Chương 1: I Am A Goddamn Genius!

Xiao Xuan smoothed out a rough piece of parchment on the table and scribbled the words ' QI Cultivation' in English at the top. He paused, looking at the foreign letters. In this ancient world, nobody could read English. Still, he took a moment to quickly doodle a middle finger next to it, disguised as a poorly rendered bamboo shoot. Then, he began jotting down the instructions for sensing Qi that he had wrangled out of Wei Tu. According to Wei Tu, he needed to cultivate to gain basic physical strength.

According to the laws of web novels, however, he had been scammed. He was a transmigrator. Where was his status screen? Where was his system notification? Where was his grandfather in a ring? He had nothing. But he refused to believe he was just an extra destined to die in a ditch. Until he found his golden finger, he just had to do what every broke college student on Earth did: fake it until he made it!

Placing the paper before him, Xiao Xuan hopped onto the bed, crossed his legs into a lotus position, closed his eyes, and began to inhale. In… and out… breathe like a Daoist master, Xiao Xuan. Don't think about your spiteful mother-in-law. After what felt like an eternity, or perhaps just forty minutes of fighting the urge to scratch his left thigh, the air around him changed.

On Earth, the closest he had ever come to spiritual enlightenment was a five-minute guided meditation app that he had uninstalled after just two days. An unfamiliar warmth prickled against his skin. Unfortunately, sensing the energy was the only easy part. The original owner of this body had trash-tier meridians. They weren't just blocked; they were as fragile as wet tissue paper. For him, channeling Qi meant risking an internal blowout, which was why the poor guy had never bothered trying.

The current Xiao Xuan, however, had read over three hundred Xianxia web novels back on Earth. He was no cultivation expert, but he was a scholar of fictional metaphysics. If raw Qi was too heavy for his weak meridians, he just needed to control the intake stream with precision. Filtering the energy, he carefully snorted a tiny strand of Qi through his nose. He gently guided the energy down his chest and deposited it into his lower dantian. Boom.

Well, there was no explosion, but a tiny spark of warmth ignited in his lower belly. Who needs a system? I am a genius! Three hours later, his inner genius was crying. He had poured his soul into the process, sweat dripping down his neck, only to manifest a grand total of three pathetic strands of Qi. Desperate to make something happen, he forced them together, compressing the energy into a single mass. It thickened into a semi-solid slush, and then, under his intense focus, it turned into a ruby-like sphere. Pop.

The ruby popped like a cheap balloon.

"Gah!" Xiao Xuan snapped out of his meditation, coughing profusely as a wave of dizziness hit him. His robes were drenched in sweat.

"Damn it! This is impossible!" He threw the parchment across the room. But as he sat there wheezing, the cold reality of his situation set in. He couldn't afford to throw a tantrum. In this world, weakness was a capital offense. If he didn't get strong by hook or by crook, one of his spiteful enemies would eventually find a way to make him 'accidentally' disappear. Sighing, he slid off the bed to retrieve his notes. The paper had landed face-up on the floor, in front of a polished copper mirror.

Xiao Xuan bent down to pick it up, but his hand froze. In the reflective surface of the copper mirror, the English word that he had written at the top of the page was flipped.' QI'had turned into' IQ'. Xiao Xuan stared at the mirror. Qi… IQ… Internal Energy… Intelligence Quotient… Eureka! He snatched the paper off the floor and scrambled back onto the bed. This novel's true home is a different platform. Support the author by finding it there. He closed his eyes and drew in a fresh strand of Qi through his nose.

Instead of forcing it down toward his broken meridians, he tried to pull the energy up toward his head with his breath. Nothing happened. The Qi refused to go upward, drifting back toward his chest like smoke. He tried three more times, nearly giving himself a migraine, but he simply couldn't force the energy against its natural downward flow. Xiao Xuan opened his eyes, glaring at the wall. Fine. If gravity wants to play dirty, I'll play dirtier.

He slid off the bed, walked over to an empty patch of wall, and placed his head firmly on the ground. Interlocking his fingers behind his skull, he kicked his legs up into the air. His untrained body screamed in agony. His core shook, his shoulders wobbled, and he crashed down sideways into a basket of laundry on his first attempt. On his third attempt, he finally balanced into a perfect Shirshasana. Blood rushed to his face. His muscles ached. But his head was now technically at the bottom of the gravity well.

He closed his eyes, stabilized his frantic breathing, and snorted another strand of Qi. This time, the energy didn't drop to his chest. Swept away by the rush of blood and the downward momentum, the strand of Qi shot directly into his brain. Xiao Xuan's eyes snapped open. If cultivators could use Qi to temper muscle cells, bone cells, and skin cells to make them immortal, why not brain cells too? Back on Earth, he had heard countless tales about unlocking the human brain's full potential.

Why couldn't the magical cosmic energy do the exact same thing? The moment the first strand of Qi dissolved into his cerebral cortex, an icy chill washed over his mind. The throbbing ache in his muscles vanished. The mental stress of his transmigration, his lack of a system, and his spiteful in-laws evaporated. I knew it. An arrogant grin formed on his face. I am a goddamn genius! Xiao Xuan swept more Qi into his head, coating his brain cells in the raw energy.

Within a few minutes, the cooling, pleasant sensation in his skull began to curdle. The icy clarity vanished. It was replaced by a throbbing heaviness, as if someone were pouring molten lead directly into his ears. Xiao Xuan's vision blurred. His balance gave out and he collapsed sideways onto the floor, panting heavily as the room spun around him. He lay there like a defeated starfish, staring blankly at the floorboards. A warm stream of blood traced a neat line across his cheek and pooled onto the floor.

Dammit, my brain cells are literally redlining! He let out a ragged wheeze. Slowly, he dragged himself onto the bed and sat in a normal cross-legged position. He closed his eyes to test the results. The heavy feeling was still there. But beneath it, he could feel his own body with microscopic precision: his diaphragm expanding and contracting, his stomach churning, and the faint pulse of blood through his veins. He tried to cultivate normally again, drawing a strand of Qi toward his lower belly.

He could 'see' the resistance in his chest: a localized blockage in his meridians that acted like a clogged pipe. Instead of trying to forcefully ram the Qi through like an idiot, he used his enhanced mental focus to gently shave away at the edges of the blockage. A burning sensation flared in his chest. After an hour of intense concentration, a tiny, foul-smelling black residue began to seep out of the pores on his skin. He stopped, falling backward on the bed.

He had managed to clear barely a single centimeter of his meridian. At this rate, it would take him weeks just to open a single pathway.

"One step at a time," Xiao Xuan muttered to the ceiling, wiping the foul black goo from his arm. He didn't have a system to instant-level his stats, but he had something better: a biological upgrade. He closed his eyes, letting the exhaustion take over. But as his body sank into the mattress, his newly enhanced brain refused to quiet down.

Instead, under the loud rhythm of his heart, it began to wander, drifting backward through the void of his memories, tracing the absurd path that had brought him to this alien bed. … Back on Earth, Xiao Xuan hadn't been a tragic protagonist. He didn't have a brooding trauma. He wasn't avenging a murdered family, and he certainly hadn't been hit by a mysterious truck. He was just an average twenty-year-old living in mainland China. Financially, he existed in that comfortable middle-class sweet spot.

Physically, he was just an easy-going guy with a sharp and expressive face who could blend into any friend group. But he possessed one glorious flaw: he was a hopeless romantic! He simply could not ignore a pretty face. He loved to talk, joke, and subtly flirt with every pretty girl he crossed paths with, tossing out smooth, playful compliments just to watch them smile. Yet, despite his shameless wandering eyes, he was decent at heart.

He never crossed the line into being a creep; he would charm a pretty girl, drop a witty line, and then casually walk away. He was a romantic rogue who had simply never found 'his one person'. He worked part-time as a web novel translator while living alone in a small apartment where he took pride in cooking his own meals. Since a college budget didn't allow for a car or a motorcycle, he cycled through the local parks, admiring nature and occasionally stopping to feed stray animals.

Until the same nature decided to personally delete him from the timeline. It happened on a Tuesday evening. He was walking back from the convenience store, a plastic bag full of snacks dangling from his wrist. The sky above was magnificent: a swirling canvas of dark grays and silver that looked like a classical ink painting brought to life. Unable to resist, he stopped to admire it. Then, the universe decided to turn the volume up to eleven.

Violent thunder cracked through the air, shaking the asphalt beneath his sneakers. There was no rain. Just a fierce wind that whipped his hair across his face, and a procession of gray-black clouds moving at terrifying speed. Amidst the swirling darkness, forks of lightning danced across the sky. He stared upward, his eyes locking onto the center of the sky where the clouds had begun to churn into a huge spinning vortex. Out of nowhere, a majestic bolt of purple lightning materialized from the center of the vortex.

It didn't strike a nearby building. It didn't hit a lightning rod. Instead, it shot downward like a targeted orbital laser, aiming for his face. He didn't even have time to drop his snacks. Zap. And now, here he was. Locked in a parallel world, trapped in a fragile body, balancing upside down against a wall, and snorting magical air to fry his own brain cells, all just to survive his new, spiteful in-laws. Xiao Xuan let out a tired yawn as the memory faded, a faint smile tugging at the corner of his lips.

Purple lightning, huh? If I ever find the God of Storms, I'm going to demand a refund for my snacks. With his hyperactive senses finally settling into a quiet hum, his mind went blank, and he drifted off into a deep sleep.