Central Galaxy
Golden Yaoung floated in the endless void between galaxies, his divine essence flickering like a dying star. Four other god-level cultivators surrounded him, their combined auras pressing against his fractured soul.
"Give up, Yaoung. Your soul is already broken," declared Tianwei, the one who had once called him brother. "This meaningless struggle only hastens your end."
Yaoung's eyes blazed with the fury of a collapsing sun. "Meaningless? You speak of meaning after what you've done?" His voice carried the weight of eons. "We were sworn brothers. We ascended together from the mortal realm. And you, all of you chose to betray me for the favor of the Celestial Court."
The ancient cultivator felt the cracks in his soul pulse with each heartbeat. Even gods were not immune to the hierarchies of power that governed the universe. Those who ruled from the supreme cultivation regions at the galaxy's center had long arms and longer memories.
Betrayed at birth by fate, betrayed at death by family, he thought, the irony bitter as poison on his tongue. Perhaps this is justice after all.
But as his divine consciousness began to fray, one desire burned brighter than his pain—home. That small blue world at the galaxy's edge where he had been born a slave and forged himself into a god. Where he had loved and lost everything that mattered. If he was to die, let it be there, not in this cold emptiness surrounded by those who had sold their honor.
"I will not die here," Yaoung whispered, his god core pulsing with desperate resolve.
He activated Soul Steps, the forbidden technique that utilized soul power instead of qi. His soul screamed as he tore through space itself, leaving his former brothers far behind. Each step fractured him further, divine essence bleeding into the void like golden tears.
The image of that blue world filled his mind—the forests where he had first learned to cultivate, the mountains where he had met Lian Yu, the woman whose death had driven him to godhood and beyond. As these memories surfaced, his control wavered.
The final fracture came not from technique or battle, but from the weight of remembrance. His soul shattered like crystal, ten thousand fragments of divine essence scattering across the cosmos. His god core, inseparable from his soul, exploded in a burst of golden light.
The fragments rained down upon an unsuspecting world below—not his destination, but close enough to taste the irony. Even in death, Golden Yaoung would not find the peace of home.
Earth-Japan
Tim stepped out into the mountain air, the familiar weight of his troubles lifting slightly as he breathed in the crisp evening. At thirty, he'd left everything behind—his marriage, his life in America, even his savings account that his ex-wife had cleaned out during their brutal divorce. Now he taught English at a small college in this Japanese mountain town, bound by a two-year contract that felt more like salvation than obligation.
The convenience store run had become his evening ritual. As he walked down the winding path, the ocean spread out far below, catching the last golden rays of sunlight.
"Fucking beautiful," he muttered, lighting a cigarette. The view never got old—that endless expanse of deep blue water, the way the light danced across its surface like scattered diamonds.
He flicked his cigarette to the curb as he entered the little shop. The bell chimed softly.
"Oh, hey Tim," Mr. Kato called from behind the counter, his weathered face creasing into a smile.
"Evening, Mr. Kato. How's business today?"
"Slow, always slow. But I have my number one customer who keeps me in business with all that beer," the old man said with a wink.
Tim grabbed his usual—a six-pack and some snacks—and paid. "See you tomorrow, probably."
"Probably," Mr. Kato agreed with a chuckle.
Outside, something was wrong with the sky. Instead of the deepening twilight he expected, the darkness was giving way to an unnatural brightness. Tim paused, squinting upward. The cold mountain air burned his lungs, but that familiar sting that usually made him feel alive now carried an edge of unease.
The sky continued to brighten as if dawn was breaking in reverse. He turned to check if the moon was unusually bright, and his blood froze.
Streaks of light cut across the heavens—not the gentle arcs of a meteor shower, but aggressive slashes of fire heading directly toward the town. Toward him.
"Shit." Tim turned and ran, his beer cans clanking in the plastic bag. The divorce had taken everything from him, but it had also freed him. He wasn't ready to die just when he'd started to live again.
Behind him, the whistling grew louder. He risked a glance over his shoulder and saw one meteor fragment separating from the rest, tracking him like a heat-seeking missile. There was nowhere to run that would matter.
Tim stopped. He cracked open a beer, took a long pull, and faced his death head-on. "Well, here's to new beginnings."
The impact drove him into darkness.
Tim's Soul Realm
When awareness returned, Tim existed as something else entirely. His body was gone, replaced by a pulsing orb of white light that felt more essentially him than flesh ever had. He was warm, luminous, stripped of everything external yet somehow more complete.
Then came the pain.
The meteor fragment had buried itself deep within his light-form, and it was changing him. Growing him. His essence expanded rapidly as the cosmic energy merged with his soul, carrying with it alien sensations—a desperate hunger to travel impossibly far, to reach something distant and important.
He tried to scream but had no mouth. The merger was violent, like swallowing fire that wanted to escape in every direction at once. When the absorption finally completed, the agony intensified.
His soul began to tear in half.
The division was excruciating—like every part of his being was splitting down an invisible seam. One half remained tethered to Earth, anchored by his human memories and attachments. The other half, infected with the meteor's cosmic longing, stretched toward something unimaginably distant.
Avenge me.
The thought wasn't his own. It came from the meteor fragment, a final whisper of will from whatever intelligence had hurled it across the void. That dying voice pushed his severed soul-half toward a distant world, past stars and through cosmic distances that should have taken lifetimes to cross.
Below him—or was it ahead?—a planet teemed with billions of souls, their light creating a complex web of life and consciousness. But there was a gap in that web. A dark space where light should have been but wasn't. An empty vessel waiting.
The meteor's final will guided him toward that absence, and Tim felt himself being pulled into something that wasn't quite alive but wasn't quite dead either.
Everything went dark again.
But this time, the darkness felt like the moment before birth rather than the moment after death.
Cultivation World- Silus
Lia was part of the Flowing Water Sect, a rising star in the cultivation world who had reached the first stage of Foundation Establishment at only nineteen. Now she was battling for her life on what should have been a routine mission—investigating some old ruins not far from the sect. The task was overkill for a Foundation Establishment cultivator who could split hills with a punch.
That's when she spotted it: a shimmering slit in the fabric of space itself.
She took a deep breath. "A spatial rift," she whispered, her eyes widening with possibility. She remembered the sect elders teaching that rifts were cuts in space and time, usually created by Nascent Soul level cultivators or higher to forge pocket realms. There were no reported rifts in this region—this had to be an ancient one, reopening after countless years. The treasures within could accelerate her advancement, and she desperately needed that power. So much depended on her strength.
When she stepped through the rift, she wasn't transported to some ancient treasury. Purple lightning crackled across a twisted sky, illuminating a wasteland of cultivator bones and a broken fortress in the distance. The metallic scent of old blood hung thick in the air.
That's when she heard it—a sound like grinding stone and whispered death.
Robed figures materialized behind her, moving with unnatural silence. Their attack came instantly. Lia raised her hand, channeling qi to deflect the strike, but the dark energy passed through her defenses like they were made of mist.
Soul attacks. They were targeting her very essence, not her body. As a new Foundation Establishment cultivator, she had no techniques to counter such assaults. Dark streaks of malevolent energy tore through her spiritual form repeatedly. While her meridians and flesh remained intact, her soul began to fracture like cracked glass.
She stumbled backward, desperation clawing at her throat. "I can't die here. I tried so hard... I was meant to save everyone." But she was outmatched, overwhelmed by enemies who specialized in soul warfare.
She turned to flee, but a final soul-piercing blow struck from behind. Her spiritual essence shattered completely. Lia's body collapsed lifeless as her attackers dispersed like smoke, hunting for other prey.
The Transition
In that moment between death and oblivion, when Lia's soul scattered to the winds, something else arrived. Tim's displaced consciousness—somehow torn from another world entirely—found itself drawn to the empty vessel. Like water filling a broken cup, his essence poured into the abandoned body.
The merger was violent and wrong. Tim's awareness crashed into flesh that wasn't his, neural pathways that fired in alien patterns. Cold seeped through every fiber of his being as conflicting signals warred in his mind.
His eyes snapped open to see the nightmare landscape around him. He tried to breathe, but his throat burned like fire. Every instinct felt scrambled—his brain sending commands to limbs that responded differently than expected. Fighting through the disorientation, he finally managed to force air into unfamiliar lungs.
"Huuuuuuh." The massive breath echoed strangely in his new voice.
Adrenaline from fear, shock, and inhabiting a body that had just died flooded his system. He attempted to sit up, but the signals felt all wrong. In jerky, zombie-like motions, the body twitched as he struggled upright. Looking down, Tim saw delicate, pale fingers—definitely not his own calloused hands.
His breathing quickened as he reached up to touch his face. Smooth skin where his beard should be. High cheekbones. A distinctly feminine jawline.
"Where... where am I?" The voice that emerged was soft and musical completely alien to his ears.
She stood shakily, surveying her surroundings. The landscape was a massive battlefield strewn with rubble, twisted hills, and structures covered in glowing runic carvings. The silky robes she wore were stained with dirt, and the spatial rift behind her crackled ominously in the purple-tinged twilight.
Barely able to control her new body's movements, she stumbled away from the tear in space, each step feeling like learning to walk again. She kept stumbling as she tried to adjust to the weird-ass proportions.
"Please don't tell me I isekaid into a woman, please, please, please," he begged whatever powers that existed. The distinct lack of friction between his thighs made him even more freaked out. "Please just let me be a feminine guy with a tiny dick."
After what felt like hours of this shit, she found a small cave carved into a hillside—shelter from the nightmare realm.
Collapsing inside the rocky alcove, she tried to process what had happened. Somehow, impossibly, she had been reincarnated into another person's body. But how? And why? Was her original body dead back on Earth, or was this some kind of spiritual projection?
She closed her eyes and tried to access the body's original memories. Fragments came flooding back in disjointed flashes: training with sword forms at dawn, the weight of cultivation manuals, the pride in her master's eyes when she broke through to Foundation Establishment, brushing long hair before a bronze mirror. But there was nothing about the robed attackers or this cursed realm those final moments seemed locked away.
The constant lightning outside periodically illuminated her new form. She wore light red robes in the sect's style, and even in her disoriented state, she couldn't help but notice the dramatic differences from her old body. Long smooth legs, wide hips, thin waist, and large perky breasts.
"No, no, no," he muttered, pulling his robe open to see lacy underwear. "Oh fuck, come on," he muttered, pulling them aside to see the most perfect pussy of his life. "This is bullshit," he mouthed quietly to the heavens. "You got the wrong damn body. I'm supposed to be surrounded by women like this, not become one."
"Focus, Tim, we can mourn the loss of little tim later," she muttered to herself, then paused at hearing the unfamiliar voice. "Being distracted won't help anyone." Noticing the feminine voice, he couldn't help but try it out. "Ah no, Tim, stop—it's too big." Now at least a girl has said it to me at some point, he laughed as he joked about the unwanted gender bender.
The memory fragments revealed she had been part of a sect—the Flowing Water Sect—but the details remained frustratingly vague. It would take time for the memories to fully integrate, if they ever did. Meanwhile, pain wracked her entire being, like a headache that had spread to every inch of her body. Her soul was slowly adapting to its new vessel, stretching and molding to fit the foreign spiritual pathways.
Exhausted by the ordeal and overwhelmed by the magnitude of her situation, she finally allowed her eyes to close. Hidden in the small cave while purple lightning painted the wasteland beyond, she fell into an uneasy sleep—the first rest of her new existence.
Earth
Tim woke up to beeping from beside him. He opened his eyes to see he was in a hospital bed. He quickly looked down at his hands—they were his own again. A nurse came rushing in.
"Oh, Mr. Jones, you're awake. You collapsed suddenly outside. A passerby called the ambulance and brought you here. How do you feel?"
"I feel okay," Tim mumbled, still trying to figure out what had happened.
The nurse examined him and flashed a light into his eyes. "Your responses are normal. We think you had been drinking too much and fell. When they brought you to the hospital, you had alcohol in your system."
He felt weak but fine otherwise. As soon as the nurse left the room, he pulled his pants down. "Thank god, little Tim, you're alive," he muttered, genuinely relieved after the nightmare he'd just experienced—just as the nurse who had forgotten her clipboard walked back in.
They stared at each other for a solid three seconds. Tim with his pants around his ankles, the middle-aged nurse clutching her clipboard like a shield, both frozen in mutual horror.
"I was just... checking for injuries," Tim said weakly.
"Uh-huh," the nurse replied, backing toward the door. "Well, everything looks... functional." She grabbed her clipboard and practically sprinted out, muttering something about needing more coffee for this shift.
The rest of the day was spent in the hospital under observation as Tim tried to piece together what had happened, while carefully avoiding eye contact with that particular nurse. He was discharged later that day after they found nothing wrong.
Tim walked home thinking about the vivid dream when he noticed something strange. His vision changed slightly, as if he could see more details than before. He blinked and shook his head, but it didn't go away. He started to see two places simultaneously—he was both here and in the cultivation world at the same time. Separate bodies but one soul.
He dropped to one knee, puking with vertigo from seeing through two sets of eyes at once.
Keeping Lia's eyes closed, he focused on Tim's body movements. He instantly noticed how sluggish and slow everything was in his male body. Stumbling and dizzy, Tim managed to get to his door. Opening it up, he stumbled and collapsed on the couch. Two sets of sounds, smells, and feelings hit him at once. The nausea surged again.
"Okay... okay..." Tim muttered, squeezing his eyes shut. "Focus on one."
He willed himself to only perceive through Lia's senses—the cold cave, the distant sound of water, the soft fabric of her robes, and the heavy weights on her chest. Gradually, the overload faded, leaving just her awareness.
Then he switched back to his own body. The nausea increased, and his head still throbbed. He sat up slowly, gripping the edge of the couch for balance.
"This is real. I'm... split between two worlds."
A hysterical laugh bubbled up. Divorce? Job stress? None of that mattered now. His soul had been fractured, split in two, and forced halfway across the universe. "Man up or shut up," he whispered, a phrase his dad always said to him. He laughed some more, realizing manning up would only work on one body.
"What's the most pressing need?" He analyzed the situation methodically. "My earthly body is okay. The one in the cultivation world—I can't let that die. If it does, will I die on Earth too?" He had no idea how any of this worked. "I need to get Lia back to her sect."
From novels he'd read about cultivation, he understood the basics. Qi Refining was the first level where someone would try to feel qi in the world and condense it into vapor while clearing channels that carried qi—like veins but for energy. These channels were called meridians, pathways that ran throughout the body like a second circulatory system. The qi would flow through these meridians and collect in the dantian, a spiritual energy center located just below the navel that acted like a reservoir for storing and refining qi.
As cultivators cleared impurities from their meridians—basically spiritual blockages that prevented smooth qi flow—they would advance through qi levels from 1 to 9. Each breakthrough meant wider, cleaner channels that could handle more qi without bursting like overpressured pipes. The dantian would also expand and strengthen, able to hold increasingly dense concentrations of energy.
Once they cleared the 9th level, they could try to condense the qi vapor into liquid form—Foundation Establishment. This liquid qi was exponentially more potent than vapor, transforming cultivators into something beyond human limits.
Even at the basic Qi Refining stages, practitioners became superhuman. Their muscles could exert forces that would shatter stone, their reflexes could track arrows in flight, and their bodies could heal from wounds that would kill normal people. A Qi Refining cultivator could leap across rooftops, punch through steel, and go days without food or sleep. Foundation Establishment cultivators were essentially living weapons—capable of leveling buildings with their bare hands and moving faster than the eye could follow.
Thinking about Lia's brief, fragmented memories, he realized this should be incredibly difficult to achieve. Maybe only 1 in 100,000 in her world would get there in a lifetime. She had made it at 19 years old—that was insane talent.
He lay back down, closing his eyes. First things first: make sure Lia didn't die. Then figure out how to survive in both worlds. Because right now, he was both of them.
He closed his eyes again and focused on shifting his awareness fully to her. The cave materialized around him instantly. Thunder filled her ears, and the cold stone beneath her legs sent shivers up her spine.
Cultivation world
Lia opened her eyes. She was still alive. Still hidden.
"First step: get out of here without dying," she whispered, testing her voice. It sounded strange to Tim—foreign yet familiar.
Her stomach growled. Right. Food and water were immediate priorities.
Carefully, she crept to the edge of the cave, peering out into the battlefield. The ruins stretched under that eerie twilight sky. No sign of immediate danger, but something had killed Lia originally, and he didn't want to find out what.
She hesitated. Did she remember where the sect was? Fragments floated up—a mountain range to the east, days of travel. But first, she needed to leave these ruins unseen.
Lia took a deep breath and stepped out from the small cave. This body moved differently—the way her hips swayed, the shift in balance, the bounce with each step. But the power of cultivation flowed through her like liquid fire, rich and intoxicating, strengthening every muscle and bone.
Something about the way she moved felt natural yet completely wrong at the same time.
"Oh fuck... right," Lia muttered, watching her chest bounce as she walked. "I'm a chick now."
The realization hit like a punch to the gut. Tim had never dealt with this kind of mind-fuck before—his consciousness felt like it was wearing someone else's skin. The body moved like it belonged to her, every step fluid and graceful, but his brain kept screaming that something was off. It was like being a passenger in a car that drove itself.
She shook her head. "Doesn't matter right now. Survive first."
The ruins weren't completely abandoned. Scattered carvings pulsed with faint energy, and the air itself tasted metallic—like blood and lightning. Lia's memories supplied flashes: this was an ancient battlefield from some forgotten war between sects. The space fracture must have been newly formed, or else someone would've looted this place centuries ago.
She wasn't far from the entrance. Original Lia's greed had cost her everything—she'd entered when she found the rift because she wanted to claim the treasures for herself rather than reporting it to the sect immediately. "I need to remember how such great talent died to greed," Tim thought. He decided to go deeper and circle around the back side of the rift to avoid whatever killed her.
Lia moved cautiously, avoiding open spaces. She still wore the red sash of the Flowing Water Sect, which might make her stand out.
Without any choice, she headed deeper in, away from the rift entrance. Stars were visible through a shimmering barrier—this must be a shard of a world some great cultivator had created. The further she went, the more signs of battle appeared. Swords stuck into the ground. Pieces of armor scattered about, but never whole sets. Some skeletons were visible too.
"This is bad," Lia muttered. "If this place wasn't fully looted, that means something stopped people from taking everything."
She needed supplies—weapons, food, anything. But touching artifacts in a ruin like this was highly risky.
Her stomach growled again. Priorities.
Here's the expanded version with better explanation of the spatial ring:
She absentmindedly rubbed one of her rings, and suddenly a space opened in her mind—like having a mental window into another dimension. Only 5 cubic meters inside, but this must be a spatial ring! These storage devices were incredibly rare and expensive, using folded space techniques that defied normal physics. The ring created a pocket dimension accessible only through spiritual consciousness, where time moved differently—food stayed fresh indefinitely, and anything stored inside existed in a kind of temporal stasis.
Inside were clothes, herbs, 3 healing pills that would heal most mortal wounds, dried meats and fruit that looked like they'd been stored yesterday despite probably being months old, plus a small jug of water. There was also a pouch with coins and spirit stones—the crystallized qi that cultivators used as currency and cultivation fuel.
The ring responded to her thoughts, allowing her to visualize the contents and pull items directly into her hand without physically reaching anywhere. She could sense the exact location of everything inside, like having a perfect mental inventory.
"Sweet." She could make it home as long as whatever killed Lia didn't find her again. Flashes of cultivators attacking her surfaced—she'd been killed by an enemy sect.
She slowly circled around toward the entrance, trying not to think about how different walking felt or how her chest moved with every step. Now aware of spatial rings, she scanned every corpse for them. After several hours, she found two more on bodies of mostly bone that hadn't been looted yet. Most were stripped bare though except the spatial rings. She slipped them onto her fingers. One contained robes, tools, a sword and a staff. The second held books in an unfamiliar language.
Finally, after a day of sneaking, she saw light ahead. The exit was just past a series of broken pillars. Lia crept forward, keeping low. No sign of the robed figures—maybe they'd already left?
Then she heard screams as green-robed men fled from the portal entrance.
A figure stepped into view at the rift's edge. Tall, clad in silver-blue armor, his presence alone made the air tremble. He held a spear crackling with lightning, and behind him stood dozens of other armored cultivators.
The Flowing Water Sect's enforcers.
And they were furious.
One of the robed figures lunged toward the rift—only for the armored man to flick his spear. A bolt of lightning reduced the robber to ash mid-step.
"Annihilate them," the armored man ordered. "Leave none alive."
Lia ducked behind a pillar, heart pounding. If she ran now, they might mistake her for one of the enemy. But the man in armor would recognize her sash and outfit. She had to be careful.
She waited until most of the enforcers charged past, chasing down the last robed figures deeper into the ruins. Only then did she step out, raising her hands.
The armored man's gaze snapped to her. His eyes narrowed.
"Disciple Lia?" he said, voice like grinding stone. "You're supposed to be dead."
Lia swallowed. "I got lucky."
He studied her for a long moment before nodding. "The fracture is unstable. We're sealing it after cleanup. Go. Report to Elder Cho."
She didn't need to be told twice. Lia bolted for the rift, stepping through—and found herself back on the grassy hills outside the ruins. The sky was blue again, the sun warm. Normal.
Safe. For now.
"Now I can go home," she thought, starting to run toward the sect. It was only an hour away at full speed. She could make it by nightfall if she hurried.