The peak of early Foundation Establishment!

Gao Jian couldn't help chuckling when he read that sentence.

"If you'd written down some lifelong wishes, I'd have been willing to fulfill them for you. Too bad you didn't write a single truthful sentence in this diary," Gao Jian murmured.

He turned back to the first page. Seeing the flamboyant strokes of the name "Gao Jian" on the flyleaf stirred his emotions again.

In truth, he had been thinking about his relationship with the body's original owner all along.

The two Gao Jians shared the same name, looked similar, and were even roughly the same age.

One was a twenty-six-year-old cultivator at early Foundation Establishment.

The other was a twenty-six-year-old engineering graduate student at a Project 985 university.

Their romantic histories were similar: neither had ever dated.

Their interests were the same: he liked drawing talismans, while the original owner loved drawing design sketches; he liked refining pills, while the original owner loved cooking; he liked studying formations, while the original owner loved arranging bases in RTS games; he liked flying on his sword, while the original owner loved cycling through the mountains; he liked browsing mortal marketplaces, while the original owner loved browsing shopping streets... even their reasons for browsing were identical: they bought nothing, simply enjoying the bustle of everyday life and watching all sorts of people.

Gao Jian practiced immortal cultivation and needed to temper his Dao heart, so that was understandable.

For the other "Gao Jian" to do the same was a little uncanny.

Their personalities were also very similar. Both were endlessly patient with others.

Both had excellent tempers. Gao Jian could smile and reason with mortals even while they bullied him. When a vendor swapped the original owner's crabs for dead ones, and the market vendors surrounded him after he questioned it, he could still calmly reason with them.

Their backgrounds were similar too. One had a founding patriarch who was a mighty cultivator at the peak of late Nascent Soul, an unparalleled figure whose combat prowess ranked second in the Northern Azure Cloud Realm, with a shot at first. The other's grandfather was a high-ranking "plant" in Han Dong Province, one of its top three.

Gao Jian had accidentally wandered into someone else's tribulation site and been blasted to death by heavenly lightning.

The original owner had accidentally wandered into an intersection and received an unexpected visit from a Dayun truck.

Gao Jian had been reduced to ash beneath the heavenly tribulation, while the original owner had performed more than a dozen somersaults through the air.

The original owner's "flight distance" had reached a horrifying hundred meters or more. His instantaneous flight speed had briefly surpassed that of a Qi Refining cultivator, and even his shoes had been knocked off. He had ended up on the traffic light across the road, hanging diagonally from its pole. Anyone who didn't know better might have thought some capitalist had descended to earth.

When the ambulance arrived, the crew could only stare helplessly. In the end, firefighters had used an aerial ladder to pluck Gao Jian off the traffic-light pole.

For a while, videos of the original owner flying through the air could be found on all the major traffic-accident video channels, with different angles from dashcams and surveillance cameras. Judging by the views on Douyin alone, Gao Jian had taken flight at least several hundred million times.

As it happened, a viral meme from two years earlier was called "Chinese people can fly." Gao Jian's takeoff fit it perfectly, providing plenty of material for dark jokes. Had he been any more famous, he could have earned himself a dedicated plastic bottle.

Watching his grandson lie in the ICU, his fate uncertain, his grandfather's hair had turned white overnight. Grief and fury finally drove him to personally urge the relevant departments to take corrective action. Overnight, every video was removed from the internet.

The visible hand had flexed its muscles.

On the very day the doctors declared Gao Jian brain-dead in the ICU, Gao Jian transmigrated into his body. His brain waves instantly returned to normal, forcing the doctors to urgently retract their diagnosis and apologize profusely to Old Master Gao.

As for the transmigration...

Over the past two years, he had read some transmigration novels too, and his account on the fiction website held over ten thousand book credits. But Gao Jian had long since realized that neither bodily transmigration nor soul transmigration seemed to describe his case.

His was a rather novel form of transmigration.

Cultivation + Storage Bag + consciousness transmigration.

His Foundation Establishment cultivation had merged directly into the body lying in the ICU, his high-grade Storage Bag had automatically entered his sea of consciousness, and Gao Jian's consciousness had replaced the original owner's extinguished one.

After all those twists and turns, two years had slipped by in a flash, bringing him to the present.

After closing the diary, Gao Jian caught sight of another line of tiny writing in a bottom corner of the flyleaf.

"You might try another way of reading my diary."

Gao Jian froze.

He instantly went on guard, gripping his Life-bound Spirit Sword while his left hand formed a spell gesture, his wary gaze sweeping his surroundings.

Finding nothing unusual, he immediately drew the curtains, locked the door, and tossed out three talismans: a Breath-Holding Talisman, a Soundproofing Talisman, and a Light-Concealing Talisman.

"What the hell..." Sword in hand, Gao Jian stared at that tiny line, his expression grave.

What was this random, unexplained sentence in the diary supposed to mean?

He had already been feeling rather paranoid lately, and this sentence was far too strange. What did it mean that he could read the diary another way? Had the original owner anticipated his arrival? How was that possible? Or had the original owner been going through an edgy phase and written it just to scare someone for fun?

Another way of reading the diary... what way?

Gao Jian frowned and pondered for a long time.

Half an hour later, Gao Jian returned home with a backpack.

From it, he took out iodine solution, dilute sodium hydroxide solution, phenolphthalein, and absolute ethanol. He had just bought them all at a pharmacy.

"Whether you're acidic, alkaline, or colorless, there's always a way to make you show up."

Gao Jian took a little iodine solution, diluted it with a few drops of water, dipped some tissue into it, and dabbed it very lightly onto a blank area of the diary. But the dark blue writing he had imagined failed to appear.

"Was he messing with me?"

Gao Jian took a little dilute sodium hydroxide solution and lightly applied it to a blank area of the diary. Yet even after he waited a while, no pale red hidden writing appeared.

"Tss..." Gao Jian frowned. At this rate, he could only resort to his last method.

"If it isn't acid or alkali, it's probably organic invisible ink."

After a moment's thought, he fished another vial of absolute ethanol out of his pencil case, then retrieved a small packet of anhydrous calcium chloride from his backpack's side pocket. In a bottle cap, he mixed a little slightly cloudy dehydrated alcohol solution.

"Show yourself!"

Gao Jian gave a soft shout and gently dabbed it on with a tissue soaked in the dehydrated alcohol solution.

The paper fibers tightened slightly in a token show of respect, but the writing still failed to emerge.

After all that effort, the whole diary was nearly soaked through!

Gao Jian stared blankly. A moment later, his embarrassment turned to anger, and he flung the entire diary onto the bed. The original owner had actually made a fool of him.

Apparently, he had used too much force. The entire hardcover diary fell apart, and a fragment suddenly flew out of the gap between the flyleaf and the laminated cover. Gao Jian reacted instantly, catching the torn page in midair from a distance and drawing it back to him.

It was a dark yellow fragment of a page that had been burned.

Dense columns of vertical text covered it. Despite the fire damage, the writing remained clearly legible.

"...the method uses copper for a vessel, filled with water and heated over blazing charcoal. The water boils and vapor rises, driving a wheel to turn of its own accord. As the wheel moves, the shaft follows; as the shaft turns, mechanisms of wood and stone may all operate unaided, requiring neither human labor nor animal strength. A small prototype vehicle was once constructed and tested in the courtyard. It could haul heavy loads weighing several jun. All who saw it marveled and called it a fire-wheel engine..."

Aside from that, he could faintly make out three seal-script characters along the edge.

They read: "Yongle Ency-"

The fourth character had been burned away, but Gao Jian knew what it was.

[-clopedia]

The back of the fragment was covered in tiny, neat handwriting, all in pencil. Judging by the handwriting, "Gao Jian" must have written it himself.

"Friend, I found this fragment in my grandfather's History of Ming. It appears to be a surviving page from the Ming dynasty's Yongle Encyclopedia. I don't know why Grandpa's book had one of these tucked inside. I've never been interested in history, but this fragment describes a steam engine. Weren't steam engines a product of Britain's Industrial Revolution?

Out of curiosity, I specifically went online to look into it. But I couldn't find any information on domestic sites, so I had to bypass the firewall and search abroad. What I didn't expect was that, during my search, I would come under malicious attack from numerous unknown IP addresses, including death threats. At first, I didn't take them seriously, but they actually doxxed my home address,

...I'm a little scared. Although I don't believe this rabble can do anything to me, I've decided to be cautious, which is why I've written this message on the back of the fragment. If I die unexpectedly, this diary is certain to be discovered among my belongings. Please pass it on to my grandfather. He'll avenge me, and so will Uncle Qi. Below are some of my findings. You can bypass the firewall and log into CryptPad to view them. The registered account is my personal email address, and the secret key is A9K7pR2gT5."

After reading it, Gao Jian solemnly tucked the fragment back into the diary and put it away safely.

Good. If someone had deliberately caused the original owner's death, then he had something new to do: take revenge and settle the original owner's karmic debts.

But Gao Jian didn't rush to log into the website. Instead, he sealed the room with more talismans, then took out three spirit stones and drew all the spiritual energy out of them. Sitting in the sealed room amid the swirling spiritual energy, he began cultivating for the first time in two years.

The sky gradually darkened.

The spiritual energy in the room was gradually exhausted as well.

Gao Jian's cultivation had risen from early Foundation Establishment to the peak of early Foundation Establishment.

"This feels wonderful," Gao Jian murmured, savoring the pure spiritual power within him.