The Transmigrator

In a drafty room with a huge hole in the roof, so dilapidated it looked more like a ruin than a home, Feng Xue leaned against a wall that was at least still sturdy. Dressed in a white robe in the style of Assassin's Creed, he gripped a short knife while cold sweat trickled down his temple.

Outside the flimsy wooden door, cries of battle and screams rose and fell. Even just hearing the sounds, he could imagine the carnage in the street.

Fortunately, Feng Xue wasn't one of the people being killed or doing the killing.

Unfortunately, he couldn't guarantee he wouldn't end up joining them.

He'd been transported to this strange world three days ago, and hadn't even figured out its basic circumstances, let alone fully understood the abilities of his Golden Finger.

He could drink water, but even after three days without it, he wouldn't feel thirsty. He could eat, but even after three days without food, he wouldn't feel hungry. In that sense, it wouldn't be wrong to say Feng Xue wasn't even alive anymore.

He even wondered if his tastes in his past life had been too unconventional, and he'd been sent to this hell after death as punishment!

That's right. Hell was the most immediate impression this world had made on him.

Ever since he'd inexplicably transmigrated into a garbage dump and been met with the scavenger's response, "What's so surprising about transmigration? Hurry up and get out of my way," he'd been surrounded by one baffling thing after another.

He only knew that this place was called the Landfill Area. He had no idea whether that meant this garbage dump, the surrounding slums, the city where the slums were located, or perhaps the entire world.

But he knew that just two hours after arriving, he'd seen people fight to the death over a piece of dog shit they'd dug out of a garbage heap. More than a dozen had died, and only one survived.

It wasn't a figure of speech. It was actual dog shit—well, Feng Xue didn't know what had left it, but it was definitely shit!

Later, he picked up some things that looked somewhat useful, though not particularly, and traded them for five pieces of dried bran ration harder than bricks. He risked nearly breaking his teeth to force down a few bites, only to discover that people here didn't use their mouths to "eat" at all. And while trying to learn how they did it, he was tricked out of one of his bricks by the guy who'd offered to demonstrate.

The awkward part was that the "nutrition" one brick provided was only enough to keep him in this world for a day. And now it was already the third day.

That meant that if he couldn't find a way to earn money by tomorrow, he'd completely disappear for lack of sustenance. On the second day after transmigrating, Feng Xue had been lucky enough to witness the entire process as someone vanished on an execution platform outside Garbage Mountain.

The heart-rending wails, the body slowly withering and collapsing in on itself before turning to smoke and disappearing, had kept Feng Xue, a man from modern society, awake all night.

"Maybe tomorrow I'll be just like those people outside, making one last desperate gamble to survive?"

Feng Xue glanced at the icon in the upper-left corner of his vision and sighed helplessly. He did have a Golden Finger that came with his transmigration, but he still hadn't figured out everything it could do.

This thing, which resembled a game interface, couldn't store items, issue quests, or do anything like track achievements. It didn't even have the most basic instructions.

It passively provided an ability somewhat like a game's appraisal skill, but the information it gave was only two lines. One showed the item's [Name], and the other was labeled [Element], displaying words such as [Weapon], [Tool], and [Food], along with a string of garbled code.

It did have two active abilities, though: [Smelt] and [Reforge]. The former consumed energy called [Shi], while the latter showed only a grid with a crosshair in the center, resembling a game inventory but unable to hold anything, and a gray, unselectable [Confirm] button. He didn't even know what it would consume.

As for [Shi]...it was the very "nutrition" people needed to survive in this world.

[Shi] was measured in "towers," which was also the basic unit of currency here. A person consumed 100 towers of [Shi] a day, while each use of [Smelt] cost 5 towers. In other words, every smelting attempt took 72 minutes off his life.

Of course, Feng Xue had gritted his teeth and spent 5 towers to test this Golden Finger. But he hadn't gotten the answer he wanted, because it had told him—

[Smelt failed.]

He wanted to tell himself that the failure was just a matter of probability, but he couldn't afford to waste the little [Shi] he had.

As Feng Xue wallowed in self-pity over his predicament, the cries of battle and groans of pain in the street gradually faded, and quiet seemed to return.

Just as he was about to lean against the wall and sleep for a while, a sudden series of knocks sounded against the somewhat rotten wooden door.

Feng Xue's heart tightened. He immediately gripped his short knife, but the next moment, he hid it behind his back.

His current shelter offered almost no protection. Pretending no one was home or trying to brace the door shut would be pointless. And he was just a shut-in from a peaceful era with no real combat training. In this situation, all he could do was prepare for the worst while forcing himself to take comfort in the fact that whoever was outside had at least bothered to knock.

"Creak—"

The door opened with an unpleasant groan of rotting wood. A middle-aged man with a well-proportioned build and slightly mature features stood outside. He glanced at Feng Xue and said without a hint of emotion:

"Come out and help collect the bodies. 100 towers per corpse!"

"Is this for real?" Feng Xue was so caught off guard that he didn't react at first. But as soon as the man finished speaking, he turned and walked away. Similar knocks soon sounded from other doors nearby.

Unsure what was going on, Feng Xue didn't go out right away. He looked toward the street and saw five or six people emerging from the ramshackle houses nearby. Most, of course, pretended not to have heard.

Fear and indecision showed on the faces of those who had come out, stirring some unease in Feng Xue. But with only one day of life left, it seemed he had no grounds to refuse.

After a brief hesitation, he decided to go out after all. He joined the few others with conflicted expressions and stepped onto the bloodstained street. At the same time, an impatient voice rang out from nearby—

"Move it! Quit dawdling. If you hold things up, nobody gets anything!"

The voice belonged to a man holding a large cleaver. Behind him stood a table piled with familiar bran bricks.

Perhaps the man's words had done the trick. The poor, who had been dragging their feet, hurried over to the corpses in various states of disfigurement and loaded them onto the handcarts provided by his men.

Seeing that the process didn't seem to require any special skills, Feng Xue immediately stepped forward. Holding his breath against the pungent stench of blood and rotting organs, he dragged a corpse that looked relatively intact onto a handcart.

His body had changed in strange ways after the transmigration, but he hadn't become some kind of strongman. He couldn't draw a massive bow, and even dragging a corpse left him panting.

Fortunately, there were more than forty corpses, and only nine people had been called out to collect them, including him. By the time Feng Xue had dragged the third corpse to a handcart, the others had already hauled their carts over to line up at the table.

Watching the first person to collect a bran brick push his handcart away at a brisk pace, Feng Xue finally realized that the job clearly didn't end with tossing the bodies onto the carts.