The asphalt on the streets of Jakarta felt cold and damp under the thin soles of his worn-out shoes.
Lin Yuan, a 22-year-old guy with perpetually slumped shoulders, swung his long stick broom like a machine. The smell of rain mixed with exhaust fumes was his daily perfume. Life was just one endless string of failures for Lin Yuan: graduating high school with no money for college, getting scammed by a job agency, and now ending up as a contract street sweeper with wages that couldn't even cover the rent for the crappiest boarding room.
BZZZTT...!
The cracked phone in his pocket vibrated. A name popped up on the screen: Budi. The only person who still acted like Lin Yuan actually existed in this world.
"Yo, Budi?" Lin Yuan's voice was hoarse. He pinned the phone between his ear and shoulder while his hands kept sweeping.
"What's taking so long, Yuan? It's already eleven at night. I cooked instant noodles with two eggs, special for you. Hurry up or they're gonna get soggy!" Budi's voice sounded cheerful on the other end, a stark contrast to Lin Yuan's gray mood.
Lin Yuan gave a faint smile, the only genuine one he'd had all day. "Yeah, almost done. Save some for me, don't eat it all. I'm starving, I only had two fried snacks for lunch."
"That's why you gotta work properly, quit daydreaming! Alright, hurry up. I'll leave it on the usual table. Be careful, the roads are slippery," Budi said.
"Thanks, Bud. I'm heading ba...."
The sentence was never finished.
A blinding white light suddenly swallowed Lin Yuan's vision from the side. The roar of a metal monster thundered, followed by the ear-splitting screech of brakes.
BAMM!
Lin Yuan's skinny body felt as light as a feather as the violent impact launched him into the air.
Time seemed to slow down. Lin Yuan could feel his bones shattering, his lungs collapsing, and a heat spreading through his entire body. As his back hit the asphalt with a sickening thud, his phone went flying, the call timer still running on the screen.
Blood began to pool from his head, warming the cold asphalt. But strangely, Lin Yuan didn't feel afraid. He actually felt peaceful.
"Ah... finally," Lin Yuan mumbled in his heart.
No regrets. No parents to miss, since he didn't have any. There was only an overwhelming sense of relief. The burden of life that had crushed his shoulders for 22 years seemed to just evaporate. He felt like a runner who had finally reached the finish line after a grueling marathon.
"If reincarnation is real like in those comics I read... I want a different life. I want to be strong... so no one can ever throw me away again." Lin Yuan mumbled softly as his vision darkened. His consciousness was pulled into a cold, black vortex.
Lin Yuan didn't know how long he drifted in that darkness. Until suddenly, a violent jolt yanked his soul into something that felt incredibly tight and painful.
"Ugh... ARGH!" Lin Yuan gasped.
An excruciating pain slammed into his consciousness like thousands of needles stabbing his nerves all at once. The first things he sensed were the smell of wet earth and the stinging metallic scent of blood. He tried to open his eyes, but the world was spinning.
Suddenly, his head felt like it was exploding. Millions of memory fragments that weren't his forced their way in.
"Trash! How dare you be born into the Lin Clan with shattered meridians!"
"You are a curse on this family! Go die in the mortal world!"
Lin Yuan groaned, clutching his head that felt ready to split. In his mind, he saw flashes of the life of a 10-year-old boy who shared his name. The boy was born in the Spiritual World, a higher realm where strength was everything. But from birth, this kid was considered a disgrace because all his meridians were destroyed—it was impossible for him to cultivate.
He saw memories of the boy being dragged out of a grand palace, cursed at by his own father, and hunted like an animal by servants sent by his half-brother. They didn't just kick him out to the lower world they considered dirty and weak; they wanted to make sure this "bad luck" was gone for good.
"Jump, you jinx! The mortal world is a fitting grave for you!"
The final flash was the cold sensation of the small body being shoved into the deepest chasm separating the two worlds.
"Hah... hah... hah..." Lin Yuan snapped back to reality.
Cold sweat mixed with blood ran down his face. He tried to move his hands, but he froze. His hands were small, skinny, and covered in sword cuts and horrific black-and-blue bruises.
"Where... is this?" The voice that came out of his mouth was the high-pitched, raspy, broken voice of a child.
Lin Yuan tried to sit up, but his spine screamed in protest. With the last of his strength, he leaned against a damp rock wall. Towering in front of him were the walls of a giant chasm that seemed to swallow the sky. This wasn't Jakarta anymore. This was the bottom of a ravine in a world he didn't know.
He saw his reflection in a puddle of murky water near his feet. A pale face, sunken eyes, and tattered silk clothes that looked more like a shroud.
"I... came back to life in this kid's body?" Lin Yuan stared at his small palms, trembling. A mix of disbelief and horror crept into his heart. "The Spiritual World... The Lin Clan... they killed this kid just because he couldn't cultivate?"
"Haha... Cough! Cough!" Lin Yuan tried to laugh at the absurdity of it all, but the laugh turned into a painful cough of blood.
This body was truly at its limit. Every breath felt like sandpaper rubbing against his lungs. Shattered meridians, severe internal injuries, and gnawing hunger made his consciousness flicker in and out.
He was at the bottom of the world, in a body that the laws of nature already considered dead.
"So... this is my new life?" he whispered hoarsely, staring at the purple sky far above. "Thrown away because I was considered trash... Sigh... dying without dignity..."
Lin Yuan closed his eyes, feeling his heartbeat getting weaker, as if death was getting ready to pick him up one more time in this strange place.
Feeling his consciousness fading again, Lin Yuan refused to give up. He knew if he let his eyes close now, this reincarnation would be nothing but a short, cruel joke from fate.
With his energy nearly depleted, Lin Yuan crawled slowly, looking for the most stable position to lie on the hard ground.
He regulated his short, gasping breaths, trying to calm his erratic heart.
"Calm down... calm down..." he whispered to himself.
In that semi-conscious state, he began diving into the ocean of memories belonging to this boy named Lin Yuan. He was looking for one thing: A way to survive.
He sorted through memories of breathing techniques, ancient books the boy had read in the Lin Clan library, or any secrets about medicine. However, every time he touched on "Cultivation," he hit a cold, thick wall. Permanently damaged meridians. This body was literally a leaky bucket that couldn't hold a single drop of the world's spiritual energy.
.....
Meanwhile, thousands of light years away, or perhaps in a different dimension entirely—on the wet asphalt of Jakarta.
Lin Yuan's phone, lying three meters from a pool of blood, was still lit up, even though the screen was shattered. A voice from the speaker broke the eerie silence of the night.
"Yuan? Lin Yuan! Hey, answer me!" Budi's voice sounded panicked, trembling over the line. "What was that noise? Yuan! Don't joke around, it's not funny!"
On the other end, Budi was holding his motorbike keys, ready to pick up his girlfriend. But his hands were shaking violently. He had heard the loud crash of metal followed by the sound of something being dragged. And now, there was only a painful silence.
"Hello! Anyone there! Yuan!" Budi shouted again, but only the howling night wind answered.
Without thinking, Budi canceled his date. He drove his bike like a madman toward the route Lin Yuan usually swept.
When Budi reached the location, his heart felt like it stopped beating.
The blue and red lights of newly arrived police cars illuminated the street. A crowd was starting to gather behind the yellow tape. Budi jumped off his bike, sprinting through the crowd until he came to a sudden halt.
His knees went weak. His world collapsed in an instant.
In the middle of the road, his best friend the only person he considered a brother was lying helpless. Lin Yuan's body looked so small and fragile under the streetlights. Blood flowed heavily, soaking the shabby street sweeper uniform. The stick broom he had been holding was snapped in two, not far from his lifeless body.
"Yuan..." Budi mumbled, his voice lost in his throat. He tried to get closer, but a police officer held him back.
"Sorry, kid, don't get any closer. This is a sterile area," the officer said flatly.
"That's my friend, Sir! That's my friend!" Budi screamed hysterically, tears flooding his cheeks.
He watched the ambulance crew cover Lin Yuan's body with a white sheet. Something inside Budi's chest shattered. He thought of the instant noodles still steaming at home, thought of their small plans to save money together.
"You said you wanted to eat my noodles, Yuan... you said you were coming back..." Budi fell to the asphalt, sobbing uncontrollably amidst the blaring ambulance sirens, mourning the friend who left just when life was starting to feel a little bit better.
.....
Back in the silent abyss.
Lin Yuan, in the boy's body, jolted, as if feeling the remnants of sadness from his old world. A tear fell from the corner of his small eye.
"Sorry, Budi... looks like I really can't come home for those noodles," he whispered in his heart.
Lin Yuan's consciousness was now purely settled in this 10-year-old body. He had finished sorting through the memories, and the result was zero. There was no technique in this world that could heal totally shattered meridians like his. According to the logic of this spiritual world, he was a dead man breathing.
However, Lin Yuan wasn't just a boy from the Lin Clan. He was a soul from Earth who had studied the logic of matter.
"Haaaa...." Lin Yuan let out a long sigh, a breath that felt heavy and smelled of iron.
The result of digging through this kid's memories is a dead end. The Lin Clan, a giant in the Spiritual World, sentenced him as "eternal trash." No medicine, no technique, and no miracle for someone born with meridians shattered to pieces, Lin Yuan thought.
Lin Yuan shifted his gaze, looking around with blurring eyes. He was at the bottom of the Chaos Abyss, a cosmic rift that served as the boundary between the majestic Spiritual World and the lowly Mortal World. This place was a death zone. In the air, a thin gray mist moved lazily, swirling like invisible whirlpools.
The boy's memories told him one terrifying thing: That mist was Chaos Energy. For cultivators, this was the purest poison. This energy couldn't be absorbed by normal meridians, and if exposed for too long, the body would disintegrate from the inside. Normal people could survive a day at most before their flesh rotted and their souls were destroyed.
"I've been here half a day..." Lin Yuan whispered hoarsely, calculating the remaining time based on the dim light above the chasm. "Sigh... That means I only have half a day left before this small body turns into dust."
Lin Yuan frowned, confused. He could feel the negative effects—his lungs felt like they were burning and his skin was starting to itch intensely—but he couldn't sense the energy spiritually. Since he had no cultivation ability, he was blind to the flow of energy. to him, the mist just looked like deadly air pollution.
"Where exactly am I? what kind of place uses energy as an executioner?" Lin Yuan mumbled in frustration.
Despair began to creep in. His body was full of wounds, his meridians were trash, and death was standing right in front of him. Lin Yuan felt there was no opening, no chance to turn things around. With a bitter laugh stuck in his throat, he decided to give in to the pain.
"Maybe it's just my fate to die twice in one day," Lin Yuan whispered. He began trying to find a comfortable position to breathe his last breath.
Since his time on Earth, he had a habit of sleeping on his right side if he was feeling anxious. With great difficulty, he turned his battered body, groaning as his ribs shifted, until he finally faced the damp rock wall.
Right in front of his eyes, just a few centimeters away, a chunk of rock protruded from the canyon wall. It didn't sparkle like the gemstones of the cultivation world; it was pitch black with dull greenish-yellow streaks, emitting a very faint glow almost invisible in the darkness.
"This is...!" Lin Yuan was stunned.
His eyes, which had been drooping, suddenly went wide. His memories as a young man from Earth who loved reading science encyclopedias suddenly flared up.
"Wait... this color... this texture..." Lin Yuan said, shocked. He brought his face closer, observing the greenish-yellow pattern with held breath. He remembered images from the internet and geology books about rare minerals.
"Uraninite? Uranium rock?" Lin Yuan said, his heart pounding hard.
Lin Yuan compared the Lin Clan boy's memories of Chaos Energy with his scientific knowledge. In this world, they called the energy that destroys the body "Chaos Energy"—energy that destroys cells, causes nausea, hair loss, and organ failure. On Earth, those symptoms had a very specific name: Radiation Sickness.
"Don't tell me..." Lin Yuan muttered, his voice trembling between horror and disbelief. "The Chaos Energy that all cultivators fear... is actually radioactive energy? High-frequency electromagnetic waves that destroy molecular bonds?"
Lin Yuan's mind started spinning wildly. Cultivators fail to absorb this energy because they try to force it into meridians—fragile biological pathways. Uranium radiation doesn't run on nerve paths or meridians; it penetrates directly to the cell nucleus, slamming into the atoms that make up matter.
"Hahaha... No wonder they die! They're trying to 'drink' poison that shouldn't be touched biologically!" Lin Yuan laughed maniacally, coughing blood along with his laughter. "Cough! Cough! But to science... radiation is pure energy. Massive energy trapped within atomic structures."
Lin Yuan stared at the Uranium rock in front of him as if looking at the most precious treasure in the universe.
Lin Yuan began racking his brain. Thanks to his habit on Earth of constantly asking AI about quantum physics and science, a crazy, reckless idea suddenly struck him.
"Hmph! If I don't have meridians to flow spiritual energy... Then so be it! I don't need those pathways! I will use every cell in my body, and every single atom inside them, to be the vessel for this radiation! Hahaha..." Lin Yuan shouted with a hoarse voice, laughing wildly.