In New York's Chinatown, a two-story vintage house with a small courtyard stood next to an antique shop.
In a bedroom on the second floor, beside a shelf lined with all kinds of palm-sized statues, a figure was waving a charcoal pencil at an easel.
The figure looked young, about fifteen or sixteen, and stood around 1.7 meters tall. He had a well-proportioned build and wore a loose black-and-white tracksuit. His long black hair fell to his shoulders and was tied back in a simple ponytail.
His eyes were a deep blue, and his facial features combined Western definition with Eastern softness. His nose was straight and prominent, and his lips were full. He had the face of a handsome, successful mixed-race young man.
As the view drew closer, the boy could be seen concentrating intently on drawing a square-shaped world. Blocky land and trees, square cows, sheep, and horses, and a square-shaped person. Surely everyone had recognized it: this was Minecraft.
Turning to the shelf nearby, the statues wore either various kinds of cool armor or distinctive outfits. They were imposing, mysterious, powerful, and fierce, full of wild flights of fancy. Every boy's dream!
Li Ge's hand kept moving as he carefully sketched a corner of the blocky world on the paper. His eyes seemed to follow the charcoal pencil in his hand with concentration, but in reality, his mind was wandering.
As the charcoal pencil moved, Li Ge's memories gradually returned to sixteen years earlier.
Back then, he had been a loser who would look for a job, go to work, get off work, quit, and lie flat, only to look for another job and repeat the cycle after a while.
He spent all his free time reading novels and scrolling through videos. He had no goals, no motivation, no girlfriend-just a social outcast.
It was the weekend again. Lying in bed and reading novels, Li Ge flicked through all kinds of stories. The more he browsed, the more irritated he felt.
There was nothing worth reading! The same old content and inexplicable plots made his temples throb.
He came across another story about someone crossing over into the Marvel Universe. After reading the synopsis, he quickly skimmed a few chapters with eye-catching titles.
The protagonist had crossed over as a mutant and, with the help of a cheat system, gradually developed his superpowers, devoured and copied the abilities of other mutants, and slowly leveled up by fighting monsters in the Marvel Universe.
A standard, formulaic story, like countless others he had read.
Couldn't they come up with a mutant protagonist who turned the genre on its head and upended the Marvel Universe?
Now he didn't even feel like reading anything else!
Li Ge rolled out of bed, took his phone, and headed for the balcony to catch some air. He looked up and saw a dark cloud gathering overhead, with faint flashes of lightning. The wind was getting stronger, too.
Li Ge was about to head back inside when he happened to notice something beneath the thunderclouds. It piqued his curiosity.
He opened the camera on his phone, zoomed in all the way, and pointed the lens at the thunderclouds.
Li Ge pressed his eye to the screen and took a look. His pupils instantly dilated in shock! What had he seen? A person dressed in a Taoist robe!
He wasn't sure. He had to look again!
Those wide, flowing sleeves, the faintly visible black-and-white yin-yang symbol on the back, the topknot sticking up from his head-there was no mistaking it! This was the standard attire of an enlightened master. Could someone really be undergoing a tribulation in this scientific age?
Li Ge's throat went dry, but he kept his eyes fixed on the Taoist on his phone. His heart pounded like a war drum!
Nothing was more stirring than discovering something extraordinary in an ordinary world!
The dark clouds overhead grew even more ominous, and lightning snakes danced wildly. The Taoist's figure, bathed in their light, looked small and fragile, yet he remained standing firm.
Suddenly! A black-purple bolt of lightning gathered as it streaked through the clouds. A tiny thread of lightning split off from it and shot straight toward Li Ge.
Before Li Ge could react, his scalp tingled and his whole body tensed. A pitch-black fissure flashed before his eyes. Discontent with Marvel novels flickered through his mind, and he slowly sank into darkness.
In the distant thunderclouds, the Taoist also froze. He swept the area with his spiritual sense and made a calculation with his fingers, immediately understanding the cause and effect.
"Good lad! I don't know whether you're lucky or unlucky, but you actually managed to notice my ascension tribulation despite the effects of my spiritual presence."
"In this age of declining magic, when the Great Dao is hidden, how could a mortal like you be allowed to glimpse the power of the heavens? If I hadn't accumulated my strength in slumber for a thousand years, I wouldn't have dared defy heaven and ascend to immortality in this age of declining magic!"
"Fortunately, the Great Dao has fifty paths, Heaven evolves forty-nine, and one escapes. The spacetime power contained in this Purple Heaven Divine Thunder should send your soul into the fantasy world derived from whatever left the deepest impression on you before you died."
"After being tempered by the Purple Heaven Divine Thunder, your talent in the next life is bound to be extraordinary. The way fortune and misfortune depend on each other truly is profound and mysterious."
"My final tribulation is coming, too. Come! A thousand years of bitter endurance, all for this moment! Here I come! Hahahaha!"
With that, the Taoist shot upward and plunged straight into the thunderclouds!
As for Li Ge, when he regained consciousness, he had become a sixteen-year-old Chinese-American boy.
The memories of sixteen years made him understand the situation. He had crossed over into the Marvel Universe, the very world he had been dissatisfied with in those fanfiction novels.
As it turned out, breaking through the mystery of the womb and awakening his past-life memories had been a complete accident.
A week earlier, Li Ge had witnessed a mutant awakening his powers on the street. That unlucky guy had been so upset after his girlfriend cheated on him that his emotions had run wild. The moment his powers awakened, he lost control. Scales covered his body, turning him into a monster, and he shoved his girlfriend beneath the wheels of a speeding freight truck. Blood and gore splattered everywhere on the spot.
When that terrifying, bloody, surreal scene entered his field of vision, Li Ge's mind buzzed, as if a computer had been plugged in. His memories from his past life instantly flooded his mind.
Amid the throbbing pain in his brain as the memories fused, the word "mutant" suddenly sprang into Li Ge's mind.
There was no time to think. Amid the panic-stricken crowd's screams, the patrol officers' shouts, and the unlucky guy's frantic, flustered explanations, Li Ge quickly fled the street.
After he returned home, his father, Li Chuang, and his mother, Alice Li, had already seen everything on the live news broadcast filmed by reckless reporters. They had also seen him in the footage.
They both assumed that Li Ge's strange behavior, caused by the fusion of his memories, was a result of the mental shock from suddenly witnessing the horrific incident caused by a mutant's awakening.
Worried about Li Ge's mental state, they requested a week off from school so he could rest at home and get his emotions under control.