The Abondoned One

"Now, where do I go?" Alister muttered, looking around the dense, unfamiliar forest.

"This is literally the middle of nowhere. I don't even know where the hell I am."

With a silent sigh and a loud grumbling stomach, he picked a random direction and started walking, trying to navigate using the original Alister's memories.

"Hope I don't end up in some beast's stomach," he said, half-joking, half-serious.

The forest was rich with unfamiliar scents but rustling with life. After hours of wandering and experimenting, he finally found something useful—a few wild fruits from a low-hanging branch and cautiously bit into one. It was bitter, but edible.

After munching on them like a hungry gorilla, his mind wandered back to the fragmented memories he's inherited and the world he's landed in.

"This world looks like a normal world inhabited by humans."

His eyes lit up as something clicked.

"Oh! It's the Emerald Jade Realm."

Excitement bubbled up in his chest. "It seems to be one of the seven ancient continents of Veloria. Just like Crimson Flame world, my homeland."

The historical information about this world that he gathered from venturing into myriad realms during his previous life appeared in his mind.

The publicly known history goes up to the time when a mystical figure known as "Celestial Valoria" gathered an unbeatable force, which conquered the known lands, forming the biggest empire. It was said that the empire was so large that no mortal had ever ventured beyond it. However, Alister knew there were even more worlds out there because he had personally travelled to several worlds in his previous lifetime.

After the disappearance of the 'Celestial Valoria', several power struggles and devastating wars took place. The entire empire fragmented into seven continents, which were then separated by bodies of water known as the Four Seas.

The Crimson Flame world, where Alister had lived his previous life as Pure Yang Lord, was believed to be one of the fragments of the ancient seven continents. For many centuries, people of the Crimson Flame world ventured beyond their world to search for the other six continents, but they found no traces of them. This led many of them to doubt if their ancient records were true. Even if it's true, it seemed as if they just evaporated one day, leaving the lone continent behind.

This search, however, led them to come into contact with several other worlds inhabited by devils, foreign creatures and unknown entities, which invited several conflicts and disasters.

Yet, now Alister was currently standing on the Emerald Jade World—another of the seven continents broken off of the Valoria.

"It doesn't look much different from the world I lived in," Alister mused, glancing around at the green hills. "Except.. there are no volcanoes here and a lot more trees."

Similar to his previous world, cultivation and strength were the ruling factors around here.

Despite the excitement, a frown appeared on his face,

"I wonder if I can find the Crimson Flame world here? That would help in determining a few things, but there's not even a mention of it in this guy's memory… Have I really migrated to the past? Or is it some sort of parallel universe?"

Too many questions. Too little clarity.

He decided to slowly figure things out and currently focuses on what he can at the moment—increasing his cultivation.

He sat down cross-legged beside a towering tree to observe the cultivation of this body.

Closing his eyes, he perceived the energy pathways inside his body using his formidable soul sense, noticing a subtle glow in exactly nine meridians.

"Tch. Only nine open Qi pathways."

An energy cultivator typically needs to be able to sense as many Qi pathways as possible in the Qi sensing realm to slowly awaken them, with eight being the bare minimum required before one can ascend to the Body Refinement Realm.

'Pathetic!' A disdain appeared on his face, and he sighed.

Although Alister was raised in the declining Grimshaw clan, which was considered a mid-sized force in Redwood town, the old couple who adopted him had some status and influence in the clan. This was mainly due to their son, who had decent cultivation but went missing on an outside clan mission. They were somewhat wealthy to be able to support him in cultivation early on.

He was a bright and agile child who started cultivating when he was six years of age, showing early talent in cultivation. He quickly reached the ninth level of the Qi sensing realm in just seven years, which made him a rare talent among his peers.

People proclaimed him as the number one talent in the town. Even powerful clans of the town sent their children to get acquainted with the boy. One of the powerful clans of the town, the Mei clan, somehow tricked the two old couples into accepting an arranged marriage for the boy with their daughter.

He was then nurtured as the future expert of the clan and bestowed with the secret cultivation technique of his clan, 'Grimshaw's Shadow Embrace', despite not having the clan's bloodline. But then things took a bad turn as he didn't improve in cultivation for an entire two years, resulting in his peers catching up with him. The town's whispers turned into taunts.

"A guy with a natural Pure Yang body practising an extreme Yin-based cultivation technique? Tsk! Those fools!"

Unable to bear the looks of scorn and disdain of his friends and peers who once looked up to him, he started working even harder in cultivation, but it eventually became harder and harder for him to cultivate. Even his fiancé, who had a good relationship with him, started to distance herself from him. Moreover, the couple taking care of him passed away when he was still a teenager.

Unable to bear the sudden reversal, he resorted to using unconventional methods… and somehow managed to break through to the Body Refinement Realm.

"This guy could barely feel nine meridians after a decade of cultivation and directly went to the Body Refinement Realm. Tsk! That's why this body is so bloody weak."

"Thankfully, this guy didn't go further than that with his unstable foundation. Hopefully, I can still restart cultivating energy in this body with a more robust foundation."

Alister settled deeper into meditation, trying to sense the flow of Qi more clearly while trying to improve his foundation for cultivation.

While dealing with the Qi sensing realm, he traced back to a memory of when he had once met a mysterious cultivator–the strongest and the most talented one he met in his whole life who defeated him despite being several ranks lower.