Chapter 1: Reincarnated as a Ghost?

In this boundless, lightless stillness, Lin Yu’s consciousness had drifted for nearly five hundred years. Should he make that choice? The thought, like a cluster of faint flame, flickered in the endless darkness.

Memories surged and dragged him back to the moment he first arrived in this realm.

Back then, he was nothing but a lone wisp of a soul, exposed naked under a hostile sun. Sunshine was no longer warmth but a scorching poison that burned spirit, every ray bringing tearing agony, his soul-body on the verge of dissipating. In the brink-of-collapse despair, he fled frantically on instinct, and smashed into a place that felt safe.

His consciousness sank into it: a tiny storage world, scattered with jars and objects. His taut nerves suddenly relaxed, and the endless black swallowed him, plunging his awareness into total interruption.

He woke slowly after an unknown span of time.

Still groggy, a fragment of nightmare clung to him—the tattered battle banner whipping in a fierce wind, the battlefield strewn with corpses like spilled ink. A blood-soaked Taoist in cyan robes, face contorted, eyes burning with resolve and madness.

He clutched an archaic ring tight, then shoved it violently into his cracked chest, his scream seeming to pierce time: “Seal this demonic artifact with my soul! Let it sink for ten thousand generations!”

A hangover-like headache made Lin Yu reach out habitually for the phone on his bedside to check the time.

His fingertips touched nothing but void and cold.

He shot his eyes open. There was no familiar ceiling, only unchanging gloom. He finally took in his surroundings: dozens of sealed pill bottles, a pile of strange ores, and several stacks of yellowed talismans scattered nearby.

His brain crashed instantly. A second ago he had been in a brightly lit office, hunched over a computer screen, tearing his hair out over a client’s blueprints.

How did he end up here?

An absurd yet singular thought detonated in his mind: I... transmigrated?

The dead silence stretched on, until Lin Yu numbly accepted reality.

He had transmigrated.

Strangely, in this pitch-black void, he could see everything with uncanny clarity.

There was no system, no golden finger, not even a living body granted to him—fate had treated him brutally. He roared in silence, questioning the absurdity: why did he have to transmigrate into such a... thing?

Even stranger, he faintly felt an invisible restraint wrapped around his soul, like cold thorns that brought stinging pain. The source seemed to be this very ring. The cyan-robed Taoist’s dying scream lay branded deep in his consciousness.

At first, he drifted like a ghost, helplessly observing. This space spat out and swallowed items at random—sometimes a razor-sharp sword, sometimes a pile of spirit-rich pills. They appeared and vanished in an instant. After long observation he finally deduced his situation: he was trapped inside a storage magical treasure.

Time lost all meaning there. After an unknowable interval, he found, to his astonishment, that his insubstantial “body” gradually solidified and he could move freely within that tiny world. An unprecedented sense of power grew and surged through his illusionary limbs and bones.

He tried several times to leave. A few attempts to “go out” came with agonizing burns from the outside sun, pain as if his soul would be reduced to ash, forcing him to retreat in humiliation. Those agonizing costs revealed the full picture of his prison—a plain, archaic storage ring.

Through repeated burns and despair, an idea flashed through Lin Yu’s mind: perhaps he could cling to the ring itself—neither leaving nor fully sealed off—so he could interact with the outside world.

He carefully attached his consciousness to the ring’s cold band. That risky move finally let him glimpse the outside world and hear external sounds, while sparing him the sun’s searing pain.

With a subtle shift of thought, he froze. A novel sense of control rose up, as if invisible limbs had extended, and the storage space bowed to him.

He was like a Trojan horse virus: parasitic in the ring, yet possessing independent will, completely free from its owner’s control.

“Have I become an artifact spirit?” Lin Yu muttered quietly. At the same time he clearly “saw” deep within the ring’s inner wall the invisible shackles of thorn-like restraints entwining the soul, seeming to coexist oddly with his newfound control.

The cyan-robed Taoist’s face flickered in the ghostlight of the shackles.

Centuries drifted by like a flick of a finger. When Lin Yu finally recovered some clarity from his muddled “ring life,” he realized with a start: damn, this remnant soul of his had drifted here for almost sixty years plus half a cycle! What nearly scattered his barely solid soul again were the following four hundred years.

During those long four centuries, the ring had changed hands no less than six times!

Each change of owner made his soul-flame tremble.

Why? Because he knew all too well the nature of cultivators who held precious treasures. Possessiveness? It was embedded in their bones. A ring with an unknown, inhabiting ghost?

To them, it was like finding an unexploded bomb in their backyard.

Lin Yu could bet that if he dared appear before any “owner,” or made a sound, whether the person was a righteous-looking gentleman or a malevolent power, their first reaction would be ninety-nine to one—silence him! Or worse, drag him out to be used as a component for alchemy or forging. That would be a soul-shattering end, not even a sound left.

So Lin Yu shrank to the deepest part of the ring, making himself thinner than air, quieter than stone. He watched coldly as six “fortunate” owners passed like a revolving lantern.

The first was an exuberant young man who found the ring and grinned ear to ear, thinking he had discovered an ancient treasure. The next day, while showing off at the market, a jealous wandering cultivator smacked him in the back of the head with a club. Before the treasure had even warmed, it was gone.

Lin Yu clicked his tongue inside the ring: “Don’t flaunt wealth, the ancients weren’t lying.” Just as the youth died and the ring changed hands, the thorny restraint around Lin Yu’s soul trembled, and a cold breath was sucked away. He stared at the inner wall and saw a very subtle, dark-red streak appear, like dried blood.

The second owner was a scruffy, down-and-out wandering cultivator who treated the ring like a lifeline, muttering to it daily, praying for an old master to teach him divine arts. One stormy night after a training mishap, he fell into a demonic deviation, blood poured from his orifices, and he died miserably.

Lin Yu shrank his soul: “This host’s mental fortitude is no good, too dependent on objects, dies too easily.” As the wandering cultivator’s soul vanished, another blood streak quietly formed beside the first, the chill stronger.

The third was a ruthless female demonic cultivator. After getting the ring she grew paranoid, feeling something watching her, and tossed it into a smelting furnace to try to melt it. The furnace went out of control, exploding so that both person and furnace were left only half a wall.

Watching that towering inferno, Lin Yu’s heart still skipped: “That chick’s dangerous!” At the moment the flames consumed her, the third blood streak surfaced. The thorny seal seemed to draw sustenance, tightening its bind.

The fourth was a self-styled righteous old scholar who tried every purification charm to cleanse the “evil spirit” in the ring, driving Lin Yu to distraction. While studying an ancient evil formation, he inadvertently triggered counterblow and was “purified” into a wisp of blue smoke.

Lin Yu sighed: “Curiosity killed the cat, and the old scholar too…” As the scholar became blue smoke, the fourth blood streak was etched, and the inner wall’s red glow became faintly visible.

The fifth was a treasure-hunting opportunist riding a streak of luck; after getting the ring he was on cloud nine. But during an exploration of an ancient powerhouse’s tomb, he triggered a chain of traps and was pierced by ten thousand arrows.

Lin Yu lamented: “Where people walk by the river, who doesn’t get wet? Even the king of finds can’t survive courting death.” Blood sprayed the tomb, and the fifth streak extended like a living thing, weaving with the other four, the stabbing pain in Lin Yu’s soul growing ever clearer.

The sixth was a pill-refining fanatic who stuffed the ring with poisons and half-baked pills as high-level storage. During a new formula test the pill furnace exploded, releasing toxic gas that corroded him until he died in unspeakable agony.

Lin Yu rolled his eyes in the thick poison fog: “Be professional, will you? Refining pills is risky; join at your own caution!” When the poison finally ate away the fanatic’s last life, the sixth blood streak formed violently. The six streaks together created a strange, incomplete pattern inside the ring that exuded an ominous murderous aura.

The thorny seal that wrapped his soul burned hot, as if ready to grind into the origin of his soul at any moment.

Lin Yu fixed his “sight” on the newly formed blood pattern. A chill rose from the depths of his soul and made his soul-flame flicker: “Six already... this ghostly seal has absorbed so much death energy... if more people die... this thing might really blow!”

This was far more than a mere master-killing mechanism. The ring itself was a terrifying malevolent object! The cyan-robed Taoist’s dying sealing had been continuously weakened and activated by the deaths of successive owners!

However, in those anxious, drawn-out years, Lin Yu wasn’t left empty-handed. In a deeply hidden corner of the ring, he accidentally “touched” a brilliantly crafted spirit-concentrating array!

That formation was running silently, tirelessly siphoning faint spirit energy from the outside and nurturing his remnant soul.

But the array’s flow was already dim, like a candle in the wind, on the verge of extinction.

Worse, the spirit array seemed to be in a subtle antagonism with the six blood-streak seals; each cycle of the formation looked particularly difficult.

Thanks to that “spirit buffet,” his nearly dissipated soul fragments were barely able to cohere. Though far from vigorous, he was no longer a wisp of smoke—at least he had formed a translucent body with hands and feet.

Lin Yu touched the array with his thought, feeling the faint pulse, and cracked a grin: “Hey, the heavens don’t absolutely extinguish a soul? The ancients weren’t wrong...

Uh, this time I actually managed to touch it before it went out? But how long can this spirit-gathering array hold? And will that lethal seal finally erupt when the next owner arrives?”