Pre-Chapter AN: Unfortunately, real life has decided to enter the equation and throw my schedule completely off balance. As a result, there won’t be an update for Celestial Star or the first chapter of Fang Over Fang for now. That said, I do have two chapters of a Xianxia snippet I’ve been working on. Originally, I planned to release it once I had more chapters completed, since even the first part still isn’t fully finished yet. Still, these chapters were meant to be released eventually, so I’m posting them today instead.

Getting a Rise Out of the Heavens (Xianxia)Chapter 1: The Captive

I woke up to the taste of dirt and blood.

My face was pressed against the ground, and my arms were tied behind my back with rough rope that bit into my wrists every time I shifted. My head was pounding, a dull, heavy ache that ran from the base of my skull to my temples, and my mouth was so dry that my tongue felt like it was stuck to the roof of it. I tried to move, and the pain shot through my ribs on the left side. Someone had kicked me there. Maybe more than once.

I could hear voices. Low, murmuring voices somewhere nearby, and the crackling of a fire. The ground beneath me was cold and uneven, packed earth with small rocks digging into my cheek. I kept my eyes closed and tried to think, but my thoughts were scattered and wrong. They didn't feel like mine.

And then, all at once, the world went silent.

Not quiet. Silent. The crackling fire, the murmuring voices, the faint rustle of wind through grass, all of it just stopped. I opened my eyes, and the world was gray. Not dark, not foggy, just drained of all color, like someone had pulled the life out of everything around me. The two men sitting a few paces away from me were frozen mid-motion, one with his hand halfway to his mouth holding a strip of dried meat, the other leaning back against a wooden post with his eyes half-closed. Neither of them moved. Neither of them breathed.

I stared at them for a long moment, and then the memories hit me.

They came all at once, fast and sharp, like being dumped into cold water. A village. A small village near the eastern foothills, surrounded by farmland that barely produced enough to feed the families that worked it. A boy named Shen Wei, sixteen years old, the son of the village carpenter. A normal, unremarkable kid who had never held a weapon in his life and whose biggest worry three days ago had been whether or not the girl who sold dumplings at the market had smiled at him on purpose. Then the bandits came. They came at night, with torches and swords, and a man at the front who moved like no human being should be able to move, fast, impossibly fast, crossing the distance between the village gate and the first house in what looked like a single step. The village had no walls worth mentioning. No militia. No defenses. The whole thing was over in less than an hour.

That boy, that Shen Wei, had been knocked unconscious with a blow to the back of the head while trying to drag his younger sister behind their house. He didn't know if she got away. The memory cut off there.

I was not that boy.

Or rather, I was not only that boy. I was also someone else, someone who had lived an entirely different life in an entirely different world. A man named David Park, twenty-seven years old, who had spent five years after college trying to make it as an actor in a city that did not care whether he existed or not. Five years of auditions, callbacks that led nowhere, bit parts in student films, and a growing collection of rejection emails that he'd stopped reading after the first sentence. I had been good. I knew I had been good. But being good hadn't been enough, and the last thing I remembered from that life was falling asleep on the couch in my studio apartment after another twelve-hour shift at the restaurant where I waited tables to pay rent.

Both sets of memories settled into place like two puzzle pieces clicking together, and I understood, with a calm that surprised me, that I was both of them now. David's mind in Shen Wei's body, or maybe something in between. The panic was there, sitting right at the base of my throat, but it wasn't the kind of panic that made you scream. It was the kind that made you hold very still and think very carefully about what to do next.

Then the text appeared.

A simple blue screen with white text opened up in front of me.

[Reaction Farming System — Activated]

[Host: Shen Wei]

[When you provoke a genuine emotional reaction in another living being, you will earn points based on the strength and nature of that reaction. Points can be invested into your physical stats, your mental stats, or your understanding of techniques and skills. The stronger the reaction and the stronger the individual reacting, the more points you will earn.]

[Current Points: 0]

[Note: You are advised to moderate your behavior. Provoking reactions carries inherent risk. The system does not protect you from consequences.]

The screen faded, and color started bleeding back into the world. Sound returned first, the fire and the voices and the wind, and then the rest followed, the orange glow of the flames, the brown of the dirt, the dark cloth of the bandits' clothing. The two guards were moving again, one of them chewing on his dried meat, the other adjusting his position against the post.

I lay there for a moment, my face still pressed against the ground, and I processed what I had just been told. A system. Points for making people react. The concept was strange, but it wasn't complicated. I had spent five years learning how to make people feel things on command, how to read a room, how to shift my voice and my body to pull a specific emotion out of someone watching me. I had failed at turning that into a career, but the skills themselves hadn't gone anywhere. They were sitting right there in my head, layered on top of Shen Wei's memories of sixteen years of village life.

The situation I was in, though, that was the problem. I turned my head just enough to get a better look around without drawing attention. We were in some kind of makeshift camp set up in a shallow valley between two hills. There were tents, maybe a dozen of them, arranged in a rough circle around a central fire. I could see other bodies on the ground nearby, tied up like me, men and women from the village, most of them still unconscious. I counted at least fifteen before I had to stop turning my head.

From Shen Wei's memories, I knew a few things. I knew that the bandits numbered somewhere around thirty-five, all mortals except for their leader. And their leader was a cultivator. Shen Wei didn't know much about cultivation, just the basics that everyone in this world seemed to grow up knowing. Cultivators were people who drew in the energy of the world, refined it, and used it to make themselves stronger, faster, and capable of things that no ordinary person could do. The first major stage was called Qi Condensation, and it had nine levels. Even a cultivator at the first level of Qi Condensation could take on ten armed men by himself and walk away without a scratch. The bandit leader, from what Shen Wei had seen during the attack, was well above that. The way he had moved, the way the air had seemed to ripple around his fist when he'd punched through the door of the village elder's house, that wasn't something a normal person could do.

I was a mortal. I had no cultivation, no weapons, no allies, and my hands were tied behind my back. The only thing I had was a system that rewarded me for making people feel things.

So that's what I would do.

I let out a breath, and it came out louder than I intended, a sharp exhale through my nose that sounded almost like a laugh. The guard with the dried meat looked over at me, and I saw his eyes narrow. He was a thick man with a patchy beard and a scar that ran across the bridge of his nose, and he had a short sword on his belt that looked like it hadn't been cleaned in weeks.

"This one's awake," he called out to the other guard, and the second man pushed himself off the post and walked over. He was thinner, younger, maybe early twenties, with a nervous energy about him that showed in the way his eyes kept darting around. They both stood over me, and the bigger one nudged my shoulder with his boot. "Didn't think you'd be up so soon. Took a solid hit to the head, you did. Might make a hardy slave after all."

I looked up at both of them, and I let myself take a breath. Then another. And then I started to laugh.

It started low, just a chuckle that could have been mistaken for coughing, but I let it build. I let it roll out of me the way I'd been trained to, from the chest, not the throat, with a fullness that made it sound real because it was real. Not because anything was funny, but because I was terrified and exhausted and tied up on the ground in a world that shouldn't exist, and sometimes the only honest response to something like that was to laugh at it. The tears came on their own, welling up at the corners of my eyes and spilling down my dirt-caked cheeks, and I let them come too because they made the whole thing more convincing.

The bigger guard took a half-step back, and the younger one's hand went to the hilt of his sword.

"What's wrong with him?" the younger one asked, his voice pitched a little higher than before.

I kept laughing for another few seconds, letting it taper off naturally until I was just lying there with a wide, wet grin on my face, looking up at both of them. Then I spoke, and I used the voice I'd spent years learning how to use, the one that carried without shouting, the one that made people in the back row of a theater sit up straighter.

"You don't know who you've messed with, do you?" I said, and I shook my head slowly, still grinning, like I was looking at two children who had just done something catastrophically stupid.

[Mortal Reaction — Startled: +3 Points]

[Mortal Reaction — Unsettled: +2 Points]

The notification flashed at the edge of my vision, faint and quick, and I almost lost my composure because it actually worked. Five points, just like that, from a laugh and a single sentence. I kept my face exactly where it was.

"What are you talking about?" the bigger guard said, but his weight had shifted to his back foot, and I noticed that.

"Do you want to know why our village had no walls?" I asked, and I let the grin fade into something colder, something that looked like pity. "Do you want to know why we had minimal guards, only a few men on watch at any given time? Doesn't that strike you as odd?"

The younger guard looked at the older one. The older one didn't look back.

"We didn't need them," I said, and I pitched my voice lower, more serious, letting the wild energy from the laughter drain out of it. "A cultivator hails from our village. Seventh stage Qi Condensation. He leaves for months at a time, but he always comes back. He's due within the week." I paused, and I watched their faces, and I leaned into the pause the way you lean into a silence on stage, letting it do the work for you. "When he arrives and sees the village in ashes and half the people gone, what do you think he's going to do?"

The bigger guard's jaw tightened. The younger one had gone pale.

"A seventh stage cultivator," I repeated, as if they might not have understood the first time. "Do you know what that means? Your boss, your leader, whoever he is, he might be able to push around farmers and old men. But a seventh stage? That man could tear through every single person in this camp in the time it takes you to draw that sword, and he wouldn't even be breathing hard when he was done."

Absolute, complete, and total lie. Every word of it. Shen Wei's village had no protector, no cultivator patron, and no connection to anyone with any real power. The reason the village had no walls was because they were poor. They had a few men who took turns on watch and could swing a blade if they had to, but every other able-bodied person was needed in the fields. The village was defenseless because it had nothing worth defending, and the bandits had attacked it because it was easy.

But these two didn't know that. And I had delivered the lie with the conviction of a man who genuinely believed he was about to be rescued, which was the easiest kind of lie to sell because it was all in the eyes. You didn't try to look honest. You just let yourself believe it, and the belief did the rest.

[Mortal Reaction — Fear: +6 Points]

[Mortal Reaction — Anxiety: +4 Points]

[Mortal Reaction — Doubt: +3 Points]

[Mortal Reaction — Fear: +5 Points]

[Mortal Reaction — Doubt: +2 Points]

The notifications rolled in, one after another, flickering at the edge of my vision like a tally counter going off. I kept my face still and let the silence stretch.

The younger guard swallowed hard and looked toward the center of the camp, toward the largest tent where I assumed the cultivator leader slept. The bigger one held his ground better, but his hand had moved to the hilt of his sword, not to draw it, but to hold onto something solid.

"You're lying," the bigger one said, but there was a question mark at the end of it that he probably didn't intend.

"Maybe," I said, and I smiled at him, the kind of smile that doesn't reach the eyes. "I guess you'll find out in a few days."

[Mortal Reaction — Unease: +2 Points]

The younger guard's face twisted, caught somewhere between fear and anger, and the anger won. He drew his sword in one rough motion and stepped forward, pressing the flat of the blade against my throat. The metal was cold and I could feel the edge of it just barely biting into the skin below my jaw. My heart slammed against my ribs so hard I was sure he could see it, and every part of me wanted to flinch, to pull away, to break character and beg. I held still. I kept the smile on my face even though my teeth were clenched behind it, and I looked up at him with the same pitying expression I'd worn the whole time.

"It won't change your fate," I said, and my voice came out steadier than I had any right to expect.

[Mortal Reaction — Frustration: +3 Points]

[Total Points: 30]

The older guard grabbed the younger one by the shoulder and pulled him back, hard enough that the blade scraped away from my neck and left a thin sting behind.

"Enough," the older one said, his voice low and firm. "Don't touch him. Not until we've told the boss about this." He looked down at me, and I could see him turning it over, trying to decide if I was telling the truth or if I was the best liar he'd ever met. After a moment, he jerked his head toward the center of the camp. "Come on. Let’s report this before the rest of them wake up."

The younger one sheathed his sword with a rough shove and followed, throwing one last look over his shoulder at me before the two of them disappeared between the tents.

I let out a breath I didn't realize I'd been holding, and the smile finally dropped off my face.