Xu Zimei was supposed to be in the afterlife. That’s how his story ended the first time, after years of clawing his way through the cultivation world and seeing pretty much everything it had to offer, power, betrayal, sects rising and falling apart, monsters wearing the faces of saints. He got to the point where almost nobody left alive could stand toe to toe with him.
Then he wakes up young again, back in the True Martial Sacred Sect, back before any of it went wrong.
At first he figures it’s his dream, because the mountains look exactly like he remembers and the same disciples are wandering around acting like they’ve got the world figured out, when really they’re still babies in cultivation terms. Even the people who’ll grow into absolute nightmares are stumbling through their first steps right now. Only Xu Zimei knows what they turn into. Nobody else in this world has that.
You’d think that kind of knowledge would turn him into the hero, fix all of his regrets and save the people he lost. Well. he’s got zero interest in that. Because here’s the thing, nobody in the future called him a hero to begin with. Maybe Madman or Demon and even Tyrant. People got scared enough that they stopped saying his name out loud and he doesn’t even argue with any of it.
So this time he skips the part where he pretends to be good. He’s already moving before anyone else even notices the game’s changed, chasing ruins nobody’s touched yet, secret realms still sealed shut, dangerous people who haven’t become dangerous yet, all of it because he already bled through this exact path once.
Except knowing what’s coming isn’t the same as controlling it, and the more he pulls strings like a puppeteer, the more the future starts twisting into shapes he never saw the first time around. This world was never gentle to begin with, not with koi turning into dragons at Willow Bank River, not with things sleeping under sealed ground that maybe aren’t sleeping at all.
Xu Zimei gets it better than most, this world’s always belonged to whoever’s willing to be ruthless enough. What he can’t figure out anymore is whether he’s actually escaping what he became, or just walking himself back into becoming it.
