Chapter 114 - 113: Copper Coin
BANG! BANG! BANG!
The violent pounding against the door sent vibrations through the floorboards, shaking dust from the dilapidated wooden rafters overhead.
Lin Yuan stood in the center of the main hall, his breathing shallow. His body, completely devoid of the spiritual energy that usually fortified his flesh, ached with a profound, bone-deep exhaustion. The physical toll of digging his wife’s grave in the freezing sleet the previous day had left his mortal muscles stiff and screaming in protest.
"Open up, Lin Yuan!" a harsh, guttural voice roared from the muddy street outside. "The Black Tiger Gang is here! The grace period for your wife’s medicine is over! Bring out the silver, or we’ll take the deed to this pathetic shack and throw you and your brat out!"
In the hallway behind him, a small, terrified whimper echoed. Lin Yuan turned to see seven-year-old Lin Fan clutching the doorframe, wrapped tightly in a frayed, patched blanket. The boy’s eyes were wide with sheer panic, still raw and red from crying over his mother’s death.
"Stay in the back room, Fan’er," Lin Yuan instructed, his voice low but firm. "I will handle this."
As Lin Yuan turned toward the front doors, a powerful and familiar sense of arrogance surged within him. Then he quickly remembered that this was only an illusion. Within this dream domain, he was nothing more than a mortal.
He was no longer the monster who had once brought the lords of an entire city to their knees.
Yet the thought of a group of mortal street thugs kicking down his door and threatening his family still ignited his anger. In the real world, he would have stepped outside, released a fraction of his Nascent Soul aura, and turned their fragile bodies into a bloody mist.
But he could do none of that here.
Still, that did not mean he should allow himself to become someone anyone could trample upon. If he was truly going to live a mortal life, then he also needed to experience what it meant to stand up for himself and fight back with nothing but his own physical strength.
With a cold, lethal glare, Lin Yuan unbarred the heavy wooden doors and threw them open.
Standing in the freezing morning rain were four burly men. They were clad in thick, crude leather armor, bearing the snarling tiger emblem of the local syndicate on their shoulders. In their hands, they held rusted iron machetes and heavy, iron-studded wooden clubs.
The leader of the group, a scarred, foul-smelling brute named Wang, spat a wad of mucus onto the wooden steps.
"Fifty taels of silver, Master Lin," Wang sneered, tapping his club against his open palm. "That was the price of the ginseng root and the willow-bark extract the apothecary gave you on our credit. Your wife is dead. The debt remains. Pay up."
"Leave," Lin Yuan commanded. His thoughts immediately returned to the Black Tiger Gang in the real world, the very gang he had once owed 200 spirit stones to.
Wang blinked, completely unfazed by Lin Yuan’s glare. Instead, the brute threw his head back and let out a cruel, mocking laugh.
"Are you deaf, or just stupid from grief?" Wang barked, stepping up onto the threshold. He raised his iron-studded club, aiming a casual, brutal swing directly at Lin Yuan’s shoulder.
Lin Yuan’s combat instinct reacted instantaneously. His mind mapped the trajectory of the club flawlessly. In his immortal body, he would have caught the weapon with two fingers and shattered the man’s arm.
But this was not his immortal body.
Relying solely on the martial strength of his mortal physique, Lin Yuan smoothly stepped inside Wang’s guard. He shifted his weight at the perfect moment, using the brute’s own momentum against him before delivering a precise and devastating palm strike directly to the center of Wang’s chest.
Smack!
The technique was perfect. The execution was flawless. But the result was a humiliating reality check.
Because there was absolutely no Spiritual power backing the strike, the impact was severely limited by his frail, exhausted mortal muscles. Wang stumbled backward, gasping as the air was knocked from his lungs, but his ribs did not shatter. Instead, a sharp, blinding spike of agony shot up Lin Yuan’s own forearm. The bones in his mortal wrist groaned in protest, micro-fracturing under the sheer feedback of hitting solid muscle and leather armor.
"You bastard!" Wang roared, recovering quickly and drawing a hunting knife from his belt. "Break his legs!"
The other three thugs surged forward. Lin Yuan ducked under a wild slash from a machete, pivoting on his heel to deliver a sweeping kick to the nearest thug’s knee. The man went down, but Lin Yuan’s supporting leg buckled slightly.
Before Lin Yuan could recover his stance, a heavy wooden staff swung from his blind spot.
CRACK!
The blow caught Lin Yuan squarely in the ribs.
The pain was suffocating, and blindingly intense. It was a sensation he had not truly felt since his early days as an outer city cultivator. Lin Yuan was violently thrown to the side, crashing hard against the floorboards of his own dojo. He gasped for air, clutching his side as the three remaining thugs surrounded him, raising their weapons to deliver a crippling, merciless beating.
As the shadows of the raised clubs fell over him, Lin Yuan’s gaze flicked to the hallway.
Lin Fan was standing there, the blanket dropped to the floor, watching the scene unfold with absolute horror. His father—the man who owned a martial arts school, the man who was supposed to be invincible—was bleeding on the floor, about to be beaten to death.
In that exact moment, the arrogance within Lin Yuan shattered completely.
If he kept fighting this unwinnable battle, his mortal body would be crippled, or worse, killed. And if he died, Lin Fan would be left utterly alone in this cruel, unforgiving world. He would starve in the streets or be sold to a slaver by the Black Tiger Gang.
In that exact moment, something within Lin Yuan changed. He now saw this as a test of whether he could truly understand the helplessness, fear, and desperation that mortals faced every single day.
After transmigrating into this world of cultivation and spending forty-five years within the River of Years Pagoda, Lin Yuan’s mind was far removed from what it had once been.
To truly form a Mortal Heart, one had to become a mortal after spending a lifetime as an immortal. Only by experiencing helplessness, weakness, hardship, and the countless struggles of ordinary life could a cultivator truly understand what it meant to be mortal.
So this is what it means to be mortal...
I can see the danger, yet I cannot erase it with a thought. I can see my son suffering, yet I cannot simply summon a pill to save him.
As a cultivator, I have always stood above these things.
But here, I have to live through them.
I have to find another way.
"Stop!" Lin Yuan shouted, his voice cracking as he forced himself up onto his knees, raising a bruised, trembling hand in surrender. He swallowed the bitterest, most agonizing pill of his entire existence. He bowed his head. "Stop... I will pay."
Wang signaled his men to hold their weapons, a cruel, victorious smirk stretching across his face. "I thought you might see reason, Master Lin. The silver. Now."
Holding his fractured ribs, Lin Yuan slowly stood up. He walked to a loose floorboard near the training dummy, prying it up with his good hand. Beneath it lay a small, dusty wooden box. It contained his entire life’s savings in this simulated reality.
If the memories were correct, this should be where the family kept all their savings.
He then pulled out a small handful of silver fragments and a few dozen copper coins. It was nowhere near fifty taels. Reaching deeper into the box, his hand brushed against a piece of folded parchment. It was the deed to Su Rong’s ancestral wooden loom—the only item of true value she had brought into their marriage, a cherished heirloom she had made him swear to keep for Fan’s future bride.
Lord Zhao’s Dream Dao is truly profound. The emotions I’m feeling right now... this sense of helplessness... these are things I was beginning to forget.
Lin Yuan closed his eyes, the emotional pain of the sacrifice far outweighing the physical agony in his ribs. He pulled the deed out, walking back to the doorway and placing the silver, the copper, and the parchment into Wang’s greedy hands.
Wang inspected the deed, laughing. "An antique loom? Fine. It’s worth a fair bit to the right merchant. Combined with this pitiful silver, it buys you exactly one month, Lin Yuan. One month to produce the remaining thirty taels, or we come back and take the school."
To add a final insult, Wang picked a single, dirty copper coin from the pile and flicked it casually at Lin Yuan’s chest. It clattered against the wooden floorboards.
"Buy your brat a steamed bun. He looks entirely pathetic," Wang sneered.
The thugs turned and walked away, disappearing into the rain, laughing as they went.
Lin Yuan stood in the open doorway, the freezing wind biting into his soaked clothes. He turned around slowly. Lin Fan was still standing in the hallway, his small hands balled into fists, looking at his father with a heartbreaking mixture of fear, confusion, and deep disappointment.
Lin Yuan couldn’t meet his son’s eyes. He felt a crushing, suffocating blanket of shame wrap around his heart.
He slowly knelt on the floorboards and picked up the single, dirty copper coin Wang had thrown at him.
Lin Yuan stared at the tiny piece of metal resting in his bruised, trembling palm. In the real world, he possessed a spatial ring overflowing with mountains of spirit stones, divine artifacts, and the absolute power to rival countless cultivators. Yet here, stripped of his cultivation, this pathetic, singular piece of copper held a terrifying meaning.
This coin represented a single bowl of thin rice porridge. It represented the exact difference between his son surviving the night or succumbing to starvation. It was a humiliating reality check.
This is the weight of mortal dust, Lin Yuan thought, his thumb rubbing the rough edge of the coin. The Great Dao cannot be eaten. It cannot pay a debt. In this life, I am entirely bound by the crushing, desperate anxiety of survival.
He slowly stood up, pushing through the agonizing pain in his ribs. He walked past Lin Fan, offering the boy a weak, forced smile that did not reach his exhausted eyes, and headed toward the small kitchen in the back of the dojo.
He opened the wooden cupboards. They were completely bare. There was no rice. There was no dried meat. There was only a hollow, echoing emptiness. The desperate responsibility of providing for a dependent settled heavily onto his shoulders.
Lin Yuan walked over to the rain barrel, washing the blood and mud from his bruised face with the freezing water. He stripped off his torn tunic and put on his faded martial arts robes, wrapping a thick cloth sash tightly around his torso to bind his fractured ribs.
He returned to the main hall. He took a deep breath, ignoring the stabbing pain in his chest, and threw both of the main doors of the Martial art School wide open to the bustling street.
He had to recruit paying students by sunset, or he and his son would starve.