Azure Profound Continent

  Boom!

  The wooden door splintered inward with a sound like a gunshot. Rotten splinters showered across the dusty tomb chamber, scattering across cold stone floor.

  Leo's eyes snapped open.

  He couldn't remember how he got here. The last few hours were blank, a gap in his memory. He tried to retrace his steps and found nothing.

  He was lying on his back, staring at a ceiling carved from ancient rock, covered in moss and spirit veins. The air tasted stale, thick with death and decay.

  "IRS! Is it the IRS?!" An elderly man bolted upright nearby, clutching his chest with both hands. "I don't have any offshore spirit stones! I declared all my income!"

  "Keep it down, the baby's sleeping... wait." Another man sat up, blinking rapidly. He patted the cold stone floor, then looked for his phone with increasing desperation. "Where's the monitor? Where's the crib?"

  "Oh god, I've been kidnapped!" A third man shrieked, scrambling backward until his back slammed against the chamber wall. "I don't have any money! I'm IT support! I'm single!"

  Leo pushed himself upright, his heart hammering.

  Three strangers. One tomb. Complete confusion.

  His transmigrator instincts fired. He'd seen this setup before when he transmigrated while shopping at Costco. But something nagged at the edge of his memory, a detail just out of reach.

  We've been transported somewhere. But where? And why did these people look just as confused as him?

  Through the breach in the hastily piled barricade of furniture and debris came the arms.

  Three zombie cultivators clawed their way into the room, movements jerky and unnatural. They wore tattered robes, fabric rotted to threads, grey flesh somewhere between leather and stone.

  "Zombies?" Leo pressed himself against the back wall, his legs trembling beneath him.

  Ancient robes. Stone chamber. Undead cultivators. Foreign strangers waking up confused.

  Did I transmigrate again? The thought crashed through his mind like lightning.

  Did I fail my first transmigration? Now I'm sent here to die?

  One of the zombies lunged straight for the nerdy IT guy, grey arms extended, blackened fingernails gleaming.

  "Back! Back, help!" The man screamed, squeezing his eyes shut and throwing his hands out in desperate defense.

  WHOOSH.

  A torrent of blinding white flame erupted from the man's palms, a pillar of cleansing light that engulfed the zombie completely.

  Everyone screamed and clutched their eyes, the afterimage burned into their retinas.

  The IT man perked up, still rubbing his streaming eyes in pain.

  "Whoa. My recovery is so smooth." He flexed his fingers experimentally. "The ambient Qi here is at least Foundation Establishment grade."

  Foundation Establishment, Leo noted, so these strangers were from the second world he'd been to. The Cultivation World.

  "Nice shot, kid!" The old man grunted as he scrambled to his feet. His posture shifted instantly, panic melting away. He raised his hands in a practiced guard. "You speak English? You from the States?"

  "Kevin from Queens!" The nerdy looking IT man yelled, scrambling up.

  "Mike from Seattle!" The second man shouted. The stay-at-home dad sighed heavily, rolling his shoulders with a series of pops and cracks, showing off his muscular dad-bod.

  Mike moved with a fluid grace that betrayed his lazy demeanor. As the second zombie hopped forward, arms outstretched, Mike ducked under the stiff limbs with casual ease.

  His hands found the creature's waist sash. He pivoted his hips, redirected the zombie's momentum, and slammed it into the stone floor. The zombie's skull split like a rotten melon, black ichor spraying across the chamber.

  "Ex-Military?" The old man noted, watching Mike's technique with an appraising eye. "Me too. I'm Arthur. Florida."

  "Leo!" The teenager yelled from his position against the back wall, feeling increasingly useless. "I'm from Connecticut! I think we transmigrated!"

  Arthur's brow furrowed. "Transmigrated?"

  "I read about this in a book before," Leo explained. "We must have died and reincarnated in an ancient cultivation world."

  While the three adults dealt with the stream of zombie cultivators clawing through the shattered barricade, Leo pressed himself further against the wall, shame burning in his chest.

  He was useless.

  These men were Foundation Establishment cultivators, experienced cultivators who had stepped into the second realm past Qi Refinement. Arthur's fists glowed with unstable yellow light as he punched through zombie skulls. Mike's movements flowed like water, efficient and deadly. Kevin's palms crackled with fire, incinerating anything that got too close.

  And Leo was still a mortal. Fourteen years old. He hadn't even entered high school and begun Qi Refining. His meridians unopen, his Dantian empty, his body fragile as wet paper.

  One hit from those zombies would shred him into two pieces.

  I need to be useful, Leo thought frantically. His eyes darted around the chamber.

  Maybe if this was his second transmigration, he would finally get his goldfinger. Or a cheat item nearby. Wasn't that how the stories worked? The protagonist finds a heaven-defying treasure just lying around?

  Leo scanned the dark corners and spotted a miserable little pile of bedding. A makeshift campsite, recently used, blankets still rumpled and a small fire pit filled with fresh ash.

  Someone had been living here.

  Leo rushed over, moving while the zombies focused on the bigger threats. He rifled through the mess with desperate hands. A coil of rope, frayed but functional. Some dried rations that looked like rocks and probably tasted worse. A leather pouch filled with low-grade spirit stones.

  And there, wrapped in a greasy cloth, was a sword.

  Leo's breath caught.

  Surprisingly, it looked well taken care of, oiled, elegant, and sharp. The steel shimmered with a cold blue light that spoke of quality craftsmanship and careful formation work. When Leo's fingers touched the handle, the blade vibrated in his grip, humming with power.

  A real spiritual weapon. A genuine cultivator's sword, at least Foundation Establishment grade.

  "Guys!" Leo shouted, holding the weapon up with two hands. The blade was too long for him, the weight awkward in his untrained grip. "I found a spiritual sword!"

  Leo turned to run toward Mike, intending to hand the former military guy the blade.

  Suddenly a hidden panel in the wall slid open with a grinding noise.

  A man stumbled out.

  He was a short scrawny guy, covered in grave dirt from head to toe. Dark circles carved valleys under his bloodshot eyes, and his robes hung off a frame that suggested he hadn't eaten properly in weeks. His hands trembled.

  This was Wei Tuo.

  To the four Americans, he looked like a deranged homeless cultivator.

  Wei Tuo froze in the opening of his hidden passage.

  He saw the zombies breaking in through his carefully constructed barricade.

  He saw the three strong cultivators radiating Foundation Establishment energy, foreign devils speaking a barbaric tongue.

  And then, he saw the weak child holding his most prized possession.

  The Flowing Cloud Sword.

  "Ahhhh!" Wei Tuo screamed with the desperation of a man watching his entire life crumble.

  Leo froze. "Uh... hello?"

  "Ni gan shen me!!!" Wei Tuo yelled in his native tongue, his face twisting from despair to fury in an instant.

  The words meant nothing to Leo, but the anger was clear.

  That sword was the only valuable thing Wei Tuo had. The only possession he'd hidden from his creditors. The only treasure he had to show for forty years of his life.

  Wei Tuo lunged at Leo, eyes wild, hands grasping to snatch back his livelihood.

  "Help! Help!" Leo yelped, stumbling backward, raising the sword defensively. "Help!"

  Arthur, having just kicked the head off a zombie, spun around at the noise.

  What he saw was clear as day. They had been transmigrated to a dangerous world, in the middle of battle, and now some dirty, gibberish-spouting local was attacking their group's youngest member over their only treasure.

  "Hey!" Arthur roared, his face turning a shade of angry purple that spoke of years of customer service experience being violently suppressed.

  The old man didn't hesitate.

  He channeled spiritual energy into his legs, a Spell Art he'd learned to chase car thieves back when business was booming. Yellow light flared around his calves. The stone floor cracked beneath his feet.

  Arthur launched himself across the room like a guided missile.

  "Get your dirty hands off my saber!"

  WHAM.

  Wei Tuo let out a squeak as 150 pounds of angry American former small business owner slammed into his ribs at Foundation Establishment speed.

  The two of them went tumbling into the dirt, rolling away from Leo in a tangle of limbs and curses.

  "I got him!" Arthur yelled, pinning Wei Tuo to the ground and raising a glowing fist. His knee drove into the smaller man's stomach.

  "Leo, let Mike use the sword! Kevin, tie this guy up! I bet he's the necromancer who sent those things!"

  Wei Tuo wheezed, staring up at the terrifying foreign "demon" sitting on his chest.

  He had spent three months searching for this tomb, and in it he found the greatest opportunity of his life, the Great Otherworldy Demon Summoning Formation.

  It was his golden opportunity, he had activated it without hesitation. The ancient texts promised guardians. Protectors. Powerful allies who would help him escape this nightmare.

  Instead, he got three brutes and a thief who stole his only possession.

  "Woooo..." Wei Tuo whimpered, tears streaming down his dirt-caked cheeks at the sheer injustice.

  "He's casting a spell!" Kevin shrieked, aiming his palms at Wei Tuo. Yang fire crackled between his fingers. "Should I blast him?"

  "No!" Leo shouted while handing the saber to Mike with both hands.

  "We might need him for information! We don't even know where we are! Just cripple his cultivation!"

  This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

  The words came out automatically, pulled from a cultivation novel where the protagonist captured enemies for interrogation. Standard procedure. Disable the threat, extract intelligence, then decide on disposal.

  Leo didn't realize what he'd just ordered until Arthur was already moving.

  Arthur didn't hesitate. As an ex-military man, and more importantly as an ex-small business owner, he knew the importance of removing threats at the root. Weeds grew back if you left the foundation intact.

  "Sorry, buddy," Arthur grunted, his right hand glowing with unstable, jagged yellow light. "But you look like a weed."

  Wait, Leo thought, a cold horror creeping through his chest. Crippling cultivation isn't like breaking someone's leg.

  Arthur pressed his glowing palm flat against Wei Tuo's lower abdomen. The jagged yellow energy punched through the cheap robe and into the skin beneath, boring inward toward the dantian.

  Wei Tuo screamed. The sound was raw, animalike. His whole body seized as Arthur's turbulent qi flooded his spiritual center and tore it apart from the inside.

  There was a muffled pop. Wei Tuo arched his back, then went limp, wheezing. His eyes rolled white. Decades of cultivation, gone in a few seconds.

  Leo watched, frozen.

  In the novels, crippling someone's cultivation was just a sentence.

  Reality was uglier than any sentence.

  Arthur pulled his hand back and snatched up the rope Leo had dropped. With quick, professional movements, he trussed the sobbing, broken man like a prize hog at a county fair.

  At the entrance of the room, Mike Ross was putting on a clinic.

  The Flowing Cloud Sword hummed in his grip, a lethal extension of his arm.

  Mike sidestepped a frantic claw swipe, the zombie's nails screeching against the stone wall where his head had been a moment before. He pivoted on his heel, driving the blade forward in a tight arc.

  The zombie's head separated from its neck with a wet thud. Black ichor sprayed across Mike's generic grey t-shirt.

  The body hopped forward two more steps before collapsing, legs still twitching.

  Mike advanced step by step, reaping the remaining zombie cultivators with rusty but practiced skills. Each strike was economical, targeting joints and necks, wasting no motion.

  Within thirty seconds, the last zombie fell.

  "It's clear," Mike announced, voice calm despite the carnage.

  He turned to face the group with a confident smile.

  And then he stopped.

  Mike went completely rigid.

  His eyes stared unblinking at a point in the middle distance. His chest stopped rising. His arm, holding the sword, remained suspended at an awkward forty-five-degree angle, perfectly still, as if he had been turned to stone.

  The blood drained from Leo's face.

  He had seen horrors like this before. In novels. In games.

  Soul Seizing technique. Mental invasion. Possession.

  "Mike?" Kevin whispered, shrinking back against the wall. His hands trembled, yang fire flickering unstably between his fingers.

  "He's not breathing," Leo hissed. "Look at his pupils. They're not reacting to the light."

  Arthur scrambled back from the hog-tied prisoner, raising his bloody hands in a defensive stance. Yellow energy crackled around his fists. "I can't feel his divine sense. Something's killed him!"

  Then, before their eyes, Mike disappeared.

  Leo pressed himself against the wall, trying to make himself as small as possible.

  This was wrong. This was all wrong.

  Second transmigrations were supposed to come with cheats. With systems. With heavenly protection. The protagonist wasn't supposed to be helpless while his companions got picked off by invisible enemies.

  They stood there for agonizing seconds that stretched into minutes.

  Nothing happened.

  No spectral figure materialized. No sinister laughter echoed through the chamber. No explanation presented itself.

  And then it kind of got awkward.

  Nothing happened.

  No one really wanted to stick their neck out.

  So they kindof... uhh... just waited.

  And about fifteen minutes later, Mike reappeared.

  His eyes blinked. His arm lowered the sword to his side.

  "Mike, you're back!" Leo cheered, relief washing over the group.

  Mike gave him a funny look, his expression complicated in a way Leo couldn't quite read. He glanced around the room, taking in the zombie corpses, the bound prisoner, the three terrified faces staring at him.

  "So guys..." Mike said slowly, rolling his shoulders. "Do you remember what you were doing before you got here?"

  Leo, Arthur, and Kevin stared at each other.

  They scratched their heads and thought deeply, brows furrowing as they tried to access memories that should have been clear and immediate.

  Nothing.

  It felt like they were missing an important part of their memory.

  "Let me tell you," Mike explained, crossing his arms. "You were checking out this new game in your VR pod, the Azure Profound Continent. It promised a groundbreaking 100% immersion."

  Mike gestured around at the tomb chamber.

  "Apparently, this is all a game. My baby monitor force-logged me, I mean, notified me to log off."

  Leo's brain stuttered to a halt.

  A game.

  This was all a game.

  Everyone just gave each other weird looks.

  Arthur's face went through seventeen different expressions as he processed the implication that he'd just crippled someone's cultivation in what was essentially a video game.

  Kevin lowered his hands, yang fire dissipating. "So... the zombies..."

  "NPCs," Mike confirmed.

  "And the guy Arthur just..." Kevin gestured at the sobbing Wei Tuo.

  "...also an NPC."

  Leo wasn't sure that made it better.

  Leo activated the log-off sequence and everything dissolved into light.

  He opened his eyes in the VR pod, the familiar sensation of gel pulling away from his temples, the soft hiss of the pod's seal releasing.

  Mike was right.

  The real world solidified around him. His room in Connecticut. The expensive pod that wasn't a part of his first life. The afternoon sun slanting through windows where he'd left the blinds open.

  Leo sat up slowly, his mind still reeling.

  This felt nothing like any game he'd played in his VR pod before, which were all limited by technology to 10% realism. He had genuinely thought he'd transmigrated again.

  But Leo knew. After three months of waiting, searching and acting like a fool, his opportunity was finally here.

  This was something special, inexplicable. It was his transmigrator destiny.

  ---

  As nice as it would have been to be the only one with a cheat and become unparalleled, Leo appreciated the wisdom of the crowd. Four minds working together could maximize opportunity far better than one confused transmigrator stumbling alone.

  It took a couple of hours to sort through everything.

  A few minutes went toward reading the game documentation. The interface provided bare bones information about the Azure Profound Continent.

  In the Azure Profound Continent game world they could both Log Off and Respawn after death.

  Logging off was quick, and you would log on where you last logged off. This could be a great way to escape from enemies.

  Respawning was more powerful. Upon dying, you had to wait a specific period, then could log in where your Personal Otherworldly Demon Summoning formation plate was.

  The cooldown was determined by cultivation realm. Mortals like Leo would take 3 hours to respawn. Qi Refining took 15 hours. Foundation Establishment, like Arthur, Mike, and Kevin, took 75 hours.

  Another benefit was the Great Otherworldly Demon Summoning formation would allow everyone to play through the night, becoming fully refreshed as long as they spent 8 hours in the Azure Profound Continent.

  And the most important benefit was that progress between both worlds carried over. You could cultivate using the free qi of the Azure Profound Continent and eat the cheap, delicious food of Earth, saving a fortune.

  The rest of the time was spent trying to communicate with Wei Tuo.

  They found a rudimentary English-Common Dictionary buried in the inheritance materials. The leather binding was cracked and ancient, the pages yellowed with age, but the translations were surprisingly comprehensive. Someone in this world had encountered English speakers before.

  The process was agonizing. Word by word. Page by page. Flipping back and forth while Wei Tuo sobbed between sentences.

  Arthur's patience lasted approximately fifteen minutes.

  "I can't listen to this anymore," the old man growled, snatching up a rusted shovel from the corner of the tomb. "I'm going to find the spirit vein feeding this place. Has to be one nearby with qi this dense."

  He stomped off toward the deeper tunnels, muttering about crying locals and wasted time.

  Leo watched him go, then turned back to Wei Tuo.

  The man had stopped crying, at least temporarily. His eyes were hollow. The wound in his lower abdomen had been crudely bandaged with strips torn from his own robe.

  He looked broken.

  Leo felt a twinge of guilt. It's only a game, he told himself, unconvinced.

  "Ask him about the inheritance," Mike suggested, leaning against the wall with his arms crossed. "We need to know what we're working with."

  Leo flipped through the dictionary, searching for the right words.

  The story emerged in fragments.

  Wei Tuo had stumbled upon a map three months ago while fleeing creditors. The map led here, to this forgotten burial site, where someone had hidden a great legacy.

  The Great Otherworldly Demon Summoning Formation.

  Formations were complex arrays of inscribed patterns and symbols that channeled spiritual qi to produce specific effects. They were the backbone of cultivation technology, used for everything from magical swords to detecting and suppressing nukes back on Earth.

  This particular legacy was profound beyond measure.

  It contained formations for summoning "Great Otherworldly Demons" from the Demon Continent of "America."

  Leo nearly choked when he translated that part.

  "Did he just call us demons?" Kevin asked, his eye twitching.

  "From the Demon Continent of America," Leo confirmed, struggling to keep a straight face. "Apparently that's what they call Earth here."

  "I mean..." Mike shrugged. "Given our history, that's probably fair."

  The inheritance was comprehensive. Frighteningly so.

  It contained summoning formations for every cultivation tier: Qi Refining (Tier 1), Foundation Establishment (Tier 2), Gold Core (Tier 3), Nascent Soul (Tier 4), Deity Transformation (Tier 5), Void Refining (Tier 6), and Great Ascension (Tier 7).

  There was also something called a "Profound Website Formation" that apparently controlled the game interface recruiting Earthlings into the Azure Profound Continent.

  Someone had built an interdimensional video game using ancient cultivation techniques that predated the internet by millennia.

  The group quickly screenshot and saved every piece of available information using their VR pod's function. They photographed page after page of formation diagrams, cultivation insights, and dimensional theory.

  "This is our golden ticket," Kevin breathed, scrolling through the images on his phone. "If we can master these formations..."

  "We can summon anyone we want," Mike finished. "Armies. Specialists. Whoever we need."

  The excitement was palpable. Even Wei Tuo seemed to perk up slightly, perhaps sensing the shift in atmosphere even if he couldn't understand the words.

  Then reality reasserted itself.

  "There are two problems," Leo said, still translating Wei Tuo's increasingly frantic explanations. "The first is that the formations act as a level cap."

  "A what?" Arthur's voice echoed from somewhere in the tunnels. He hadn't gone as far as Leo thought.

  "The summoning formation we're bound to determines our maximum cultivation in this world," Leo explained. "We're connected to Foundation Establishment formations. That means we can cultivate up to Foundation Establishment, but we can't break through to Gold Core."

  Silence.

  "So we're stuck," Kevin said flatly. "You normally need to be Gold Core to create a Gold Core formation. It's a chicken and egg problem."

  "And the second problem," Leo continued, flipping back through the dictionary to double-check his translation. "The formation can only be inscribed on a specific material called Nether Sovereign Jade."

  "Each piece of Nether Sovereign Jade can only be bound to one person. One jade, one summoning plate, one user. Forever."

  Mike's jaw tightened. "So we can't make more plates to bring help in."

  "Fantastic." Arthur emerged from the tunnel mouth, covered in dirt and looking thoroughly frustrated. "Found the spirit vein, by the way. About thirty feet down, running under the whole tomb complex. Tier 2, like we thought."

  In the real world, spirit vein fees for a Tier 2 Foundation Establishment vein cost about $40,000 a year. Here, they had access for free.

  That was something, at least.

  The discussion that followed was surprisingly productive.

  With four minds working together, a plan took shape. They divided roles based on skills and availability, argued over logistics, and gradually assembled something resembling a strategy.

  Their goal was simple: conquer a Tier 3 spirit vein.

  The nearest one was miles away, in something called the Pond Gazing Sect. Wei Tuo claimed the sect had four Gold Core cultivators defending it.

  The Americans were undeterred.

  "We can't beat four Gold Cores head on," Arthur admitted. "But we don't have to. We just need to fly."

  "Like the La Ferrari Eclipse?" Leo asked.

  Arthur snorted. "Kid, we're not making Eclipses. Those have Tier 4 Forbidden formations. You'd need Nascent Soul level divine sense just to engrave the array, and none of us are anywhere close." He scratched his chin.

  "Basic flying swords," Mike said, nodding slowly. "Foundation Establishment grade steel, Foundation Establishment grade formations. Simple enough for us to forge and engrave ourselves."

  "They won't hit like Eclipses, but the locals here don't fly at all." Arthur cracked his knuckles. "We'll just fly over their sect and drop qi bombs until they give up and leave. That's how we did it back in Vietnam."

  They divided up the roles.

  Arthur would scout for opportunities and spirit stones to build capital. He would also search for spiritual iron deposits needed for their future flying swords, and food for Wei Tuo. The old boomer was too stubborn to teach new tricks, so they let him do the grunt work.

  "Why are we keeping him alive?" Kevin asked, jerking a thumb at the bound cultivator.

  "Language learning," Leo answered. "And information. He knows this world. We don't."

  Kevin, who had studied formations as a graduate student, would handle their real world finances. He explained that by refilling their qi using the free spiritual energy in the game world and then drawing and selling formations back on Earth, they could make a killing.

  "One hundred percent profit margins," Kevin said, his eyes gleaming. "Zero material costs on the qi."

  Mike, the stay-at-home dad with the highest divine sense due to his military background, would focus on learning the formations for the flying swords, the qi bombs, and the summoning plates. The work would train his divine sense, bringing him closer to the threshold needed for Tier 3 formation creation.

  "How close are you to that threshold?" Leo asked.

  Mike hesitated. "Really far. But that isn't the biggest problem."

  "I have a newborn at home. I randomly log off whenever the baby monitor goes off. Creating a Tier 3 formation requires a full day of uninterrupted work." Mike sighed heavily. "We'd have to wait until my current and future kids graduate high school before I'd have that kind of time."

  That left Leo.

  "You're our secret weapon," Arthur declared, clapping a hand on Leo's shoulder with enough force to make the teenager stagger.

  Leo was assigned two primary responsibilities.

  First: learn the common tongue of the Azure Profound Continent. The other three claimed they were "too old" to learn a new language efficiently and would do it later. Apparently, after reaching Superior Gold Core, comprehension abilities increased dramatically, making language acquisition trivial.

  Second: eventually create the Tier 3 Gold Core summoning formation.

  "Wait, what?" Leo blinked. "I'm a mortal. I don't even have enough divine sense to register on most meters. How am I supposed to create a formation that requires being Gold Core?"

  Arthur's smile was unsettling. "I have a special method."