As Varkhan's Family's Ninth Elder, Lyara had an independent courtyard.
There were three rooms in the courtyard; Lyara, Ryan, and the servant girl each lived in their own room.
Ryan greeted Lyara as they returned to the courtyard before heading back to his room.
"After receiving severe injuries this time, Ryan seems a little bit different..."
As the closest person to Ryan, how could Lyara not notice the difference in Ryan after he woke up?
She didn't contemplate it further and presumed that her son had changed after enduring such a shock.
How could she ever know that the body of her son was still present, but his soul had been switched for another?
After returning to his room, Ryan sat on his bed with a gloomy expression on his face.
Back in his room, Ryan sat cross-legged on the bed, his face a blank mask. But inside? Chaos.
Alright… deep breath. I've seen enough webnovels back on Earth to know this trope by heart.
Guy dies → wakes up in a cultivation world → boom, golden finger system, cheat codes, plot armor edition.
He waited.
Silence.
"…Yo, System? You there? Hello? Any tutorial pop-up window?"
Still nothing.
Ryan rubbed his temple. "Bruh. Don't tell me I reincarnated into this death-trap world without a damn system. That's like buying a gaming PC and realizing it's just the case with no GPU."
A grim laugh escaped him. "Figures. My luck always sucked."
But his mind didn't stop spinning.
Wait… nah. Let's be real. In every novel I read, whenever a dude gets a system, it's never some freebie. It's always someone pulling strings—someone up there treating you like a pawn on their cosmic chessboard.
Ryan's poker face stayed unshaken, but inside his head he was ranting:
If that's the case, f** it. I'm not dancing to anyone's strings. I'll play dumb, smile when needed, nod like a good boy. But deep down? I'll stay sharp. If they think I'm just some clueless transmigrator, they'll get rolled later.
His paranoia wasn't unfounded. This world wasn't Earth. Here, memory reading was as common as breathing techniques. A single slip, one stray thought revealed, and he'd be cooked alive.
Ryan leaned back, eyes narrowing at the wooden ceiling. "So yeah, trust no one. Mask up. Poker face always on."
The corner of his lip tugged upward. If problems come, I'll deal with them when they show up—one step at a time. No system? Fine. I'll be my own damn system.
As he sat in silence, he caught himself drifting deeper into thought than usual. Back on Earth, he wasn't the type to spiral into endless overthinking—but now? He could feel it, the weight of the original Ryan's habits seeping into him. The constant caution, the paranoia, the endless what-ifs.
"Tch… guess I'm inheriting more than just this guy's body," he muttered.
"HeHeHeHe..."
Suddenly, a string of eerie and husky laughter, like that of a ghost, resonated inside Ryan.
"Who?"
Ryan's face distorted.
"Kid, I didn't think you were that lucky; for your soul to survive that! But nothing has changed... Wait, you're not that kid.
Who are you?! Damn it! You actually dared to snatch away the body that I wanted. Die!!" The husky voice was suddenly filled with cruelty and rage.
"Die!!"
A roar filled with rage exploded inside Ryan's mind.
Ryan instantly felt a sharp pain that nearly caused him to faint.
The sharp pain hailed from deep within his soul, causing Duan Ling Tian's body to tremble....
"No... Impossible! You're not a person of this world...
So close, just a little bit more... I can't accept this... I can't accept this!!"
The husky voice suddenly distorted as if it encountered something that caused it to feel intense fear.
After roaring once more, the voice vanished completely, as if it had never appeared at all.
"What's going on?"
After the sharp pain receded, Ryan finally began to recover his senses.
But the torment wasn't over yet. The moment the voice disappeared, his mind was assaulted again—this time not by rage, but by a tidal wave of alien, complex memories. They crashed into him without warning, every strand of information clawing into his consciousness like burning thorns.
Ryan clutched his head, his body trembling as he gritted his teeth. "Ughhh—dammit… this feels like my skull is being split open!"
It wasn't something he could just shake off. The pain went beyond flesh—it was a soul-deep agony, as though his very existence was being rewritten. For what felt like an eternity, the torrent of memories kept surging.
Minutes bled into more minutes. Sweat drenched his back, soaking the sheets beneath him. His nails dug into his palms until blood seeped out, but the pain didn't stop.
At least one full hour passed in unbearable torment before the foreign fragments finally began to settle, merging with his own thoughts. Each second stretched like a lifetime, but at last, Ryan felt his mind stabilize. His breathing was ragged, his eyes bloodshot, but the storm had finally begun to calm.
Soon, his eyes opened wide, and a stream of vastly complex and foreign memories arranged themselves inside his brain as he forcibly seized them.
"This..."
Even with two lifetimes of experiences, Ryan was still stupefied by the stream of memories.
The husky voice belonged to a figure that once shook the entire Solara Continent—an existence at the very peak of power, a Martial Emperor. The strongest cultivation realm in all of Solara, unattainable by the masses, yet this man had stood at that summit.
Worse still, this wasn't his first attempt at life. Through the fragments Ryan seized, he saw flashes of four past incarnations.
—In his first life, he was an alchemist of unparalleled skill, capable of refining extraordinary pills that could alter the fates of entire clans.
—In his second life, he became both a martial artist and a beast tamer, commanding herds of Origin beasts that followed his every command.
—In his third life, he walked the path of a craftsman, forging weapons that could cleave mountains and mastering the enigmatic art of inscriptions.
—In his fourth life, he delved even deeper into martial cultivation, defeating countless enemies and leaving behind a legacy of legends.
And now—this was supposed to be his fifth rebirth.
Ryan's lips curled into a thin line. "…So that's it. He wanted this body. He wanted… me."
The realization sent a chill down his spine. That eerie laughter, that rage—it wasn't random. It was the fury of a Martial Emperor, robbed of his vessel at the very moment he intended to seize it.