Chapter 1: Awakening

Zuo Qingcang opened his eyes and felt a splitting headache. But years of training still made him want to roll over immediately and check his surroundings.

When he moved his waist slightly, he found his lower body unusually weak. He could not even roll over, and even trying to sit up felt a little difficult.

“Anesthetic? Or some kind of drug?”

While these thoughts crossed Zuo Qingcang’s mind, he began to move his eyeballs and look around.

There was a wooden ceiling and dim lighting. The smell of salty sea air reached his nose, and he seemed to hear the sound of waves crashing.

“Am I at sea? Inside a boat?”

Having grown up in dangerous environments, Zuo Qingcang was not surprised that someone might target him. But he did not expect to be transported to the open sea on a simple boat. It seemed unnecessary.

“My last memory was falling asleep in a room at the Sheraton Hotel.”

“The alarm I set did not go off.”

“The food was tested and was fine.”

While thinking about how he ended up at sea, Zuo Qingcang slowly tried to use his hands to sit up.

This movement led to two new discoveries.

First, the other party did not use any means to restrain him; they simply left him lying on the bed. Second, something felt wrong with his body.

Leaning halfway against the ship’s cabin wall, Zuo Qingcang looked at his hands, then at his chest, stomach, and thighs under his clothes.

“The scars are gone.”

“My body size has changed. My hands are longer, and my chest is broader than before.”

Then he carefully touched his face and frowned even more. “The skin is rough, my cheekbones are higher than before, and my chin is a bit longer.”

Even now, his mind remained calm, trying to use his past experiences to understand the situation.

“Hallucinogens? Or did they perform major cosmetic surgery on me?”

“But what’s the point? If they wanted to interrogate me, tying me up and using exhaustion tactics or torture would be more effective.”

Zuo Qingcang gently twisted his hair between his thumb and index finger, thinking silently. “My hair has become curly. Did they curl it? They also tied it up in a bun. If I let it down, it would probably reach my shoulders.”

The situation seemed stranger and stranger. Zuo Qingcang had been captured before, and he had captured others. In those situations, he had encountered people lying on an Operating Table, wanting to skin him.

He had also encountered people hanging others from trees, preparing to feed them to lions.

There were also times when people were thrown into water dungeons, ready to throw in man-eating rats.

But waking up to find his body completely changed—this was his first such experience.

What he did not know was that in some places, certain works of entertainment referred to this kind of experience as “crossing over.”

He was still trying to understand the situation using his previous knowledge and experience.

He tried to stand up but found his legs completely unable to exert any strength. It seemed the other party had given him more drugs than he had imagined.

He could only rely on his hands to move around on the bed. Fortunately, his current body seemed stronger than before, so moving using just his hands was manageable.

However, there was not much to see in the room. There was a wooden bed and a wooden table with a candle lamp on it. The cabin swayed gently with the waves, occasionally making creaking sounds. Everything gave Zuo Qingcang a sense of backwardness and antiquity.

Zuo Qingcang believed that only a madman would do something meaningless. So as he observed, he began to think.

But as Zuo Qingcang slowly pondered, fragments of memories that did not belong to him began to surface in his mind from time to time.

They were the memories of a man named Liu Zhicheng.

In these memories, Liu Zhicheng was a sergeant in the Northern Garrison Army of the Great Qi Dynasty. Half a year ago, when he returned home to visit his family, he found that his elderly father had been hastily buried.

After some investigation, he learned that his father had been killed by someone riding a horse on the street. The rider was none other than the youngest son of Prince Yu, Cao Sheng.

Prince Yu was the current Tianzi’s uncle. How could Liu Zhicheng possibly confront his youngest son? After some conflict, Cao Sheng remained unharmed, while Liu Zhicheng was forced to apologize.

In his anger, Liu Zhicheng attacked Cao Sheng but was defeated with a single move. After that, he was transferred out of the Northern Garrison Army, ostensibly promoted but actually demoted. He was sent with a voyage team to the colonies on the New Continent.

But that was just the beginning. Perhaps to Prince Yu, Liu Zhicheng was nothing more than an insignificant ant. But to those below, Liu Zhicheng became a way to curry favor with Prince Yu.

Zuo Qingcang understood this kind of political oppression all too well. Perhaps Prince Yu never intended to pursue Liu Zhicheng. But as long as he did not make a clear statement, his silence alone was enough to make countless underlings act like piranhas. To connect with Prince Yu’s faction, to please Prince Yu, or to avoid offending him, they would exert all kinds of pressure on Liu Zhicheng.

It could be said that without Prince Yu uttering a single word, Liu Zhicheng would never have a chance to rise again in the Great Qi Dynasty. All his superiors, colleagues, and subordinates would collectively exclude him as if by unspoken agreement.

Liu Zhicheng’s subsequent memories quickly confirmed Zuo Qingcang’s judgment. On the way to the New Continent, he not only faced various forms of exclusion but also began to be attacked.

Recalling the persecution Liu Zhicheng endured along the way, Zuo Qingcang frowned slightly. In his opinion, Prince Yu would likely not order his subordinates to do such things. The idea of having him killed on the ship to the New Continent was more likely the plan of Prince Yu’s youngest son, Cao Sheng.

According to Liu Zhicheng’s memories, although he was defeated by Cao Sheng with a single move, he had spoken rudely afterward. It might have been just a few insulting words. Zuo Qingcang knew deeply that throughout history, in any world, there was no shortage of privileged, vindictive princes and nobles.

But for Zuo Qingcang, now was not the time to think about the reasons, to wonder why he had come to the Great Qi Dynasty, or why he had become a man named Liu Zhicheng. It was also not the time to complain about the mess Liu Zhicheng had left him.

The most important thing now was to survive. His lower body had completely lost sensation. The drug the other party had given him clearly grew stronger with time.

At this point, the other party could burst in at any moment. With his lower body paralyzed and no weapons at hand, he was like a lamb waiting to be slaughtered.

According to Liu Zhicheng’s memories, this should be a drug powder called “Hero’s Fall,” used in the army to imprison Martial Arts experts. The antidote was likely in the other party’s possession.

Zuo Qingcang frowned and once again looked around the room, starting with the candle lamp. After about ten seconds, Zuo Qingcang untied his bun, and his long hair fell onto his shoulders.

Next, he began to pull out his hair, one strand after another. Dozens of centimeters long, he tied them together, connecting them into a thin thread over two meters long.

Using his hands to move his body, he tied one end of the thread to the base of the candle lamp and the other end to his little finger.

The dim light and the thin hair made the setup nearly invisible if one was not paying attention.

Then, Zuo Qingcang quickly pulled back the bedding on the ship and saw the wooden bed boards. As he had imagined, the ship was very old. The bed boards were not only covered in mold stains but also had several obvious cracks and loose spots.

The creaking sounds earlier had come from the bed boards beneath Zuo Qingcang.

So, from the cracks in the bed boards, he pried out a wooden splinter about the thickness of a thumb and the length of a palm. He hid it behind his back like a Dagger.

This was the only weapon he could find in the room. Then he closed his eyes, leaned against the bed, and remained motionless, as if asleep.

About five minutes later, the room’s door opened, and footsteps reached Zuo Qingcang’s ears.

Listening to the footsteps, Zuo Qingcang kept his eyes closed and silently judged, “One person… light footsteps.”

The other person stopped about a meter in front of Zuo Qingcang.

Silence fell in the room. The other person seemed surprised by Zuo Qingcang’s—or rather Liu Zhicheng’s—calmness and silence. Finally, he could not help but speak. It was the voice of a middle-aged man. He had just said the word “Liu” when Zuo Qingcang moved.

He had been waiting for this moment. With a sharp pull of the finger tied to the hair, the candle fell to the ground, and the flame went out mid-air.

The entire room was plunged into darkness. The sudden change from light to dark made it impossible for the visitor to see anything at that moment.

But Zuo Qingcang, who had been keeping his eyes closed, now opened them. Not only could his eyes adjust to the darkness faster than the other person’s, but his other hand, even before opening his eyes, was already thrusting the wooden splinter toward the source of the voice.

When Zuo Qingcang realized only one person had come, he had already decided to act. Less than a second after the candle went out, the wooden splinter had deeply pierced the other person’s upper thigh.

“Ah!” The other person cried out in pain and fell. Zuo Qingcang calmly pulled out the splinter and immediately stabbed it into the other person’s other thigh.

With a squelching sound, the wooden splinter penetrated about six or seven centimeters into the thigh muscle.

The other person knelt on the ground, and Zuo Qingcang grabbed his throat, squeezing tightly, making the man emit choking sounds.

In the darkness, the other person could see nothing, but Zuo Qingcang could barely make out his outline—a tall, thin man.

He extended his left hand, inserting his fingers into the wound on the man’s thigh. With two fingers digging and twisting in the flesh, the man struggled violently all over. But Zuo Qingcang’s two fingers remained in the wound, making the man afraid to struggle too hard because every movement caused excruciating pain.

A voice like that of a devil reached the man’s ears from Zuo Qingcang’s mouth.

“If my fingers go deeper, I can tear open the blood vessels in your thigh. No one will be able to save you then.”

“If you don’t want to die, tell me where the antidote is.”