Good-for-Nothing Beggar's Bones: A Bloodstained Road of Thorns to Immortality

When snow and grit lashed his face, Lin Yi finally accepted reality: this cultivation world had no use for transmigrators.

The ruined temple where his soul had transmigrated was as drafty as a sieve, and his muddled four-element spiritual roots were so poor even stray dogs would turn them down. His frostbitten, ulcerated toes dug into the frozen earth as he shivered and finished chewing the moldy scraps of a steamed bun. Then he began muttering into the void for the thousand and first time: “Dao Ancestor, take a look. That wisp of spiritual energy yesterday shot off faster than a rat...”

The three copper coins he had scraped together through ten years of blood and tears were crushed into filth by thugs. The Qi Guiding Art he had carved into his bones only attracted evil cultivators, who drained his blood to make pills. When his knees, worn raw from kneeling, finally carried him through the gates of Qinglan Sect, the pickaxe in the poisonous mine split his palm. Flecks of spirit stone glimmered faintly in the blood he coughed up.

At forty, he was still at the first layer of Qi Refining. A Yin Bone Flower dug up in a graveyard earned him a Foundation Establishment Pill. On the night the pill cracked, he listened to the hiss of energy leaking from his dantian and touched the half a spirit stone his dao companion had pressed into his hand before jumping off a cliff. Three hundred years passed in cycles of decline and renewal. When his shoddy golden core was blasted to cinders by heavenly lightning, the opening page of the Ant Scripture he had created was being copied onto jade slips by the chosen geniuses of great sects.

The baleful winds of the Demon Burial Abyss took his left arm; the killing array of an ancient battlefield chewed up his right leg. As the world's spiritual veins collapsed in his hands, amid the roar of the Milky Way pouring backward, he remembered the little beggar crying from hunger in that ruined temple on a snowy night.

“I did it...”

The day the final figure on the mountaintop turned into a mineral vein, a new beggar gnawed on a spirit stone exposed at the surface and cursed:

“Bah! What kind of lousy lucky break is this? It's chipping my teeth!”