Chapter 1 | Dragon Last Breath
The first thing he tasted was blood.
Xu Tianlong’s eyes snapped open, and copper flooded his mouth. The taste was thick, warm, wrong. His body convulsed before his mind caught up, chest locking, spine arching off a mattress that felt like straw and stone.
’What—’
The cough that followed tore through him. Something dark and viscous splattered onto his chin. In the faint glow of a dying oil lamp, it looked black.
’Poison.’
The word surfaced not from thought but from instinct, from a body that knew it was dying. His meridians burned. Every channel where qi should have flowed felt like it had been replaced with molten lead. The poison wasn’t just killing him. It was corroding his cultivation from the inside.
’This isn’t my body.’
The realization hit harder than the convulsions. Ethan Cole, that was his name, his real name, the name of a man who’d lived on Earth, who’d gone to sleep in a cramped apartment with traffic noise outside his window. And now that man was drowning inside a stranger’s corpse.
Memories that didn’t belong to him crashed through his skull. A city called Thousand Pines. A clan named Xu. A father whose eyes held more disappointment than love. A fiancée whose gaze could freeze water.
Xu Tianlong. The clan’s shame. Body Tempering, Layer 2. 22 years old and already a failure.
He needed to decide who he was later, clawed at the mattress, trying to push himself upright. His arms shook. His fingers were pale, the nails tinged purple. The lamp’s flame wavered as if even the fire knew something was wrong in this room.
The poison was spreading. He could feel it crawling toward his heart, slow and patient, like it had all the time in the world.
’I just got here. I’m not dying again.’
He didn’t know how he knew that. Didn’t know what "again" meant. But the thought crystallized into something harder than fear, sharper than pain.
Then the sound came in his mind.
It started as a chime, pure, crystalline, impossible. The kind of sound that didn’t belong in a dying man’s bedroom. The kind of sound that rewrote reality just by existing.
[Ding!]
A panel bloomed in front of his eyes. Translucent. Blue as glacial ice. It hung in the air like a window into somewhere else.
[Genesis Harem System Activated]
He stared at the words, the convulsions momentarily forgotten. Genesis. Harem. System. The words meant something on Earth, games, novels, escapism. But this wasn’t a screen. This was real. The panel cast blue light across his bloodstained fingers.
[Lethal Poison Detected — Spreading to Heart Meridian]
[Time to Fatality: 4 Minutes]
4 minutes. His heart hammered, accelerating the poison. Stupid. Panic was making it worse.
’Think’
[System Intervention Available]
[Amplification Protocol Ready]
[Convert Poison → Cultivation Energy?]
[Yes / No]
He didn’t hesitate. Couldn’t. His hand moved before thought, finger touching the glowing [Yes] like it was the only real thing in the universe, but it just went through.
The reaction was immediate.
Heat. Not the sluggish, venomous heat of the poison, but something clean. Something that burned without destroying. The fire started in his chest and spread outward, through his meridians, through his bones, through every channel the poison had corrupted. It didn’t hurt. It repaired.
The dark stain on his chin began to fade. His fingers, purple at the nails moments ago, flushed pink. The pain in his chest unwound like a knot being pulled apart thread by thread. His lungs, which had felt like wet paper, expanded fully for the first time since he’d woken up.
[Amplification Complete]
[Poison Converted → +1,000 Cultivation Energy]
[Body Tempering Layer 3 Achieved]
The panel flickered, updating. Layer 3. He’d jumped an entire layer in few minutes, no, in seconds. The meridians that had been corroded moments ago now hummed with energy. Weak energy, barely a trickle compared to what this world’s true cultivators could command, but it was his. Clean. Alive.
He sat up.
His body obeyed. No shaking. No convulsions. The silk robes, blue, faded, expensive once but now worn thin, clung to his chest, damp with sweat and the last traces of expelled poison. He swung his legs over the edge of the bed. The straw mattress creaked beneath him.
’I’m alive.’
’I’m really alive.’
He raised a hand, flexing the fingers. Pale skin. Long fingers. A small scar on the knuckle, a childhood fall, tripping over a stone in the compound, his mother’s gentle hands cleaning the wound.
His mother was dead. The body remembered that, too.
He pushed the thought aside. Grief was a luxury for someone who wasn’t few minutes dead.
The blue panel still floated in the air, waiting. He’d read enough webnovels on Earth to know the basics. System. Cheat. The thing that made a weak protagonist strong. But this one was different. Genesis Harem System. The name itself made him pause.
’Harem.’
Before he could think further, the panel shimmered. New text appeared, each line materializing in crisp, unhurried sequence.
[Ding!]
[System Scan Complete]
[First Genesis Harem Candidate Detected]
[Location: Within 100 Meters]
[Direction: Northeast Pavilion]
[Status: Unawakened]
His pulse quickened, not from poison this time, but from something sharper. Curiosity. Hunger. A pull he didn’t fully understand.
100 meters. Northeast Pavilion.
The body’s memory supplied the answer before his mind could ask the question. The northeast pavilion of the Xu clan compound didn’t belong to servants. It didn’t belong to guards or elders or visiting merchants.
It belonged to her.
Lin Yueyao. His fiancée. The woman who’d rather see him dead than married to her.
He stared at the glowing panel, at the words that promised something he hadn’t asked for but suddenly, desperately wanted to understand. Outside the paper window, the first gray light of dawn was bleeding into the sky. Birds stirred in the courtyard. The city of Thousand Pines was waking up.
And a woman who despised him was about to become the first piece of a game he didn’t yet know how to play.