Arriving by Dragon-Transmigration?

Above Mars, the sky suddenly split open, like a cosmic black hole or a spacetime passage connecting to an unknown world.

Heaven and earth trembled, and ripples rose through the void like waves across the sea. An immense mass slowly emerged from the spacetime tunnel: nine enormous dragon corpses, their bodies seemingly cast from steel, majestic and sacred.

A chain as thick as a large bowl was fastened to each of their tails, pulling an enormous bronze coffin steeped in ancient desolation. It was impossible to imagine what sort of being lay within, to require nine true dragons from myth and legend to pull its coffin!

"Boom!"

With a thunderous crash, the Nine Dragons Pulling a Coffin fell from the sky and slammed into a mystical site long sealed away, sending dust billowing into the air.

"Cough, cough..."

The nine true dragons were covered in dense scales gleaming with an ominous black luster, their heads as large as houses. Astonishingly, a man lay sprawled atop one of them, coughing as the swirling dust choked him.

The young man's name was Lu Chen. A work of fiction-Shrouding the Heavens-and its scene of the Nine Dragons Pulling a Coffin descending on Mount Tai had inspired him to visit the mountain.

Then, during a moment of distraction atop Jade Emperor Peak, light and shadow had shifted as though spacetime itself were changing, leaving him in his present circumstances.

"Where... is this?"

He looked around and saw a plaza paved with five-colored jade, while he himself lay atop the head of a divine dragon that should have existed only in imagination.

"What's going on? Am I dreaming?" The scene before him left Lu Chen struggling to make sense of things.

The plaza resembled a vast altar, shimmering in five colors. Nine true dragons from myth lay across it, with chains trailing behind them to a Bronze Ancient Coffin more than twenty meters long.

"The Five-Colored Altar! The Nine Dragons Pulling a Coffin! ...This is... Shrouding the Heavens... Mars!"

A pair of black dragon horns pointed fiercely at the heavens. Standing between them, Lu Chen surveyed his surroundings and took in the entire site. What he saw left him tongue-tied, his whole body frozen in shock.

"No way! Mount Tai can really send you to another world? Fantasy has spilled into reality!" Only after a long while did he recover and murmur those words, disbelief written all over his face.

When he was younger, he had indulged in adolescent fantasies of traveling into the fictional worlds of films, shows, and novels, slaughtering foes on every side, soaring above the world, and winning a beauty's heart.

But after leaving the ivory tower and working in society for several years, he had long since discarded those unrealistic notions. Yet everything before him now had overturned his understanding of the world.

"Look, there's light!"

"Ah! ...We're saved!"

"The government sent people to rescue us!"

"..."

While Lu Chen's mind was still tangled in a thousand thoughts, excited voices rang out from the Bronze Ancient Coffin, pulling him back to reality and drawing memories from the depths of his mind—the plot of Shrouding the Heavens.

It told of Ye Fan and the others holding a class reunion, then visiting Mount Tai, only to be carried away from Earth by the Nine Dragons Pulling a Coffin as it traveled through the depths of the starry sky. Passing through Mars, they arrived in the distant Big Dipper Star Domain and embarked on their path to immortality.

This should have been Mars, a stopover for the Nine Dragons Pulling a Coffin.

For some unknown reason, Lu Chen, a man from another spacetime, had inexplicably crossed the barrier between fiction and reality and boarded this cosmic train.

Ye Fan, Pang Bo, and the others who had just stepped out of the Bronze Ancient Coffin had thought a rescue team had freed them from that terrifying, sinister coffin. But the scene outside was beyond anything they had imagined.

The Nine Dragons Pulling a Coffin lay silently at the center of a Five-Colored Altar larger than the summit of Mount Tai. The light was dim, and their surroundings were mysterious and still. In the distance, the land revealed a hazy reddish-brown expanse dotted with towering boulders, without the slightest trace of life.

"Where is this?"

"Could the coffin be radioactive? Have we all been quarantined?"

"Why aren't there any rescuers...?"

The group emerging from the ancient coffin had no idea what was happening. Their joy at escaping death quickly vanished, replaced by panic. Only a handful with stronger nerves could remain calm.

"Look at that dragon's head. Is there... someone standing on it?" a female classmate suddenly said, her voice trembling as she pointed ahead.

"Over there...?" Everyone followed her gaze.

Only faint light illuminated their surroundings, making it impossible to see anything clearly in the distance. With the hundred-meter dragon bodies and the chains between them, the Bronze Ancient Coffin was more than a hundred meters from the dragon heads. Neither Lu Chen nor Ye Fan's group could make out the other side clearly; they could see only vague human silhouettes.

"That really does... look like a person!"

"Standing on a dragon's head-could he be an immortal?"

"Was he controlling the Nine Dragons Pulling a Coffin and bringing us here?" Some were doubtful, some disbelieving, and some afraid, while others seemed to glimpse hope and wanted to approach.

"Wait." Ye Fan immediately stopped several classmates and said gravely, "This is too strange. We need to be careful."

The classmates who had started forward immediately pulled back. Certain possibilities occurred to them, and fear welled up unbidden.

Perhaps the figure standing atop the dragon's head was a ghost or monster. After all, they had already seen dragons from myth; demons and spirits existing in the world was no longer impossible.

"Hey! Are you a person or a ghost?" A burly man stepped forward. He was Pang Bo, Ye Fan's close friend, and he shouted the question.

A ghost! Seeing Ye Fan and the others emerge from the ancient coffin and call out to him, Lu Chen temporarily suppressed his confusion and shock at having crossed into the Shrouding the Heavens World and considered the road ahead. After all, the journey aboard the Nine Dragons Pulling a Coffin was fraught with dangers. One careless mistake could kill him along the way, and there really were demons on Mars.

"A person, of course," he answered clearly. Then he carefully slid down from the dragon's head and walked toward them.

Hearing the figure in the gloom answer-and in Mandarin, at that-everyone let out a deep breath of relief. In such eerie surroundings, the mysterious and unknown were the most frightening things of all.

Only after they drew closer could Ye Fan and the others see him clearly in the faint light. He was a handsome man around their age, roughly 1.8 meters tall, dressed in casual clothes and carrying a backpack, no different from them.

"Where are we? Why were you standing on the dragon's head?"

A male classmate named Zhou Yi asked the questions. The others also stared at the stranger before them. They had already counted their classmates inside the Bronze Ancient Coffin and were certain he had not been among their party, so they remained wary.

"Ah..." Lu Chen shook his head slightly and sighed before telling them, "Like you, I was visiting Mount Tai when the Nine Dragons Pulling a Coffin descended. After you were sucked into the Bronze Ancient Coffin, some inexplicable force pulled me onto the dragon's head. Then I ended up here. As for where this is, I don't know either."

He was not lying entirely. He really had been visiting Mount Tai before arriving here by accident, and he himself did not know why. But the Mount Tai he spoke of was not the same Mount Tai that Ye Fan's group had climbed.

Unfortunately, this Mount Tai was not that Mount Tai! Lu Chen silently mused.

Ye Fan's classmates found his explanation somewhat credible. After all, they too had been sucked into the eerie Bronze Ancient Coffin and brought here. Another tourist being drawn onto a dragon corpse and carried along did not seem all that different from their own experience.

Lu Chen's appearance did not give Ye Fan and the others any hope of escape. The uncanny Nine Dragons Pulling a Coffin, the mysterious Five-Colored Altar, and the vast reddish-brown land still left the road ahead unknown and bewildering.

In such surroundings, an unrelated stranger soon ceased to attract everyone's attention. Only Ye Fan and a few others felt there was more to the situation than met the eye and quietly kept some of their attention on Lu Chen.

Beside the Bronze Ancient Coffin, the group debated for a while and decided to leave the Five-Colored Altar together, venturing onto the vast reddish-brown land to explore the way ahead.

"Brother, do you have any suggestions?" For some inexplicable reason, Ye Fan wanted to hear Lu Chen's opinion. He kept feeling there was more to this man than met the eye.

"No suggestions!" Lu Chen gave him a searching look, feeling that Ye Fan's future ascent to the position of Heavenly Emperor truly owed something to his exceptional qualities. It was not merely his powerful physique; his mind was meticulous as well.

"The road ahead is unknown. Let's take it one step at a time!"