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“Ugh…” I open my eyes to the starry sky above me just in time for a barrel full of water to come pouring over me.

My first response is to have a full body spasm as my not-quite-conscious brain struggles to understand that I am not actually drowning.

Then, when my body finally gets a grip, I spit out a mouthful of gritty water and quickly reach up to wipe water and grime from my face.

“That was pleasant,” I mutter petulantly while wondering who I am supposed to thank when a system stuck inside my head doesn’t kill me while turning off my brain.

“Oi! You can talk?” An astonished voice shouts at me from nearby.

I put my hands on the ground and push myself up into a sitting position while looking around. There are five men around me: the two I was walking behind before the system reset, the guy who could have done better with his Roadrunner impression, and two men that I didn’t recognize. Both of the new men as well as the runner had barrels in their hands, but it looked like only the runner had dumped his on me.

“You deaf?” The guy with the halberd asks me. It was his voice that asked if I could talk just a second ago.

“Uh… no. Just,” I shake my head to clear off some water, “I’m kinda out of it. Weird day, I guess.”

The guy scoffs and the men around him chuckle.

“You’re telling me! I was on a patrol and found a pig shit monster who learned how to talk after having some water poured on him!” The men laugh louder this time as I smirk at their antics.

“Sorry, I…” I look up at the night sky while considering my words. “To be honest, I don’t know what the fuck is going on. I think I might have hit my head or something. Where am I?”

“Where are you?” The guard with the halberd exchanges glances with the guard with the saber before looking back at me. “You really don’t know where you are?”

“Nope.” I shake my head. “I was sitting on my ass at my desk not too long ago and then something weird happened and I got thrown into a building.”

I tell the guard my story, minus the parts about the system, and watch as the guards become more and more curious.

“Don’t really know anything about disappearing from one place and reappearing in another, but I’ve heard some cultivators can move fast enough that it seems like that. I can’t sense any Qi fluctuations from you at all, so I’m pretty sure you aren’t a cultivator. You sure that’s what happened?”

I can tell just by looking at the guards that none of them believe the first half of my story up to the point I was sucked into the wormhole. To be honest, I can’t blame them because I wouldn’t believe it if it hadn’t happened to me. I know I have to defend my story, but there is one thing that I don’t know about.

“What’s a cultivator? Like with trees and stuff?” I ask and the guards’ expressions go from curious to baffled.

They all exchange looks that express everything from “is he joking” to “is he an idiot”. For what feels like a very long few seconds, none of the guards say anything to me or each other. Finally, the guard with the halberd clears his throat and speaks.

“I think you must have hit your head pretty hard. Let’s get you cleaned off and we’ll bring you to the Outer City Physician to have Physician Bing check you over. He isn’t as popular as Physician Mu in the inner city, but he knows what he knows and he’s good at his job.” With that, the guard turns around and waves his hand in a circle, saying, “Follow me.”

Before I can stand up and before the guard can take a step he pauses and looks at the two men still carrying full water barrels. “Clean him up first,” he orders, and two large barrels full of water are dumped on me knocking me back to the ground.

***

“So, what’s your name?” I ask the guard with the halberd after I manage to get back on my feet.

“I am Sergeant Lin under the command of Captain Lu. Captain Lu falls under the authority of Marquise Qiang.” His response is all business. “What is your name?”

“My name is— uh…” I stop mid-stride and try to remember my name but end up pulling a blank.

“The rest of the guards stop around me and Sergeant Lin asks, “You don’t remember your name, either?”

This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.

“I did… I’m sure I knew it just a minute ago.” I scratch my head pensively and wonder why I can’t remember my name and then realize something. “Oh!” I reach into my pocket and pull out a black leather trifold wallet. I flip it open and pull out my driver’s license before passing it to Sergeant Lin.

He looks at my license for several seconds before saying, “I can’t read this. What language is this in?”

“English,” I respond.

Sergeant Lin gives me a curious look and asks, “Can you tell me what it says?”

I take back my driver’s license and look at it with a blank expression on my face. I’m able to recognize my face, but the letters and numbers on the card don’t seem to trigger a response as I’m looking over them.

“Well this sucks,” I mumble quietly while turning my license over and over in my hand.

I feel a heavy hand fall on my shoulder and I look up to see Sergeant Lin standing over me. “Don’t worry about it, kid. I’ve seen guys like you when I was on the frontlines. People can recover from memory loss as long as they have a bit of time, and a good physician like Physician Bing can help things along.”

His words make sense so I nod my head. “Thanks. It’s just weird not knowing what my name is.”

Sergeant Lin scratches the side of his jaw for a second and grunts. “How about this. We will call you Lan Jin until you get your memories back. Sound good?”

“Lan Jin?” I repeat slowly. “Why Lan Jin?”

“It’s because you have blue eyes and gold hair in the picture you just showed me. If I hadn’t seen that picture, I probably would have called you Lan Fen!” Sergeant Lin snickers at his own joke and so do the rest of the guards, but I don’t understand it. Sergeant Lin explains, “Lan for your blue eyes. Fen for the shit covering you!”

Everyone but me laughs, but I try to at least show my appreciation for his joke by giving a half-hearted smile. Sergeant Lin pats me on the shoulder again before turning around and continuing to walk down the long road with the rest of us following behind him.

As we’re walking, I get a reminder from the system.

<>

Not having anything else to do while walking, and being curious about what the system actually is, I think .

The next second, an opaque screen opens up in front of my eyes and I am barely mindful enough of my surroundings to not trip over my feet as it appears.

My first thought when I see the browser is that it is edgy as fuck. A dark neon-green background with an ‘O’ at the top of the page. Inside the ‘O’ is that creepy eye from the back of dollar bills. Under the ‘O’ I a simple text box with a search button next to it. Below that is a section for my favorite web pages, currently empty, and any bookmarks I decide are important.

I sneer at both the browser and my fate as I decide to search for something. If I’m lucky, I can open up a map and path my way back home… however far that may be.

I quickly input ‘maps and directions’ into the search field and press enter. To my pleasant surprise, it works! What is even more baffling is that I’m writing in a language that uses characters rather than letters.

A map opens up and shows my current position in real time. I can see an overhead view of the area I am in as well as the guards walking along with me. Apparently, I am in a place called South Border City, but it also has another name, ‘Qiang City’. It then dawns on me that Sergeant Lin never actually answered my question earlier when I asked him where I was. Probably because he thought I was a nut.

Curious, I zoom out on the map and my eyes widen in shock as I am finally able to understand just why I never seemed to get anywhere earlier while I was walking on my own. This city is enormous! It is basically a huge rectangular city with a width of around a hundred fifty miles and a length of somewhere close to five hundred miles! How can anyone get anywhere in a place this huge? There is also a section on the map which shows demographics, and this city apparently has a population of just under eight hundred million people! For some reason, the gender diversity is skewed toward women with them accounting for 63% of the population. There is a bunch of other information on the population, economy, and so on of the city, but after seeing how large this place is I immediately run a search for the United States in the directions field.

It takes less than a second for the map to find the United States. When the search is done, I know I will likely never see my home again because the number of commas in the miles separating Qiang City from the United States is definitely in the millions at the very least. And that’s probably being considerate to my fragile heart. What really makes me appalled is that one of the places I would have to cross through in order to get home is known as the Eternal Battlefield located at Eternal Devil Chasm. And that isn’t even the halfway point.

With my already bad mood completely destroyed and trampled upon, I decide to lookup the ‘cultivation’ thing Sergeant Lin was talking about. A quick thought, and a second of time, and I am shown tens of trillions of results with duplicate results omitted. Begrudging the very thought of even considering the possibility of having to look through all of that information, I click on the ‘search specifications’ dropdown and include ‘Qi’ as one of the requirements for the search. I’m still left with tens of trillions of results, but I’m left with tens of trillions less than when I started. I further narrow down the search through limiting the results to definitions and click on the first web page that shows up.

The web page is simple and to the point.

Qi Cultivators: Beings who use Qi to strengthen the energies within their bodies and commune with the universe.

See also: Body Cultivators, Soul Cultivators, Pill Refiners, Talisman Masters, Array Masters, Beast Tamers, …

The related topics go on for a very, very long time so I decide to put them off for later. Strictly speaking, I learned what Qi Cultivators are. Yet I know absolutely nothing. And one thing that bugs me is that the definition said ‘beings’ and not ‘humans’ so I quickly feel as though I may as well have not have learned anything with this web page.

I back out of the web page and instead search for ‘human Qi cultivator’ in the search bar before running the search. I’m still met with a lot of results, but they are less terrifying in number this time around and I click the first link in the results section.

Instead of a definition, I am shown a wiki-like page.

“Humans have cultivated qi for billions of years. In that time, many empires centered around cultivation have risen and fallen due to the passing of years, internal and external strife, and unusual circumstances that are often described as being ‘the will of the heavens’. Unlike many species, humans are advantaged in the cultivation of qi in that they are adaptable creatures and can typically accept various forms of energies that they then use to refine their Essence, Body, and Soul. However, because there is a strange balancing force in the universe, humans are required to create and follow cultivation practices in order to cultivate themselves. This is contrary to many other species that simply need to eat objects with qi and live in qi-rich environments in order to rapidly develop themselves.”

The page then introduces a directory to topics further on in the page and I balk at the idea of reading through that much information. Judging by the numbers of topics and sub-topics, I could spend a thousand lifetimes and not even finish one percent of the information available! As far as I care, I need to know what I need to know most before I even consider taking steps to learn all of this information.