The Ancestral Ring

Blue Star, Capital Hospital.

Shen Jingchuan lay slumped beside the hospital bed, his head resting on his arm. Days of keeping watch had left him utterly exhausted, with dark circles beneath his eyes. Even in his sleep, his brow remained furrowed.

Shen Jianguo slowly opened his eyes in the bed.

The old man looked to be in his seventies. Illness had tormented him until he was little more than skin and bones. His cloudy gaze drifted down and settled on his son's youthful profile.

He had become a father late in life, and he had always cherished his only child more than his own life. Seeing how exhausted his son was, his bony fingers trembled. He summoned all his strength to lift his hand half an inch and brush it faintly against Shen Jingchuan's hair.

"Dad?"

Shen Jingchuan jolted awake, his eyes still bloodshot. As soon as he saw that his father's eyes were open, he pushed himself upright, his voice hoarse and rough:

"Dad, you're awake? How do you feel? I'll get the doctor—"

Shen Jianguo slowly shook his head. Only a faint, breathy sound came from his throat:

"No need. I have a few things to tell you."

He struggled to raise his right hand, trying to pull the brass-colored ring he had worn all his life from his left ring finger. But halfway up, his arm gave out and fell heavily back onto the sheet.

"Xiaochuan..." His voice was as faint as a thread of breath. "Take the ring... off."

Shen Jingchuan's heart sank. A sense of foreboding clenched around it.

He lifted his father's thin hand and gently worked the brass-colored ring over his knuckle. Its etched patterns had been worn smooth and shiny, and it still held the old man's warmth.

"This ring has been passed down in our family."

Shen Jianguo kept his eyes fixed on his son's face. "I haven't amounted to much, and I haven't left you anything... I'll leave you this, something to remember me by."

"Dad, what are you saying?!" Shen Jingchuan's nose stung, and his eyes instantly reddened. His hand tightened around the ring. "You'll get better. The doctors said so—"

Shen Jianguo simply looked at him, his gaze gentle and weary.

"You're the one I worry about most." His voice grew softer and softer. "Your mother left us early... From now on, you'll be all alone... Hurry and find a..."

Shen Jianguo strained to take one last look at his son, his gaze brimming with all the love and tenderness he had never given him enough of in this lifetime.

His eyelids slowly closed.

"Beep—"

The sharp, unbroken tone suddenly pierced the silence. The curve on the monitor flattened into a straight line, never to rise or fall again.

Shen Jingchuan froze.

He did not wail or weep aloud. He only clenched his teeth, his shoulders trembling uncontrollably.

Scalding tears fell onto the back of his hand. He remembered his father, then in his fifties, carrying him on his back and running to the hospital when he had a fever as a child; he remembered his father scrimping and saving to scrape together his tuition and buy him new clothes... Scene after scene...

The man who had cherished him for more than twenty years was gone, just like that.

Three days later, after taking care of all the funeral arrangements, Shen Jingchuan dragged his exhausted body home.

It was a two-bedroom apartment assigned by his father's work unit, in a residential building for employees' families at an old factory on the outskirts of the Capital. The plaster on the walls was mottled and peeling.

The furniture had all been in use for decades. The corners of the sofa were worn and fraying, and the spider plant his father had tended while he was alive still sat on the windowsill, its leaves already wilted.

The empty apartment was so quiet it made his heart sink. From now on, he was the only one left in the world.

Days of grief and sleeplessness had left his head aching. He had just braced himself against the coffee table, intending to sit down and rest for a while, when his nose suddenly grew warm and blood poured out without warning.

Shen Jingchuan hurriedly raised a hand to cover it, reaching for the tissues in the coffee table drawer with the other.

Blood streamed through his fingers. As the warm blood flowed over the ancestral ring he wore on his index finger, the brass-colored band seemed to come alive, absorbing every last drop that ran down his finger.

Shen Jingchuan suddenly felt a slight pressure between his brows, as though an invisible thread had firmly connected his consciousness to the copper ring. Somewhere in the unseen, he simply understood—the ring had recognized him as its master.

Startled, he concentrated and followed that connection into the ring. An independent space actually appeared in his mind.

It was not large, about five or six meters across. All four walls gave off a faint, soft glow, like a small sealed room conjured out of thin air.

"Storage space."

The consciousness in Shen Jingchuan's mind told him so, and his heart began pounding uncontrollably. Wasn't this something only cultivators could have?

Following the method the ring had shown him, he picked up the glass half-filled with water on the coffee table, concentrated on it, and thought, Store.

His vision blurred, and the glass vanished from the coffee table in an instant.

When he looked into the space in his consciousness again, the glass was standing steadily on its floor.

Release.

He repeated the word silently in his mind.

With a soft tap, the glass landed steadily back on the coffee table, just as he had intended.

Shen Jingchuan picked up the bottle of mineral water beside him, the keys on the table, and the remote on the sofa, testing each one in turn. As long as he touched an object, he could store it with a thought and take it out whenever he wished, placing it wherever he wanted.

It really was a storage space, and this was a ring that could carry things around with him.

Wild joy rushed to his head. His father's treatment had cost several hundred thousand yuan in all. He had borrowed from every relative and friend he could, and he was still up to his ears in debt. Could he use the ring's space to make money?

He stared at the ring. The first idea that sprang to mind was carrying goods across borders—customs would never find them...

But the moment the thought appeared, he stamped it out himself.

No.

However badly he needed money, he could not touch anything illegal. Smuggling, tax evasion, drug trafficking—they might look like quick money, but one step onto that path and he would plunge into a bottomless abyss.

His father had taught him from childhood to walk straight and sit upright. He could hardly take the ancestral ring the old man had left him and use it to do things that could not bear the light of day.

Frowning, he paced a couple of steps around the room, turning the matter over and over in his mind.

If he stayed away from illegal work, what could the space do? Freight hauling? A space this small could not hold much cargo.

However he thought about it, aside from breaking the law, there really did not seem to be any way to make money with it.

"Is it just going to be an oversized suitcase?"

Just then, a layer of warm golden light rose from the copper ring's surface, brighter and softer than before. Fine traces of light also shimmered faintly within its worn patterns.

The ring's glow slowly receded, and it became an unremarkable copper-colored ring once more.

Shen Jingchuan clearly felt more information flood into his mind.

It was not just for storage.

The ring could actually take him to another world. An unfamiliar world entirely unlike the modern one.

Shen Jingchuan stood rooted to the spot, his whole body stiff. It took him a long while to come back to his senses. Could it be a world of cultivation? Is it really that incredible?

He slapped his thigh. If it was true, a storage space combined with travel between two worlds? That would be incredible.

He had just been worrying that he could not make money with the space, but what if he could travel between two worlds? With two worlds whose products, prices, and civilizations were completely different, there was so much he could do between them.

Is this real?

He steadied his heaving breath and, following the method the ring had passed on to him, calmed his mind and focused all his thoughts on the copper ring on his finger. Deep in his heart, he silently said, Travel.