o call Chen Xu's transmigration a coincidence would be an understatement.
It was a coincidence within a coincidence—a cosmic joke wrapped in irony.
That day, he had merely accompanied a heartbroken friend to clear his mind. The plan was to attend a lecture by some "world-renowned physicist." Yet after listening to an hour of incomprehensible theories that bent logic as easily as light, Chen Xu's head was spinning.
He never expected that very nonsense would soon become his reality.
According to that eccentric professor, space-time was not a flawless continuum. It was imperfect, wrinkled, and full of hidden folds—like creases in a cosmic fabric. Should one happen to stand at the precise point where those folds overlapped, one might, by sheer misfortune—or divine comedy—fall through, entering another time and space entirely.
That, said the professor, was what people might call "transmigration."
He also insisted that the odds of such an event were infinitesimal—one in a billion billion billion—so small as to be practically nonexistent. "Unless," the man had joked, "your father happens to be the Creator Himself."
At the time, Chen Xu had laughed. But fate, it seemed, had been listening.
Moments after leaving the lecture hall, a bucket of popcorn still cradled in his arms, his vision swam—and the world flipped.
The sky, the earth, the very air turned alien.
And so, by the grace of cosmic absurdity, Chen Xu achieved what not even the son of a Creator might claim—he had successfully fallen through time, awakening on Earth a million years before his birth.
To be fair, the professor hadn't been entirely wrong. Only one's spiritual consciousness—the soul itself—could survive such a passage. Flesh and matter were left behind.
Thus, Chen Xu's soul had found its way into the body of a roughly fifteen-year-old Homo erectus.
By the standards of the universe, this was an astronomical stroke of luck. As the professor had once quipped, "To transmigrate is good fortune; to find a body upon arrival—that's divine dogshit luck!"
A true miracle, then—if miracles smelled faintly of blood and smoke.
But Chen Xu had no time to ponder philosophy. The hunt had ended, and the fresh blood of the two-pronged elk was nearly gone. The next tasks—hauling the carcass, roasting the meat with sacred fire—demanded his full attention.
At their leader's guttural call, Chen Xu and four other hunters lifted the heavy prey.
They were followed by a dozen drooling tribesmen, vanishing swiftly into the shadows of the forest.
The band moved silently, step by step. In this ancient wilderness, they were far from rulers—merely prey that had learned to hunt.
Every sound, every misstep could summon death.
Only the mightiest clans dared claim the right to hunt openly here.
Chen Xu's tribe was not among them.
Led by their towering chieftain, the group wound cautiously through ravines and rocky slopes, skirting danger, scaling cliffs, and finally descending by tangled vines into a half-hidden cave suspended over a chasm.
Their return marked success—a rare and precious victory.
A single elk would feed the tribe for seven, perhaps eight days.
For such a small band, it was a feast bought cheaply—only a few of the weak and wounded lost.
As tradition dictated, Chen Xu's five-man hunting squad formed the upper caste.
The ten others—six women, two children, and two frail males—were laborers, the subjugated.
It fell to them to strip the hide, roast the meat, and serve it.
Only after the hunters had eaten their fill could the rest begin.
The women and children received scraps enough to live; the weak, little more than bones.
Such was the law of the primitive world—the weak are meat, the strong their feast.
Chen Xu watched the flames dance—those same flames the tribe revered as divine. The red glow reflected in their wide, reverent eyes as they heated stones to sear the meat.
He sighed, shaking his head.
Was it mockery he felt, or melancholy? Even he could not tell.
Soon, exhaustion overtook him. He leaned against a flat slab of rock, lying back as the warmth of elk blood spread through his belly. Closing his eyes, he began tracing the familiar pattern of qi circulation within his body.
The fire that burned in this cavern—their sacred flame—had been his doing.
When he first awoke in this body, these primitive beings had stumbled upon a remnant of wild fire—already fading to embers.
Even then, he had understood what it meant.
Here, in this cruel age, there was one thing he could never accept—raw meat.
Luckily, his former life had not been entirely wasted.
He knew a little about wilderness survival, enough to preserve the dying flame.
That small miracle had earned him a place among the tribe's hunters—respect born of fire.
But respect was never enough.
In a world ruled by claw and fang, survival required strength.
The body he now inhabited was sturdy enough—lean, but not weak.
Having survived the brutal childhood years, it had grown into a young adult's frame, capable of endurance and force.
That, at least, was a blessing.
Yet compared to the tribe's chieftain, a mountain of muscle and fur, Chen Xu was but a shadow.
He owed his place not to brawn, but to something else entirely—a relic of the civilized world: a Taoist breathing art passed down through generations, known simply as Yi Jin Jing—the Classic of Tendon Transformation.
It was no miraculous Shaolin technique, no myth of instant enlightenment.
Rather, it was a humble method of nurturing internal energy, of moving the essence of the five grains through the body's meridians.
Even after years of practice, all it had granted Chen Xu was a faint sense of qi—a spark of life force.
In battle, it was useless.
Worse, it seemed to weaken him the more he cultivated. In his past life, he had nearly abandoned it altogether.
But habits, once carved into the soul, are not so easily cast aside.
Even after crossing worlds, his body continued the circulation instinctively, breath by breath.
And here—in this savage body, in this primal world—it worked.
For the first time in his life, the qi moved freely, naturally, as though the very air rejoiced in its flow.
The savage form that should have resisted refinement instead embraced it, drinking in vitality like parched soil tasting rain.
Chen Xu's lips curved faintly.
Perhaps this was the true meaning of "dogshit luck."
Not merely to survive—but to begin again, reborn in the age before gods, when humanity was still clawing its way out of the dark.