There is a genre called xianxia.
It is a genre about becoming a cultivator and, at the end of endless cultivation, escaping the mortal world to become an immortal—an existence with an undying body and godlike power.
One becomes an absolute being who has transcended every karmic tie that binds them, escaped reincarnation, can read another person’s past lives and future at a glance, and manipulate that person’s fate at will. By the end, they can even destroy and recreate vast concepts like the universe or multiple dimensions as they please.
After dying for reasons unknown, I possessed a character in one of the xianxia novels I used to enjoy reading.
It would have been nice if I had possessed some powerful immortal character, but unfortunately, the one I possessed was a character named Yongyu, a cultivator at the third level of the Qi Refining Realm.
This character, Yongyu, was a common thug villain who harassed the protagonist, Munyu, and served as a source of frustration. He was also the prologue boss who, after being defeated by Munyu once he obtained a fortuitous encounter, had his arm cut off, signaling the true beginning of the story and the protagonist’s change.
I wasn’t particularly interested in cultivation. Having suddenly died without even knowing why, I wondered what meaning there was in living for hundreds or thousands of years. You die anyway, don’t you?
On top of that, cultivation was… closer to an inhuman demonic path where you had to use any means necessary to grow stronger. Grinding people up to make pills and eating them without a second thought, deceiving people, stabbing them in the back, betraying them, using them, throwing them away…
I had thought this even while reading the novel, but there was no way I could do that.
The protagonist was no different in that regard. Most xianxia protagonists pretended to be righteous cultivators on the surface, while secretly keeping several sinister, wicked methods in reserve, the kind only demonic cultivators would use.
Naturally, the protagonist of this novel, Munyu, was the same. As befitted a protagonist, he raised his realm at a speed overwhelmingly faster than ordinary cultivators, and by the end of the novel, he became the strongest being in the setting and opened his own new multiverse.
In that sense, I didn’t want to escape the fate of a defeated thug villain.
I didn’t want to drag out my life in this world for ages when it was going to vanish hundreds of thousands of years later anyway.
I decided to live an ordinary life and die an ordinary death, and trained only with the thought, “Let’s just avoid getting my arm cut off.”
After all, even as a Qi Refining cultivator, as long as I didn’t catch the eye of stronger cultivators and just kept my head down, I could live like a king among ordinary mortals and enjoy myself.
But then.
“Huh? Two spiritual roots?”
Something.
“Winner! Yongyu!”
Went.
“Nn… come to me… Senior Yu…!!”
Terribly wrong.
Not only did I avoid getting my arm cut off, I ended up defeating the protagonist outright, and somehow, I even stole the protagonist’s lover.
…Even if I only lived for about a hundred years and died, it was obvious that the protagonist would find my soul through repeated reincarnations and plunge my life into an endless abyss of suffering.
Because Munyu used the karmic power created by plunging the entire lives of his enemies and foes into pain to grow stronger quickly.
To save my future, even my reincarnations… I steeled my resolve and decided to kill the protagonist.
But then I heard that he had run away from the sect where, according to the original story, he was supposed to remain for his entire life until he ascended.
“Aaaaaaargh!!”
To ensure that the protagonist, who had vanished to who knew where, wouldn’t grow strong in the distant future and torment me, I had no choice but to desperately become stronger.
Damn it, if only this weren’t a xianxia world!