After meeting his father, Lin Yuanqiao, Lin Yunyi returned to his room.
He sat down beside his desk and carefully sorted through his thoughts. In fact, he had memories of two lifetimes. Perhaps he hadn't drunk enough of the soup that erased memories before reincarnation, because he remembered his previous life with exceptional clarity.
In that life, he had lived on Earthstar. His health had been poor, and only a few years after entering graduate school, he died of a heart attack.
When he first realized he'd been reborn, in a healthy body no less, and into a world where cultivation was possible, he was beside himself with joy.
What man hadn't dreamed of roaming the world with a sword and setting out on the path to eternal life?
As soon as Lin Yunyi could move about, he eagerly began learning everything he could about the cultivation world.
The family ancestor was a Foundation Establishment expert, and the clan library held numerous cultivation texts.
He had to admit that those books had helped him enormously.
At the age of three, the moment his spiritual roots were tested, Lin Yunyi plunged into cultivation without delay.
Everyone in the family thought his five roots meant he was finished!
But Lin Yunyi thought the family was full of short-sighted fools. So what if he had five roots? Weren't five roots the standard equipment of protagonists in underdog cultivation novels?
Since he had managed to reincarnate in this world with his past-life memories intact, he must be favored by fate. He certainly wasn't going to live an ordinary, unremarkable life.
At first, Lin Yunyi thought he'd simply transmigrated into another world. But several months ago, when news arrived that Jiang Tan'er, the girl he'd been betrothed to before birth, had dual fire and wood spiritual roots, he suddenly realized that he hadn't merely transmigrated—he'd transmigrated into a book.
On Earthstar, he had read thousands of cultivation novels. Never in his wildest dreams had he imagined that one day he'd end up inside one.
And he hadn't even become the protagonist or an important supporting character. He was nothing more than a background figure.
The story's heroine was Jiang Yueran of the Jiang family. It mainly followed her after she entered the Beast-Taming Sect, where she and the male lead became a perfectly matched couple, overcame one obstacle after another, worked tirelessly to improve, and gradually rose to the pinnacle.
When the heroine, Jiang Yueran, returned home for a family visit, she met her younger female cousin. That cousin was Lin Yunyi's fiancée, Jiang Tan'er.
In the book, Lin Yunyi was merely an idle, uneducated five-root cultivator who was like a toad lusting after swan meat, coveting a girl with dual roots.
The Lin family stubbornly refused to let go of the betrothal arranged before their births and insisted on marrying Jiang Tan'er into the family.
But after bringing her into their household, the Lins didn't treat her well. They regarded Jiang Tan'er as a childbearing machine and pressured her to have children every day.
In the end, their mistreatment came back to bite them. Lin Yunyi turned out to possess the rare Heavenly Yang Sacred Physique, and after marrying, he lost all his cultivation to Jiang Tan'er.
Only after Lin Yunyi's cultivation had been completely destroyed did the Lin family finally discover his special physique. But it was too late. He was already ruined.
The Lins blamed Jiang Tan'er for destroying Lin Yunyi and constantly made her life difficult. After several years of turmoil, the Lin family's Foundation Establishment ancestor died, and the couple finally divorced.
The story was told from the heroine's perspective. In her eyes, the Lin family had brought disaster upon itself. A marriage that began through coercion was destined to end tragically, and the Lins had only themselves to blame.
To the present Lin Yunyi, however, the Lin family seemed like a clan of complete suckers.
The Jiang family had its own Foundation Establishment ancestor and was hardly a pushover.
If the Jiangs had agreed to marry their daughter into the Lin family, the Lins must have paid a considerable price.
As far as he knew, the ancestor had even considered sending the Jiang family a gift not long ago to maintain their relationship.
After all the trouble of bringing the girl home, they ended up crippling their own grandson while Jiang Tan'er benefited enormously. It was understandable that the Lin family felt bitter about it.
The heroine and her cousin hadn't discussed what ultimately happened to the Lin family.
But if Lin Yunyi's guess was right, after the ancestor died, there was probably no Foundation Establishment cultivator left to protect the clan. Only then would Jiang Tan'er have been able to divorce so easily.
And if he wasn't mistaken, Jiang Tan'er had probably taken considerable benefits from the Lin family before leaving.
The novel began when the heroine joined the Beast-Taming Sect. Most of its main plot followed her studies under various masters and her explorations of secret places and hidden realms within the sect.
Although the ancestor had once belonged to the Beast-Taming Sect, he'd left it long ago to establish his own family. Besides, Lin Yunyi hadn't read the novel very carefully, and so much time had passed that he could no longer remember many details.
He couldn't recall much useful information at the moment.
According to the book, the Beast-Taming Sect held another round of recruitment more than twenty years after the heroine joined.
During that recruitment, an excellent young prospect emerged with three spiritual roots: lightning, fire, and wood.
At the time, an elder remarked that he'd once met a cultivator with dual lightning and fire roots, whose aptitude was even better than that of this three-root newcomer.
Unfortunately, that cultivator's ignorant family elders had mistaken his roots for metal, water, and fire and forced him to practice metal-element techniques.
This extraordinarily gifted cultivator had somehow managed to make a start despite not possessing a metal root at all.
But forcing lightning and fire roots to cultivate metal techniques had made every bit of progress needlessly difficult. By the time the mistake was discovered, metal-element spiritual energy had already damaged his meridians, severely impairing his aptitude.
A peerless genius had been ruined purely through the ignorance of his elders.
As Lin Yunyi saw it, both the tragedy of the Heavenly Yang Physique bearer and that of the lightning-and-fire cultivator had been caused by ignorance.
No matter what world you lived in, a lack of education could have dreadful consequences.
He hadn't given those passing details much thought while reading the novel. But after three years of observation, Lin Yunyi strongly suspected that those two unlucky wretches were none other than himself and his little brother.
Lately, he had been constantly trying to remember the book's contents. Unfortunately, he'd read too many novels, and very little useful information came back to him.
Lin Yunyi suspected his memory needed some kind of prompt to trigger it.
He'd noticed that as his cultivation improved, his memory grew sharper as well. Perhaps once his cultivation rose higher, he would be able to recall that entire novel from beginning to end.
