Chapter 1

"Feeling so dizzy..."

Leiwen, disoriented by a high fever, struggled to maintain his consciousness. His mind was a chaotic mess. What he saw was a mountain forest by a river at dusk, with the river water, rushing down from the mountain, continuously washing over the pebbles on the shore.

The river and a dirt road lined with smoothed pebbles ran straight, dividing the dense forest into two halves. Looking down the mountain, the end of the road was a magnificent golden city built halfway up the mountain.

The City of Gold!

It was exactly the same City of Gold as the beginner area in the game from years ago.

Seeing this scene, Leiwen was a bit stunned—last night, he was still a top player in the ultra-realistic game "Aotu World," fighting fiercely.

He clearly remembered the last scene he saw: under a pitch-black sky, a fierce wind howled, and countless undead poured out endlessly from the godly realm of the lich god Vizhalen: skeletal armies in the tens of thousands, necromancers surrounded by mountains of corpses and bones, bone dragons and skeletal griffins soaring through the sky...

The undead army was boundless, like a tide that could turn the entire world white. Their only target was Leiwen, who had been betrayed by his leader, the god of murder, Cyric. He couldn't remember how many skeletons he had shattered, but eventually, a barrage of disintegration rays, denser than a rainstorm, overwhelmed him, drowning the helpless Leiwen. After the blinding light that could burn the retina, the world turned pitch black...

In Leiwen's imagination, with one last chance at reincarnation, the scene he would see upon opening his eyes would be: a lifeless wasteland, gray-black rocks scattered across the plain, and in the distance, a battlefield strewn with corpses, with countless pale blue ghost fires drifting over the silent battlefield. In the center of his vision, two screens would play a highlight reel of his 'brief life' in the game.

Then, he would see the ancient god of death, Yegor, with his damned skull face.

Yegor, the steward of the King of the Dead, was a god of fatalism responsible for recording the ultimate fate of all souls. He never got angry, always maintaining a cold and overly formal demeanor. His voice sounded like a chilling echo in a long-forgotten tomb. The only thing the King of the End of All Things cared about and worked on was recording the orderly flow of fate in the world, as the world slowly sank into death.

Finally, Yegor would offer several options for reincarnation...

But the imagined scene did not appear before Leiwen's eyes.

What he saw was the City of Gold, which should have been destroyed by a volcanic eruption in the year 1318 of the Aotu calendar.

Leiwen subconsciously tried to get up, but a sudden, unmistakable weakness washed over his body.

Leiwen was stunned—wait! Am I still in the game?

Even though "Aotu World" was touted as the most highly realistic consciousness synchronization game in human history, there were still many things that could easily reveal that he was in a game.

For example, the river only had a few types of waves, the trees in the game had only about fifty different shapes, the negative effects only caused visual blurriness and physical heaviness, and the dampness of early spring only had a monotonous moisture without the scent of life...

But what Leiwen saw now was different.

The river's waves were constantly changing.

No two pebbles had the same shape.

The branches swayed naturally in the wind.

And the wound on his left hand, which was slightly rotten, had already attracted flies...

Everything was too real, making Leiwen feel as if he were in a hallucination. He hoped that if he closed his eyes, the hallucination would disappear, and when he opened them again, he would find himself back in his cozy doghouse at home.

The hallucination did not disappear.

Perhaps the real hallucination was the one in his mind.

He was now quietly lying by the river, his lower body being washed by the river water, and he felt intense pain in his left side and back. Leiwen couldn't help but pause, feeling carefully. The pain in his back was just a flesh wound, but his left side... Leiwen subconsciously used his right arm to support himself, turned over, and touched his left side. A heart-wrenching pain interrupted his movement, and he barely managed to suppress a scream.

Big trouble, his rich gaming experience told him that his ribs were broken, and a piece of the broken rib had pierced into his lung. Leiwen was sure he had internal bleeding, and worse, the blood was accumulating in his left lung. If left untreated, he would eventually die.

No, to be precise, being alive at all was a miracle.

"Grumble" His flat stomach protested.

He also felt a high fever on his forehead.

Well, fatal injuries, hunger, fever... it turned out all these things were his!

Leiwen pressed his right hand on his left side, found the broken bone, and with a grit of his teeth, he realigned the bone with excruciating pain. He should have let out a piercing scream, but the blood gushing from his lungs choked his throat. He coughed up several mouthfuls of blood before his breathing returned to normal.

Internal bleeding couldn't be ignored, or he would die.

Leiwen began to focus his consciousness inward. He consciously slowed his breathing, feeling the pulse of blood with each heartbeat. Slowly, he expanded his awareness from his heart to his lungs, continuously meditating to tighten the muscles around the area, compressing all the blood vessels, forcing them to close, and making the blood clot to stop the internal bleeding...

This was a famous and difficult legendary skill in the game—Self-Stabilization.

Under intense concentration, Leiwen succeeded. The intense focus also made him ignore a small voice...

His injuries finally stabilized, and he needed to heal as soon as possible, or his condition would not last long.

Now, Leiwen finally had a moment to think.

"Why am I here?"

"Did I encounter a system upgrade when I died?"

"Is this reincarnation too poor? The game company promised that reincarnation would only lower one level at most?"

"Before my first death, I was a 109-level Shadow Master, and before my second death, I was a 118-level Divine Assassin, a member of the God's Fang. The game classified levels into tiers based on total profession levels, with 20 levels per tier, from low to high: Iron, Bronze, Silver, Gold, Legendary, and Holy. Both of my characters were Holy! Even if reincarnated as a Legendary, I should have at least a Bronze body, immune to low-level negative states like fever..."

"How did I end up as a 0-level, unclassed kid in the small village of Aras, near the City of Gold?"

Leiwen muttered to himself. When he mentioned Aras, he repeated the name over and over.

Yes! He remembered.

His name was Leiwen, a 15.5-year-old elf with pointed ears. From as far back as he could remember, he had lived in the small village of Aras with his father Robert and his 13-year-old sister Karin. They were a farming and hunting family. Although he didn't look like his father or sister, it didn't affect the harmony of the family.

Two nights ago, a sudden goblin army destroyed the entire village, and his father's fate was unknown. The few survivors who managed to escape hid in the village's only church, waiting for rescue. A day passed, and no rescue came. Last night, the goblins attacked again, and the church fell in the early hours of the morning. The scattered villagers fled their homes, heading towards the City of Gold, which they considered safe.

During the escape from the goblin pursuit, Leiwen and Karin jumped into the cold river. Leiwen lost consciousness in the water, and it was Karin who desperately pulled him out of the current. Without Karin, there would be no Leiwen now.

No!

Wait!

The Leiwen in the water had already died, and Karin had only saved his body.

I am Leiwen! An ordinary young man from China. My name is Lei Wen, not the Western name Raven.

"No! Both Leiwen are you!" A mysterious voice in his mind said.

Two completely different lives, two unrelated memories, merged in his mind like white milk and black chocolate in a blender. After a hum, they combined into a single brown color, losing their original hues.

He wanted to shout to the sky, "This is too absurd!"

But he didn't. Shouting wouldn't change anything. From the other memory, Leiwen finally understood what had happened: he had crossed over!

A death in the game had brought his soul to this world, identical to the game "Aotu World." More precisely, he had entered the weak, injured, and feverish body of a dying person, merging with part of the soul of the deceased Leiwen.

Leiwen's mind was still chaotic, and the pain was intense. He clenched his fists as hard as he could, feeling his nails dig into his palms, but it did little to ease the pain in his head.

He could clearly feel the deceased's attachment to life, his unwillingness to part with his sister Karin, his hope for the future, and his desire to become stronger. These emotions now belonged to Leiwen as well, leaving him at a loss.

The chaos in his mind began to cool down.

"The high-level player Leiwen in the game is me."

"The young Leiwen living in the Aotu World is also me."

Leiwen began to accept reality. In China, he was an orphan with no friends and no attachments. He played games and waited for the day he would graduate and be unemployed. Honestly, there was nothing to miss. If given another choice, he might have chosen to directly cross over into the game world...

What?!

Suddenly, a thought like a lightning bolt in the dark night split the fog in Leiwen's mind.

According to the memories of the deceased Leiwen, it was March of the Year of the Dusk (1314 Aotu Calendar), the start of the game. From 1314 to 1318, the game's official history called it the First Era, and players referred to it as the Turbulent Years. The game's history had progressed to the Fifth Year of the Fourth Era!

If this world developed strictly according to the game's history, four years after the start of the Turbulent Years, there would be three years of the Year of Destruction, followed by two years of the Year of Voyages, and finally, the Year of War in the New World.

A wave of uncontrollable excitement and joy spread through Leiwen's body.

If everything was true, then in the next few decades, Leiwen would be more prescient than a prophet and more divine than a charlatan.

In the game, Leiwen had the personal skill "Photographic Memory" and clearly remembered every stage of the game's progression. As a穿越者 (穿越者 means "穿越者" in Chinese, which translates to "穿越者" in English, but in this context, it means "穿越者" or "穿越者"), no one knew what would happen better than he did.

In four years and two months, the era of destruction would begin. The thrones of the gods would fall from heaven to earth, and the once-high gods would walk the land as Holy Domain saints, seeking to establish earthly kingdoms.

Then, in three years, the entire Aotu continent would collapse due to the disappearance of the supreme god "Ao" and the withering of the World Tree's branches. All the demi-planes attached to the Aotu continent, including the heavens, hells, the Abyss, and the elemental planes, would suffer.

The only way to survive was to excavate the floating stones hidden in the Aotu continent, use divine power to build floating continents that could accommodate divine kingdoms, move believers and valuable items onto them, and follow the guidance of the Mother River of the Stars to travel through the planes, finding another branch of the World Tree.

Leiwen clearly remembered that only thirty-six floating continents successfully set sail, and only twelve of them reached the new world, where the exhausted gods and their people would face another pantheon determined to defend their homeland...

Leiwen was dazed. In his previous life, he was a high-level player, but he was not among the top players. Because he leveled up too slowly and had too little savings, he missed the chance to ignite his divine spark alone, leading to his two deaths.

Now, in this new life, he had entered the Aotu World without the chance to resurrect twice. Was he going to live a mediocre life again? How could he face his second true life?

A thousand thoughts raced through his mind, but in reality, this second life seemed to be on the verge of ending.

Worse, Leiwen inadvertently recalled fragments of the attacks from the previous two nights and suddenly realized a major, nightmare-like problem.

Taking a deep breath, Leiwen shook Karin awake and shouted, "Wake up! Hurry, we have to leave! We can't stay here!"

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