Pitiful! A Tragic Rebirth

A Miserable Rebirth

Chen Rui, one of countless nerds, was twenty-four years old. He'd graduated from university only to end up unemployed. After some difficulty, he'd managed to open a shop that barely kept him fed. To this day, he was still one of the "three have-nots": no house, no car, and no girlfriend.

That day, he found a phone on the road. It even had a camera. The phone didn't have a brand name and was obviously a knockoff, but it was a lucky windfall—and camera phones always got people thinking. Chen Rui immediately pressed the power button. The screen lit up, and a square box appeared in the middle. A line of glowing text popped up inside it: "Are you sure you want to do this?"

He pressed confirm, and the glowing text appeared again: "Are you really sure?"

What kind of bored idiot set up a boot animation like this? Without thinking twice, Chen Rui pressed confirm again. The words "Congratulations! You've won! Welcome to the Super System" appeared in the middle of the screen, and then the phone exploded.

Chen Rui hadn't even managed to say, "What the hell?" before he lost consciousness.

After an unknown amount of time, Chen Rui hazily opened his eyes. His head throbbed terribly. He vaguely remembered the damn phone exploding, and then passing out. Now it seemed as if there were many new things in his head. Before he could think about them, someone in front of him asked, "You're awake?"

The face before him was narrow and sharp, with dark skin and handsome features. Its hair was a dark silver, its ears pointed, and its eyes a startling blue. A gloomy expression of confusion clouded its face.

Faced with this "unusual" appearance, Chen Rui remained calm. He'd seen plenty of anime fans online who dressed up as their favorite cartoon or comic characters. He thought it was called cosplay. He spoke up, "Did you save me? Thanks!"

These days, saving someone wasn't easy.

"Save you?" Seeing Chen Rui's grateful expression, the anime fan looked even more surprised and muttered, "Was the dosage wrong? Or did I use the wrong potion?"

From this exchange, Chen Rui realized that he and the other person were speaking in a strange language he'd never heard before. Yet, for some reason, he understood what was being said. It seemed to be some sort of universal language.

"Buddy, that elf costume looks really realistic. Your skin's just a bit too dark..." Chen Rui shook his head in confusion and struggled to sit up. His whole body ached. Looking around at the strange, completely unfamiliar surroundings, he asked, "By the way, where is this?"

"You dare mock a Dark Elf's skin color, you wretched human!" The anime fan reacted in a fury. Electricity crackled in his hand. Chen Rui saw a flash of lightning and was sent flying several meters. His entire body went numb and began to convulse uncontrollably. The air filled with the stench of burning flesh.

"Sli! Get out here, now!" Even after punishing Chen Rui, the anime fan's shrill voice was still full of fury.

A short, dark figure came scrambling over. It was a strange creature: red-skinned, short, and ugly, with a wide mouth that revealed two rows of sharp teeth.

"Honorable Master Aldas, your humble servant Sli is at your command. You are the most evil and greatest potion master in all the Demon Realm..."

His voice was full of flattery, but Aldas was in no mood to listen to such nonsense. He barked, "Cut the fake act! You lazy Lesser Devil, you're just a servant! Did you give him the wrong potion just now?"

Sli jumped in fright and hurriedly said, "Absolutely not. I followed your instructions exactly and used the truth potion from bottle number three."

"The truth potion? So he really meant what he said when he insulted me?" Aldas's sinister tone made Sli break into a cold sweat. "Go draw a bottle of blood from that damned man, then make him drink potion number six, the Rending Potion!"

Sli didn't dare waste time. He immediately went to the table to choose a potion bottle.

If not for the lightning just now, Chen Rui would still have thought this was an anime convention or a movie shoot. As the Lesser Devil hopped toward him, terror filled his heart. He tried to struggle, but his still-numb body wouldn't obey his brain.

Sli reached Chen Rui and didn't bother with a blade. He extended a sharp fingernail and slashed Chen Rui's arm. Blood immediately welled up. Sli's little eyes lit up, and he smacked his lips. As he squeezed the wound, he caught the blood in a transparent glass bottle.

The bottle held quite a lot. By the time it was nearly full, Chen Rui was cold and dizzy. Once it was full, the Lesser Devil smeared the wound as if that would stop the bleeding, then casually stuck his claw in his mouth and sucked on it. The greedy expression on his face made it seem as if he were tasting the finest delicacy. Chen Rui felt a chill crawl over him.

That unnecessary action immediately drew a displeased snort from Aldas. Sli shuddered and didn't dare hesitate. He promptly poured potion number six into Chen Rui's mouth.

The potion tasted faintly sweet, but its effect was terrifyingly different. A moment later, excruciating pain swept through Chen Rui's body. It felt as if every inch of his skin were being torn apart. He'd never endured such agony in his life and couldn't help screaming.

Aldas looked pleased by Chen Rui's suffering and nodded in satisfaction. "The Rending Potion seems to be working well. I wonder whether humans are resistant to the truth potion, or whether there was something wrong with the potion itself."

Aldas knew the Rending Potion's strongest effects were yet to come. He couldn't be bothered to listen to Chen Rui scream any longer, so he ordered, "Sli! Take him to the dungeon and keep a close eye on him. Leave him hungry for the night! If he dies during an experiment one day, I won't mind giving you his corpse for food."

Sli was overjoyed and immediately launched into a string of flattering remarks. Then Aldas's voice turned ominous: "But if I catch you trying to steal a bite again, you'll be the next test subject!"

Sli had spent quite some time in the laboratory. Remembering the terrible fates of previous test subjects, he trembled with fear and nodded repeatedly. He immediately dragged Chen Rui out of the room.

The Lesser Devil was strong. He dragged Chen Rui along, bumping him against everything on the way, until they reached a dark, damp basement and tossed him inside.

"Just hurry up and die, you damned bastard! Lord Sli's never tasted human flesh before!" The Lesser Devil was nothing like the meek, respectful servant he'd been in front of Aldas. He kicked Chen Rui a few times, then licked the fingers that had touched the blood, his greedy little eyes gleaming. In the end, he didn't dare disobey Aldas's orders. He shut the cell door and hopped away.

Chen Rui had just struggled to roll over when the pain in his body suddenly multiplied tenfold. He screamed again. Then a mysterious voice rang out in his mind: "Unknown toxic substance detected. Absorb and activate Super System?"

Chen Rui was in such agony that he gave an absent-minded reply. A cool sensation came from his chest for no apparent reason, then quickly spread through his whole body. The pain noticeably eased.

"Insufficient energy supply. System activation progress: 0.5%. More energy is required to complete activation." A "ding" sounded in his mind, followed by silence.

Wait, a system? What was that?

By the time Chen Rui came to his senses, the voice hadn't returned. Could it have been a hallucination?

Chen Rui didn't have time to think further. He was stunned by the flood of information that had suddenly appeared in his mind. When he'd first awakened, he'd already felt as though he had a lot of unfamiliar memories in his head. After everything that had happened, those fragments had somehow been digested and absorbed.

It turned out he was no longer the original Chen Rui. He was now a young man named Arthur, and this wasn't Earth. It was an entirely different world.

So he really had transmigrated into another person's body! As a nerd who liked reading webnovels on Qidian, Chen Rui immediately figured it out.

Chen Rui's parents had died early, and his only close relative, his grandfather, had passed away the year before. So he didn't have many ties to his old life. The problem was, he'd heard plenty about transmigrating and being reborn, but never about a fate this miserable!

From the scattered memories Arthur had left behind, Chen Rui learned that this was a magical world. Arthur seemed to be the descendant of a noble family. He was twenty years old and had been living a comfortable life until two days ago, when he'd gone out for a stroll and somehow been transported to this place full of demons. He'd been captured and sent to the laboratory of that anime fan, Aldas, beginning his miserable life as a test subject.

The human world where Arthur had lived was home to humans, elves, dwarves, and other races. This place, on the other hand, was most likely the world of the Demon Race, enemies of humanity in legend!

The Demon Race was a powerful people. After losing an ancient war to the human alliance, they'd been driven into the harsh Abyss World, and the entrance had been sealed by a powerful barrier.

Even so, the Demon Race had never given up on returning to the surface. Every five hundred years, the barrier weakened, marking the beginning of another war between the two sides. The Demon Race had suffered too, though; they had never won a final victory in their history.

In the most recent war, three hundred years ago, the Demon army had been led by Bai Ye Lucifer, the greatest warrior of the age. They'd inflicted heavy casualties on humanity, but, just as before, the final victory had belonged to "light and justice." Bai Ye Lucifer had been slain by a human warrior, and the defeated Demon army had been forced to retreat to the Demon Realm.

Arthur's memories of the Demon Race went no further than that. The human world had its share of powerful warriors who could split rivers with a sword or crack mountains with a fist. But Arthur was a complete good-for-nothing who couldn't use either battle aura or magic. His greatest talent was apparently eating, drinking, and having fun. If Arthur's soul were still around, Chen Rui would have grabbed the kid by the neck and roared, "How the hell did you end up with such a ridiculous talent?"

The truth was that the kid had already been released from his suffering by Aldas's potions. Now Chen Rui, his miserable successor, had to face what came next.

What would happen to a powerless human in a world crawling with demons? A test subject? Food?

The more Chen Rui thought about it, the more afraid he became. He bitterly regretted his trigger-happy decision to press "confirm" and cursed that damn phone a thousand times over. But there was no undoing it now.

In his previous life, he'd been a nerd, good at reading novels, playing games, and browsing forums. He'd never had anything to do with martial arts or fighting. Even if he'd known a few tricks, they wouldn't have been any use in a magical world. How could he possibly survive?

Chen Rui thought for a long time but still couldn't come up with a solution. Exhausted both physically and mentally, he finally sank into a deep sleep.