A genius reborn

The silent, chilly hospital room smelled of disinfectant.

Outside the room, two young nurses on duty chatted idly.

"That young master in the VIP room is pretty handsome!"

"Handsome? He's a pervert! He was about to get engaged, but he was still fooling around with women. Then he got caught red-handed in a vice raid and caused a huge scandal."

"I heard he ended up here after taking drugs. Rich kids sure know how to have fun!"

Ye Fan lay in the hospital bed, his eyes darting about. He could not understand how he had transmigrated into someone with exactly the same name.

Ye Fan had been born into the Jade Cloud Sect on the Azure Mystic Continent. His grandfather was the sect master, his father an elder, and his older brother an elite disciple. He was a second-generation cultivator through and through.

When Ye Fan was born, the Violet Star had fallen, and extraordinary phenomena had appeared in the heavens, stunning the entire sect. Almost everyone had believed he would be a cultivation prodigy.

Unfortunately, when his spiritual roots were tested at the age of five, he was found to have none.

Fate always loved playing tricks on people. Though he had no spiritual roots, he possessed a nine-colored divine soul. Everyone with such a soul was a rare genius in the Cultivation World at alchemy, artifact refinement, talisman crafting, formations, and beast taming. Unfortunately, he could not cultivate. Without cultivation, he would be nothing but a mound of dirt a hundred years later, and all of it would amount to nothing.

Ye Fan had been deeply grateful to have been born into such a loving family. His parents had not given up on him just because he could not cultivate.

On the contrary, although he could not cultivate, he was free to enter the sect's scripture pavilion. Over several years, Ye Fan had read every scroll in the sect and become an expert in cultivation theory.

With a single remark, he had revealed the key to his mother Jiang Hanzhu's bottleneck, allowing her to become a Golden Core elder. With another, he had broken through the limitations holding back the sect's alchemy elder, increasing that elder's success rate by twenty percentage points. His guidance had also helped his older brother, Ye Qixian, achieve mastery of the Nine Heavens Sword Art...

Yet without cultivation, he was ultimately too weak. He had merely gone out to meet the fiancée promised to him before birth and break off their engagement, only to get caught in a fight between two Foundation Establishment cultivators. The shock waves of their battle had killed him.

Unable to cultivate, he was still a weakling in the end, no matter how intelligent or talented he was.

Ye Fan lay on the bed, grinning, his eyes brimming with excitement. The first step in cultivation was to draw spiritual energy into the dantian. In his previous life, he had attempted this step over a thousand times without ever succeeding. Yet here, in a place with so little spiritual energy, he had actually done it.

Ye Fan frowned. The spiritual energy here is far too sparse. But as long as I can cultivate, I can't ask for anything more.

Ye Fan reached for the clothes beside him. Five days had passed since his transmigration, enough time for him to fully integrate the original owner's memories.

The original owner's background was undeniably illustrious. Cang City had four major families: the Ye Family, the Wu Family, the Liao Family, and the Gao Family. Ye Fan's father belonged to the Ye Family, and his mother to the Wu Family. With two powerful families united, Ye Fan should have enjoyed an exalted status. Instead, the fellow had been terribly unlucky.

Ye Fan's mother had died giving birth to him. The Wu Family believed he had brought about her death and treated him with little affection. Before Ye Fan was even a year old, his father had brought home a "younger brother" who was barely younger than Ye Fan, and might even have been older. Ye Fan had grown up under his stepmother's care.

Although his stepmother treated Ye Fan well on the surface, she constantly schemed behind his back. Take the recent prostitution incident: Ye Fan had simply accepted an invitation to a dinner gathering, only to stumble into a room with two abused women and be caught red-handed by the arriving police.

Then there was the fact that the original owner had actually died from taking sleeping pills. Somehow, however, the story had turned into a rumor that he had gotten carried away taking recreational drugs.

Ye Fan opened his eyes and climbed out of bed. His body had mostly recovered, so he decided to leave the hospital and visit a pharmacy to look for medicinal ingredients he might be able to use.

Ye Fan took out a bank card. It held around five hundred thousand, probably the original owner's entire fortune.

After the scandal broke, the original owner had been expelled from his family. Ye Fan had no intention of having much contact with the Ye Family or becoming entangled in too many karmic ties. Of course, if the Ye Family came looking for him, he would not mind teaching them a lesson.