On a pitch-black, rainy night in the outskirts of Tokyo, Li Shunchen knelt stiffly on the living room floor. His body seemed frozen, unable to move an inch.
The once-welcoming hardwood floor had become a muddy, dark-red swamp. A sickening smell of rust hung in the air, so thick it seemed impossible to disperse. Each breath felt like a rusty rasp scraping his windpipe, nearly suffocating him.
Only minutes earlier, his ordinary, nagging parents, who loved him deeply, had been torn apart before his eyes by a terrifying force he could neither see nor even comprehend.
There had been no screams, no struggle. Everything had happened so quickly it seemed like an illusion.
That force had been like a pair of enormous, cruel, invisible hands, forcibly twisting two living people into flesh dolls so contorted they no longer looked human.
Pale bone splinters had brutally pierced their skin, exposed to the air. Blood had sprayed like fountains, staining the walls, the ceiling, and the family photos scattered across the floor.
"Why... did this happen...?"
A hoarse murmur like the wheezing of broken bellows escaped Li Shunchen's throat, so faint that even he could barely hear it.
Utter terror and rage intertwined, piercing his soul like a red-hot branding iron.
At that moment, under the violent mental shock, Li Shunchen, who had lived in this curse-filled world for fifteen years, finally awakened all his memories as a transmigrator.
Awakening alongside those memories was a dim system panel that had lain dormant in his mindscape for fifteen years.
[Host: Li Shunchen] [Cursed Energy: 5 (classified by the system as "faint Cursed Energy"; extremely low reserves, barely enough even to see Cursed Spirits)] [Cursed Technique: None] [Soul-loaded fate traits: Mental Contamination Resistance [N], Faint Presence [N], Laborer's Lower-Back Strength [N]] [Imprinted fate traits: Then Let Me Ask You [N], Loves Drinking Expired Milk [N], Thick Skin and Tough Flesh [N]...]
This was everything Li Shunchen could rely on in this unfamiliar world: a system called [Fate Gacha]. Yet the system seemed to be mocking him, too. Everything he had drawn was worthless "scrap."
[Mental Contamination Resistance [N]]: kept him from going insane at the sight of a scene like his parents' gruesome deaths.
[Faint Presence [N]]: let him cling to life like a cockroach right under the monster's nose.
Still, it was thanks to these effects that he had survived that moment of crisis, rather than becoming the third corpse to die at that unknown entity's hands, just like his parents.
Even with his past-life memories awakened, he was still nothing more than cannon fodder who could only wait for death before that unknown entity.
"Crack, crack."
The invisible monster crawled across the floor upstairs. Broken floorboards groaned with a teeth-grating sound as it slowly approached, following Li Shunchen's scent.
Clutched tightly against Li Shunchen's chest was the item his father had handed him before dying: a long box wrapped in black cloth, constantly giving off an eerie chill.
It was "Asagirimaru," the short blade known as a Cursed Tool that his father had brought back from abroad for customer service. It was probably also the very thing that had drawn this monster here.
Although Li Shunchen had learned of Cursed Energy through the system, and also knew that Cursed Techniques and Cursed Tools existed, this world was still utterly unfamiliar to him. He could not fully understand his current situation.
[Warning: Host has encountered a certain-death causal outcome! High concentration of curses detected!] [Fifteenth-year fate trait draw: forced upgrade!]
The gacha pool that had remained dim in his mindscape for fifteen years suddenly erupted with a burst of dark-gold light as blinding as an exploding supernova!
The fifteenth card, a white N card that had been about to form, instantly shattered. Through an absolute reversal of fate, it transformed into a dark-gold divine card flowing with the aura of causality.
[Miracle draw successful!] [Obtained unique UR-grade fate trait: "Causal Deduction Simulator"!] [Causal Deduction Simulator: Separates you from real-world time to observe countless future causal outcomes within your mindscape. Once observation ends, the host will perfectly inherit the simulation's experience, muscle memory, and causal feedback.]
"Deduction..."
Feeling the deathly chill that was almost upon him, Li Shunchen's gaze shifted in an instant from despair to a coldness like a polar glacier.
"Since reality is already rotten through, I'll start by dying to my heart's content in the simulation!"
[Detected that you are currently in a certain-death predicament. Your first free causal deduction has been activated.] [Deduction begins]
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