Divine Brilliance

Chapter One: Half-Monster Zong Shou

“I probably really time-traveled—”

Within the exquisitely decorated carriage, Zong Shou looked at the circular mirror in front of him expressionlessly.

The image in the mirror was obviously an underage teen. He was around thirteen years old, and his face was ashen white. However, his five basic features formed a rarely seen excellence; he was breathtakingly handsome.

He had a pair of almond-shaped eyes like a Phoenix, glowing brightly with many colors. At this moment, those eyes were filled with bitterness and helplessness.

Not long ago, he still had a normal and common face, the type that one would not be seen if thrown into a crowd. He was working as the manager of a library in one of the small countries of the Cloud World, sitting around and waiting for his turn to die. His identity could not be any more normal.

However, after he woke up from a dream, he found that his body had become one of utmost handsomeness. Although it was sickly and weak, it was undoubtedly top-class in terms of looks. Even in his last life, those famous male celebrities were far from this level. If he had to point out a lacking aspect, it would be his temperament.

But at this moment Zhou Shou did not feel any happiness or delight; he only felt worried and uncertain.

He was like a fish swimming freely and living however it wanted in the ocean, suddenly arriving on land.

Everything around him, apart from feeling unfamiliar, suffocating, and filled with surprises, gave him a sense of fear and loneliness.

Unwilling to give up, Zong Shou pinched his skin hard, and felt a sharp pain instantly. Naturally, he did not find any scars on his face from plastic surgery.

“I feel pain, so I shouldn’t be in a dream, right? But what is my identity now? And where the heck am I?”

‘Zong Shou’ was the name in the memory of his current body. In his last life, he had another name, but living in the present and in this place, that previous name no longer held any meaning to him.
He muttered a few sentences to himself before sighing and turning away his line of sight. His chest was bloated with a feeling of despair, and he had totally given up hope of waking up from the dream or returning to where he came from.

Actually, many days had passed since he appeared in this body. Pretty much every time he woke up, he would repeat the previous series of actions. Today was already the seventh day.
Looking at the decoration style of the carriage, it seemed to be from the ancient times… but also didn’t.

Opening up the blinds and looking outside, he was faced with endless wild plains, green and brimming with life, making one’s heart feel comfortable and relaxed. The air was refreshing, totally different from the polluted environment of his era.

If one looked down, one would realize that although this horse carriage had wheels, it was hanging in mid-air three inches above the ground. The horned horses at the front, sixteen in all, were stepping on the air, proceeding forward with an up and down motion.

As a result, although the carriage was big – in fact, just the carriage alone was forty square meters – they were able to travel over any terrain like it was flat land, regardless of how complicated the geography was.

At the current moment, there was no one driving the carriage, so it rushed forwards in a straight line into the distance.

On both sides of the carriage were some knife cuts and blade marks, if one paid close attention to it.

Zong Shou felt a little dizzy as he sat weakly on the soft, swan-feather-padded mattress.
The horses were tamed elite beasts, and the carriage was a Cloud Crossing Carriage. According to his knowledge, these two items only appeared twelve thousand years ago in the Cloud World, and they should have been really old antiques.

With a slight thought, he recalled a series of memories appeared.

They were all broken fragments and incomplete parts. Among them were some words and many faces. Suddenly, they were cultivating; suddenly, they were studying. Witnessing life and death battles, seeing people flying through and tunneling into the ground. There was also a giant mountain protruding into the clouds, and an unimaginably huge school that occupied half of an island within a lake.

It all felt strange yet familiar to him; he also felt a slight tinge of fear. These types of feelings were extremely complicated and weird.

Lastly, the only perfectly kept series of memories were located in the deepest parts of his brain. There were numerous magical words, which combined together to form a complete book.
He was really familiar with these words, and one could even say that he knew them like the back of his hand. When he was a student, he had studied them a lot, and he had even written a thesis specifically on this topic.

“Indefinite Spirit Emperor Art, such devilish words still exist. Is this place ten thousand-odd years ago, where martial cultivators and spirit masters prospered? These features in my memory shouldn’t be wrong…”

Thinking about the chants those spirit masters pulled off every day in the bits and pieces of memory he had of the school, as well as all sorts of spiritual energy, the corner of his lips could not help but twitch. However, his face still remained in a daze.

It wasn’t that he had never seen similar scenes before, but they were all in games!

The Cloud World in the future prohibited fighting. With the spiritual energy in the land drying up, only some special regions known as Shrines had thicker energy. Cultivation started to fall behind. With the appearance of various machines, technology started to rise up.

However, the people of the Cloud World still inherited the genes of their ancestors, to continue to strive to become stronger, to fight against Heaven and Earth.

Unable to cultivate normally, they could only make up for that in the virtual game worlds.
The most famous one was a virtual reality MMORPG known as God Emperor. It was said that they had hired all the famous martial artists of the era and hundreds of historians. They were able to recreate the era of thirteen thousand years ago. It was the time before the God Emperor descended, where heroes and legends were common. Martial arts and chanting cultivation methods proceeded as a part of daily life, and everything was exceedingly close to reality.
Oh yes. He remembered that in the last life, his last bit of consciousness was within God Emperor.
The battle of the Seven Emperors of the Cloud World. He had one sword, challenging groups of heroes. However, at the final moment, his body suddenly felt a current, and he lost consciousness.
After he woke up, he found himself in a different body. Everything in front of him was not the familiar world from before.

So was he currently in the game, or was he truly in an era thirteen thousand years in the past?
His brain felt dizzy once more. Zong Shou decided to put down everything and not think about it anymore.

Anyways, he had nothing to do inside the carriage. Zong Shou took out a meter-long green steel sword and started to practice his sword technique in the relatively large carriage.

His footsteps advanced and retreated, twisting and turning. With the movement of his body, the sword gleamed brightly.

Like in his last life, each sword stance, each footstep was accurate to the extreme. It could basically be called perfect.

However, after such a basic sword technique, Zong Shou was panting in just eight minutes. Cold sweat dripped down his entire body.

The image training of the sword technique could not help but go off pattern, and he only relied on his will and unwillingness to admit defeat to hold on and not fall to the ground.

Only after he used up all the remaining energy in his body did this stop. He panted heavily as he sat on the mattress.

When his focus dissipated, he instantly felt a sharp burning pain pierce his bones, muscles, limbs, and lungs.

He was not doing this because he felt bored. Rather, it was due to the uneasiness he felt. This world and his situation left him sensing danger and feeling nervous. He eagerly wanted to obtain some strength, so that he at least had the ability to protect his life.

In the game during his last life, he trained the martial artist basics to the ancestor level. In the entire Cloud World, only around a thousand people had a similar achievement.

The sword theories, the sword changes; he had grasped all of it. What he needed to do now was to make this body remember it, and make it a reflex action.

The only problem was that his current body was simply horrible. He could only last for the time it took to brew tea doing such basic training, and his stamina was less than half of a normal person’s.

The part that depressed him most was that those basic internal cultivation techniques could not be trained at all.

It wasn’t that Zong Shou’s body was truly weak. He even exceeded normal people by a wide marge in terms of strength, explosiveness, flexibility, and the like. His spiritual roots and bone structure could even be considered that of a top-rate genius. However, he just felt extremely weak for some reason.

After seven days of testing around, Zong Shou had an idea that it probably had something to do with his meridians. Being a half-human and half-monster – a human/fox mix – resulted in his handsome face, but it also caused him to possess a weak physique.

It was nothing surprising. After all, be it his father’s race or his mother’s race, they both had exceptional histories.

“I am still not sure about the features of my human blood. But this monster bloodline obviously belongs to the Seven-tailed Fox. In the entire Cloud World, less than a hundred people have this bloodline! It would be great if one side suppressed the other. However, both bloodlines are of equal level. In the Cloud World, regardless of the era, everyone learns martial arts. Even an underaged teen would be able to open up a meridian. An unassuming civilian might be skilled in martial arts. However, to be like me, having zero internal strength and no ability to fight back, it’s simply too rare…”

Lying on the mattress, the thoughts that Zong Shou had forcefully suppressed rose once more.

In his thoughts, he remembered those series of magical texts in the depths of his mind.
The Indefinite Spirit Emperor Art also had an Indefinite Killing Fist and a Fish into Dragon Transformation; they were both secret martial art techniques.

Moreover, regarding this Indefinite Spirit Emperor Art, Zong Shou always felt that he had heard those words somewhere. However, he simply could not recall where.

“Top class secret art, and it actually has both a fist technique and a body technique. A body having two types of top class bloodlines. The identity of this person definitely isn’t simple. Is he a distinguished person in the Cloud World? Is this Zong Shou from an aristocratic Family? Surnamed Zong? Did he come from the Sky Fox Zong Family that was wiped out? Who knows why, but that name feels really familiar. Oh yes, there were also two servants…”

When he thought of the two people who had traveled together with him for these seven days but were currently not present, Zong Shou could not help but feel dizzy once more.

With how out of the ordinary those two were, his status probably exceeded what he imagined.
Thinking about how the world in the game became reality, and how he was trapped within it, Zong Shou really could not believe it.

Just as he felt his head hurting, a whistling sound spread out from outside the carriage. Zong Shou frowned and looked out through the window.

He saw a girl in a colored skirt moving over. Although she was walking, her speed exceeded the sixteen horses. She was also dragging the corpse of a giant beast in her hands.

Seeing Zong Shou look over, the girl immediately raised her head and smiled sweetly. She had extraordinarily beautiful looks, picture-perfect, and at the sides of her head were a pair of really cute white cat ears. This was one of the two servants he had in this world when he woke up: Su Chuxue!

Behind her was a burly man. He was the coachman, Yin Yang. He was three meters tall, and his whole body was covered with muscles, like he was smelted from steel.

Yin Yang emitted a majestic aura. His footsteps were neither slow nor fast, but each one covered a long distance. His squarish face was calm and solemn like water, but beneath it, one could see hints of worry.