Chapter 1: The Boy Buried Alive

The Divine Zhou Empire, fourth year of Qianwu.

Years of calamity and turmoil had ravaged the land—drought in the north, invasion from southern tribes, chaos reigned supreme. People turned to cannibalism, white bones piled on the roads, and the stench of death filled the air.

Northwest Province of the Empire, at the foot of Crane Mountain in Yingzhou.

Ling Chi slowly opened his eyes. Darkness enveloped him; he could not see his own hand before his face.

"Wasn’t I hit by a Tomahawk missile on that yacht, killed in the explosion? Why am I alive again? Where is this place?" Ling Chi was filled with questions as he tried to sit up.

Bang!

His head struck the wooden board above and he fell back down.

Just as he was about to move again, a wave of dizziness swept over him, the world went black, and a torrent of fragmented memories, tinged with an electric numbness, surged from his nervous system into the depths of his mind.

It took Ling Chi a long while to piece together these scattered memories. The boy was twelve years old, also named Ling Chi, from Ling Family Village in He County, Yingzhou. The village had been raided by mounted bandits. Over a hundred households were slaughtered. His parents and siblings were all killed. Ling Chi himself, out tending sheep, was whipped by the bandits and then, as a cruel jest, buried alive in this abandoned tomb, the coffin lid nailed shut.

He could now confirm he had transmigrated—come to a world resembling the ancient past, a world of martial arts, monsters, and spiritual energy.

In his previous life, he had grown up an orphan in a northern welfare institution in China. At ten, he was adopted by a foreign couple and taken to a so-called land of freedom. He thought his suffering had ended, but the couple only wanted the government’s adoption subsidy and planned to sell him to a "romantic" country as a spare organ source for some powerful figure.

He escaped that alien household under the cover of night and began a life on the run. At twelve, after stabbing to death a beast who tried to violate him with the knife he always carried, he changed irrevocably. He renamed himself Ling Chi and embarked on a path of fighting evil with evil, never to turn back.

He learned every killing skill and ruthless method he could find. He became a scourge among men, a judge in the shadows, an avenger wandering the underworld. Murderers, rapists, human traffickers, drug lords, corrupt police, cultists, unethical pharmaceutical merchants, even wicked politicians—they were all his prey.

In a few short years, he gained infamy in the criminal underworld.

But before the machinery of the state, one man’s strength meant nothing. At thirty-one, he was finally targeted by the Federal Enforcement Agency, cornered on a luxury yacht at sea. With nowhere to run, Ling Chi fought desperately but ultimately failed.

As his consciousness faded, he glimpsed a Tomahawk missile approaching out of the corner of his eye. He pressed the signal button at his hand—the other end was wired to two hundred kilograms of TNT in the dining hall. The blazing fire consumed everything around him, and Ling Chi’s awareness vanished in the explosion.

When he opened his eyes again, his soul had entered this new body.

Ling Chi carefully sensed this frail, youthful body—the pain of whip wounds, the weakness from hunger, the terror of being buried alive. The double blow, physical and mental, had sent the original soul into the afterlife.

"We must have some fate together. Your hatred, your karma, now fall to me. Rest easy; your vengeance, I will see through," Ling Chi murmured.

The urgent matter now was escaping this accursed grave.

He gently moved his body; hunger made him dizzy and weak, his heart racing, symptoms of low blood sugar setting in.

He drew a deep breath, forcing himself to stay calm, and slowed his heartbeat through measured breaths.

In the darkness of the coffin, Ling Chi groped about, considering every possible means of escape.

The coffin was about seven feet long, two feet wide, and three feet high.

He tapped the lid lightly; the sound was heavy and muffled.

"Damn it, they’ve buried me deep. There’s no way out from above," Ling Chi thought.

His body was nearly four and a half feet tall—inside this cramped space, every movement took effort. He knocked at every part of the coffin, judging the thickness of the surrounding earth by the density of the sound.

The darkness and confinement gnawed at his nerves, but his past life’s trials had forged his will. He remained calm and kept searching.

Inch by inch, he tapped and felt about. Anything could be the key to his survival.

But the greatest threat was not a lack of tools—it was the dwindling oxygen, each breath further consuming the precious air.

He had to slow his breathing, yet act as quickly as possible.

A sudden crunch made his heart leap—he had stepped on something.

Reaching down, he found a rib bone.

It was the rib of the coffin’s original occupant. With a firm snap, it broke in his hand.

He nearly laughed aloud—the bones had weathered with age, proof that this coffin had lain underground for more than five years.

He continued feeling along the skeleton, seeking his targets—the femur and the shin bone, the hardest bones in the human body.

With eyes shut, he groped carefully. At last, he found two femurs and two tibias.

Bringing the two shin bones together, he struck them; they split in the middle, yielding four irregularly shaped bone chisels.

Ling Chi tucked the femurs and the four bone chisels into his clothing, preparing to test the shin bones first.

As the old saying goes: "Bronze bands, iron lid, tofu bottom"—the bottom of the coffin is thinnest. But breaking through the bottom was pointless; he would only find himself trapped beneath the earth.

He pressed his palm to the inner wall, searching for the most decayed spot, and began chiseling while half-squatting, aiming at least to open a hole for fresh air.

Before burial, the grave pit was usually dug a foot longer than the coffin, leaving a space for air. Ling Chi wasted no time—left hand wielding a bone chisel, right hand hammering with a femur.

All the while he controlled his breath and pulse, hunger making his hands tremble. Gritting his teeth, he pressed on.

Working half-squatting was exhausting, so he shifted his weight from leg to leg.

He kept feeling around, adjusting his position. After working for the time it takes an incense stick to burn, his left hand suddenly lightened—the chisel broke through.

A rush of air greeted him, thick with the scent of decay and age.

His confidence soared. Energized, he redoubled his efforts, chiseling with both hands.

When the opening was large enough, he used femur and skull to smash at the wood. Despite his hunger and chill, excitement surged through him.

The rotten coffin wood could not withstand his relentless labor. At last, he smashed a hole as large as a bucket.

He scooped the earth outside into the coffin, filling the inside completely, effectively exchanging the space within for the space beyond.