers. I threw in just enough wasted effort to trip up any observer as to the true extent of my martial art skills, but maintained just enough competence to slam Wenhao back-first to the ground.
He laid there stunned, and then jumped from his back to his feet, a genuinely impressive motion for anyone not using internal energy, and approached me, only for the Alliance Leader to appear before me to block his way. “You lost, boy. Accede to his authority.” Then he turned on his heels and took his place once again, leaving Wenhao to stew in disbelief and anger. “Yes, to all those watching in disbelief,” the Leader said. “This is how things are done here. The strong reserve the right to direct the weak for their betterment. Your comrade Tianming wishes to direct you in this same way, and I suggest you take his helping hand and listen closely to what I say. We summoned you such that we may come to a mutually beneficial accord: you receive all the training you can take, and in turn, you will use this training in the spirit of cooperation and friendship, to help defeat a common foe that will threaten your lives regardless of whether you choose to train or not.
“To help defeat… the Heavenly Demon.”
It's In The Details: Interior Art for Kindar [https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-wEna6T86--o/UT-buNLIw9I/AAAAAAAAAz8/aZy5fbTUYUo/s1600/Interior+Art+Sword.png]
A procession of servants had taken us out of the courtyard and into a dining room where we would be served our lunches, but the Alliance Leader had made it clear that this was our opportunity to speak amongst each other, away from the watchful gaze of a greater authority figure.
While I waited for my meal during the silence that reigned in the room, I considered the extent of my personal power. Before travelling back in time, I had just managed to reach the third last attainment level of the Infinite Enlightenment Fist, making me into a Supreme Peak Master and one that could likely have held his ground against the Heavenly Demon for five minutes if he was at full health.
Getting back to that level would be easier this time around. I already had the requisite enlightenments such that no one stage would bottleneck me between the Novice stage and the Insightful stage.
All I needed to do now was to amass internal energy in obscene amounts. I’d need a hundred and fifty years worth of qi at the bare minimum. Even better would be to gain control over my innate qi, but that was getting ahead of myself. In order to do that, I’d have to take advantage of my… insider information into the future.
I had not been fortunate in my past life, but I had survived, and I had paid attention. My mediocrity shielded me from risks, but it prevented me from receiving fortunes in turn. And now, in complete upheaval of heaven’s will, I was in a position to seize fortune without any risks.
Steal fortunes.
“I haven’t seen a single electronic,” Wei Jingshu began. The Second Kongming had been the class’s genius while still in school. He topped the charts school-wide and held an incredible rank one in the entire city as well, Jingshu was a man with an unbound mind, a game master and master arraycrafter. “These structures are made of wood and stone, but not a single hint of concrete. The air doesn’t have a hint of pollution.”
“Hold on!” Wenhao shouted in disbelief. “Are you saying that we’re somehow in the past?”
Jingshu nodded. “Definitely a pre modern era.” Then he turned to me. “What do you think?”
I was surprised that he even cared. “I observed the same thing,” I said. “By all accounts this is a premodern society.” That being said, a lot of the conveniences of a modern society could be made up for using arrays and talismans. Long-distance communication was one example. As for a repository of entertainment… it hurt to think about. The selection of music was limited and difficult to discover new ones, visual entertainment was either in writing or in plays, and the latter had a wide range of quality to it, and was incredibly inconvenient, as well as not on demand.
It was depressing, really.
At least there was toilet paper, and as for health, there were healing arts that were just as effective as twenty-first century medicine, if not even more.
My eyes fell on Liang Mingyu for a moment. She wore glasses, and had her hair in a neat bob. She wasn’t eating any of her food, just staring at it in sadness and grief. In the other timeline, she had shown an incredible aptitude for the medical arts, and was taken in by the Medical Hall, the jianghu’s foremost collection of eminent experts in the field of medicine.
She hadn’t even gotten a tenth into her training before she started to outstrip seasoned medical practitioners, and she would have probably become the best in the world if it hadn’t been for her untimely demise.
At the hands of Mei Ying, no less. The details were fuzzy, but Mei Ying had maintained her innocence, decrying Mingyu as the true menace, but no one believed her, even though she had sworn the Promise of Cooperation. Rumours stated that she hadn’t even been forsworn and yet the top brass of the jianghu had still banished her, which muddied the waters severely. For all I knew, Liang Mingyu could truly have been the evil one. Mei Ying, in the end, turned to the Demonic sect, the only faction willing to take one such as her in.
This time around, I would keep an eye on Mingyu. And Mei Ying.
Just one more headache in a list of them.
“One that seems to follow our ancient culture closely, no less,” Jingshu said. “I suppose the play is to speak as if you’re in a period drama if you wish to fit in.” That elicited some giggles from the crowd.
I piped in. “That’s not a bad idea. This culture relies on martial skill to determine respectability. It would be a mistake to assume—”
Wenhao hammered the table with his fist to shut me up. “I haven’t paid you back yet for your insolence, have I? Martial skill? What the fuck are you on about, you punk?” He stood up from his chair.
“Sit down,” I said with a long-suffering sigh. I couldn’t deal with him right now. Was he really always like this in the past? Surely not. “This is unbecoming.”
Wenhao choked on his words.
“Tianming is right,” Jingshu said. “You’ve tried to make one mess now, and all it serves to do is make them take us less seriously. Let’s try to find information before rocking the boat.”
With a discontented huff, he sat down once again, folded his arms, and looked away in anger.
“I will be in charge of that,” I said, and then I looked at the girls and sighed. Most of them weren’t taking things very well. The boys, too. They were sullen, angry, but quiet. No one here was having a good time. “Leave it to me. I will figure out our options and make sure that they don’t mistreat us.”
“You?” Mei Ying asked. She was a pretty girl, in a very dolled up and deliberate way. She was the social media star of the class, popular but mostly in cyberspace. Her twin pony-tails were styled in a drill-like fashion, and her face was childlike and seemed almost bent to a perpetually babyish appearance, though I assumed that was probably a trick of her cosmetics. “You’re nothing to these people. None of us are! We heard our options; either get married off to some twelfth-century peasant family, eating congee every day or whatever the hell these people eat, or become soldiers. We don’t have options!”
Despite her appearance, she was shrewd. Had to be if she could survive in the Demonic sect for any amount of time, much less before becoming the second hand of the Heavenly Demon himself.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“Why are you apologizing? Stop taking their side! You’re in this situation just like us, so stop putting on airs.”
“You’re upset,” I said. “I recognize your need to lash out in order to feel like you have any control in this situation, and were I a more benevolent person, I would allow that to be me. Unfortunately for you, I’m not,” I stood up. “This goes to all of you sitting here. I have a better grasp of your situation than you do. That means you listen when I talk and do as I say. Or I cannot guarantee your safety.”
The room broke into meaningless noise and chatter, protests and questions aplenty, but I ignored it all. It didn’t matter what I said at this juncture anyway. The hierarchy would fall into place once we started training.
I’d have to start small, though. Form an inner circle first. Mingyu the future doctor would be a good addition. Mei Ying as well, whose affinity with poisons made her invaluable as an alchemist as well.
There was Wenhao as well, but there was a chance that if I fully subjugated him, he would lose his potential to become the Golden Hero. If it was as easy as me stealing a march on the legacy before him, I would simply do so, but it wasn’t that simple at all, and the consequence of failure would be death.
Besides, why rob his fortune when I could rob someone else’s?
The Heavenly Demon.
My stomach turned in equal parts horror and excitement at the thought.
Moving back to my future powerbase, Mingyu and Mei Ying were good additions, if only so I could keep an eye on the latter, but the thought of folding in Mei Ying felt as challenging to me as herding along a cat without a leash. And I still needed to make sure that Mingyu wasn’t some kind of sleeper psychopath.
Neither of them were safe additions. I needed someone loyal at the end of the day. Neither Wenhao, his goons, or Jingshu fit the bill.
The Star Goddess, Liu Xinyi, was the most popular girl in class. Not a good option. I recalled a time where she had called me creepy and raised her nose at me in disgust when it was just the two of us. It was a strange situation, and I had assumed that someone had spread rumors about me, or that she was just prejudiced against kids her age who couldn’t make friends very easily.
If it was only that, I wouldn’t mind, but then I’d end up having three girls in my group, and the prospect of that felt like more of a headache than I could even brave at the moment. Let alone the generational gap, just the gender gap would get the best of me. God forbid any of those young girls fell in love with me out of some fascination for my strength. I shuddered a little at that. No thanks.
Once upon a time, Liu Xinyi had been my crush as well. Now, I couldn’t fathom how I could fall in love with her. She was pretty, but she acted in a way that was too reminiscent of a young child. She wasn’t unique in that regard either. Everyone in attendance did to some extent, save for Jingshu, who seemed to be the only person with common sense.
He was a good candidate for a right hand: smart, crafty, and played his cards very close to his chest. Too close, most would say. He had ambition, but then again, everyone in class who had survived until the final battle did. That didn’t mean I couldn’t bend him away from overly dramatic Alliance intrigue nonsense.
The only problem now was to find a way to win them over. Again, things would fall into place once training started in earnest and the hierarchy solidified, but before then I would have to start sowing seeds of friendship and respect.
Once our meal time ended, a servant directed us to our living quarters, an enormous courtyard manor partitioned in the middle, except for the courtyard itself, which was an uninterrupted garden with pavilion gazebos and stone pathways. The yard was as big as a half a football field, but that was par for the course with the Wudang sect that was host to the Martial Arts Alliance.
On the way to being shown to our rooms, I tapped Jingshu on his shoulder. “You’re well composed considering the situation,” I said. “I think that’s praiseworthy.”
Jingshu chuckled hollowly, his face hardly even going through the trouble of making a grin. “In those terms, I suppose you would have me beat. Your composure is abnormal.”
“I’m no good with talking the way you are,” I admitted. “So I’m just going to go ahead and say it. We should team up.”
Jingshu gave a slight and serene grin. “I assumed we were all on the same team.”
I didn’t grace that blatant political response with an acknowledgment. As I said, I was no good in that field. That was why I needed him. “I’m going to go out on a limb and assume that special favours will be given to students or groups of students that perform up to standards,” I said.
“Are you going by some knowledge or just a grasp on wuxia drama tropes?” he asked. “Either way, may the strongest be spoiled with whatever resources may make them stronger.”
I paused mentally for a moment. Right. I had totally forgotten. This boy was a genius the likes of which no one in our class came close. Of course he didn’t regard me as anything special. “You are assuming you will have the aptitude to take that position,” I realised. Jingshu frowned, and I knew I had hit the mark. “Very well. I look forward to seeing you flourish. Keep in mind, my invitation is open.”
Thus, my objective was clear. Wait for Jingshu to be sufficiently humbled, or take it upon myself to do so, and he would gently realize that it was in his best interest to team up with me.
The servants arrived at the rooms, and I took one that was uninhabited. From there, I wasted no time closing the doors and sitting in a meditative position, in order to once again begin my journey towards enlightenment.