The heavy dizziness in his head slowly ebbed away. Sebastian Langford forced his eyes open. Row after row of neat seats came into view. Men and women sat on both sides, all strangers. He turned to the right. Outside the window, the scenery was rushing backward at full speed.

This was...

A trace of shock flashed through his eyes like a bolt of lightning. He sat there frozen for several long minutes before he slowly steadied himself again.

No one noticed.

No one knew.

No one knew that Sebastian Langford, the Lingtian Immortal Exalt who had once swept across the Changsheng Realm, had not died beneath the heavenly tribulation at all. He had been reborn on Earth, a thousand years in the past.

Memories surged up in his mind one after another, wild and dense, like bamboo after spring rain.

Familiar.

Sharp.

Each one like a blade carving into his heart.

His parents, dead in a car crash.

His lover, jumping from a building on a stormy night.

And himself, drunk for three days, weeping until his throat split, then cutting his wrists and dying in despair.

Who would have guessed it?

Back then, when he slit his wrists, his soul had not scattered. By sheer chance, Zhenwu Immortal Emperor had passed that place and found him. The body people once mocked, the weak and sickly frame others sneered at, turned out to be the Purple Cloud Saint Body, a physique so rare that the Changsheng Realm might not see one in ten thousand years. With a sweep of his great sleeve, Zhenwu Immortal Emperor took both his soul and flesh away.

From that day on, Sebastian entered the Changsheng Realm.

With the Purple Cloud Saint Body, he crushed through one barrier after another and climbed all the way to Immortal Exalt.

Among the ten disciples of Zhenwu Immortal Emperor, he had been the one with the best chance of inheriting the master’s mantle.

Yet in the end, he still became nothing more than dust beneath the heavenly tribulation, erased clean.

Even now, Sebastian could still remember it clear as yesterday—the sky full of howling thunderlight, the savage web of lightning twisting across the heavens. With his cultivation, he might have endured to the very end.

But his will broke first.

At the last moment, on the line between life and utter annihilation, the figures of his parents and Evangeline Ashton rose from the deepest part of his soul. In that single instant, all the struggle, all the hard resolve he had built over the years, collapsed. And he was buried in the heavenly tribulation.

In his last life, he had the Purple Cloud Saint Body, true enough. But his cultivation had advanced too fast, while his foundation was never steady enough. In the end, all of it fell short.

This life, with heaven giving him another turn, Sebastian would walk it step by step.

Slow.

Solid.

No more rushing.

He reached into his pocket and pulled out a train ticket.

The date on it was clear.

His memory was even clearer.

Back then, his parents had pulled strings to transfer him from Ningchuan High School to Jindu No. 1 High School for his final year. They wanted him to get better results in the future college entrance exam. And right now, Sebastian was on that train, heading for Jindu.

Jindu was one of the most prosperous cities in Lingbei. Rich economy. Famous sites everywhere. A place crowded with old glory and living wealth. In the eyes of his parents, this was no small thing. This was a turning point that could change his whole life.

And the truth was, it did.

When he arrived in Jindu, he met the love of his life, Evangeline Ashton.

But it was also in Jindu that he lived through the ruin of everything.

His parents died.

His beloved threw herself from a building.

Those scenes were carved too deep. He could never forget them. He could never scrub away that furnace-like pain that burned through him. Otherwise, after a thousand years of cultivation, the images of his parents and Evangeline Ashton dying would not still be branded into the deepest part of his soul.

The Langford family Sebastian belonged to was one of the Four Great Families of Shangjing. Their bloodline was vast, their power spread wide enough to be counted across all of Huaxia. His father, Edmund Langford, was the third son of the current family head. In his youth, Edmund had been brilliant, praised as one of Shangjing’s gifted sons, a man wrapped in glory and praise wherever he went.

But in university, he met Sebastian’s mother, Diana Langford.

She came from a poor family.

He fell for her at first sight.

That love affair was something the Langford family plainly would not accept.

They blocked it at every turn.

They mocked it.

They trampled it.

They made things hard in every way they could.

In the end, Edmund broke with the Langford family in fury. He took Diana with him and left. The two of them went to the small city of Ningchuan, married there, and had a child.

That matter caused a huge uproar in Shangjing at the time.

Sebastian’s grandfather was so angry he fainted on the spot. After waking, he swore that for the rest of his life, Edmund Langford would never again step through the doors of the family home.

Later, Sebastian’s parents started from nothing in Ningchuan and built a technology company with their own hands. Their yearly profit reached several million. To ordinary people, that was already something to envy.

But in the eyes of the Langford family, it was only a joke.

Sebastian still remembered the one and only time he had entered the Langford family estate.

The ridicule.

The sneers.

The bullying.

Every bit of it was still there.

And that grandfather of his—aloof, strange, cold to the bone, sitting high above everyone like a judge looking down on dirt—had even slapped him across the face once.

That slap had landed right in front of his father and mother.

And why?

Because they said he had slept with a young maid of the Langford family.

What a joke.

Sebastian Langford knew the truth better than anyone. The whole thing had been a filthy setup. The Langford family feared Edmund Langford might step back into the clan, feared he might win back his place and fight for the inheritance. So they dumped the blame on Sebastian. Framed him clean.

And that lofty old grandfather of his?

He never even gave him a chance to speak.

Not one word.

Just one hard slap across the face.

Sebastian still remembered it clear as daylight. His mother Diana Langford, eyes swollen red from crying. His father Edmund Langford, whole body shaking with rage, yet forced to swallow it down.

Later, his parents’ tech company cracked high-end graphene technology. It should have brought them funding. Should have let them stand proud over the whole tech world. But the Langford family reached in from the shadows and wrecked it. The patent was stolen outright. Snatched away by force.

His parents drowned in grief and fury.

Then came the car crash.

Dead on the spot.

Sebastian had no proof. Not a scrap.

But he knew.

That crash had the Langford family’s hand in it too.

They could not bear to watch his father rise.

Could not bear to watch his father win the old man’s favor again.

Could not bear the thought of him stepping back into the Langford family and touching the inheritance.

At that thought, a cold flash tore through Sebastian’s eyes like thunder splitting the dark.

In his last life, he had been weak. Easy to bully. A half-good-for-nothing rich brat who knew only how to eat, drink, and waste his days. He watched his parents be humiliated, crushed, killed—and all he could do was cry like a fool, choke on his pain, and in the end use death to run from it all.

But this life was different.

Different from the root up.

The Langford family’s gate—he would step through it again.

Not only step through it.

He would make the entire Langford family pay back every last drop of blood and debt.

On the wall to the left side of the carriage hung an advertisement for Beihui Group. The biggest listed conglomerate in Lingbei. Worth hundreds of billions. Back then, in the eyes of Horatio Neville, heir to Beihui Group, Sebastian was less than dirt.

An ant.

That was why Horatio Neville had dared to seize Evangeline Ashton so brutally.

His beloved.

Then, when Sebastian tried to resist, the man ground him down again and again, trampling him until nothing was left but pain and shame.

Evangeline Ashton’s death was the deepest wound in Sebastian’s heart aside from his parents.

In this life, Horatio Neville would pay.

Beihui Group would pay.

He would turn the whole thing to ash.

After checking his body as it was now, Sebastian gave a bitter smile.

Still the same as back then.

His flesh, bones, tendons, organs, even his soul—all pitifully weak.

The Purple Cloud Saint Body had no room to show its edge in this foul, muddied air. Worse, it would actually be harmed by it. It was like pouring diesel into an aircraft. Not only would it fail to fly, it would wreck itself in the process. But swap in aviation fuel, and it would soar at once.

So right now, there was only one thing he needed to do.

Find spiritual energy.

His mind still held the countless cultivation arts from his former life. As long as he could find spiritual energy, he had full confidence he could climb back to the peak.

Still, he was not completely useless at the moment.

After rebirth, all his overwhelming cultivation had indeed vanished. But his soul had brought back a thread of True Immortal power. Tiny. Pathetically tiny. Yet even that had already greatly strengthened his body, giving him strength at the peak of the Blood-Shedding Realm.

In the Changsheng Realm, cultivation from low to high was divided into several realms: Blood-Shedding, Qi-Strengthening, Soul-Nourishing, Soul-Tempering, Saint Ascension, Ancient Immortal, Immortal Venerable, Immortal Sovereign, Immortal Emperor, and Ancient God.

Sebastian’s current Blood-Shedding Realm cultivation would be bottom-rung trash in the Changsheng Realm.

But on Earth, a low-grade world where spiritual energy had long dried up, it should be more than enough.

As for whether Earth had anyone walking the road of Changsheng cultivation, he did not know.

And whether their system matched his, he did not know that either.

For now, he could only take it slow and plan for the long game.

There was still plenty of time before his parents died in that car crash, and before Evangeline Ashton threw herself from that building. Time, for Sebastian Langford, was enough. More than enough.

He slowly clenched his fists.

At once, a thread of strength rose in his body.

The color in Sebastian’s face improved a little. He pushed himself up, meaning to head for the washroom. Before boarding, he had bought a huge bottle of iced cola. The weather had been hot enough to scorch a man, and he had gotten greedy for that cold bite and drained the whole thing. Now the urge to piss had come on strong, which was only natural.

Come to think of it, he had not eaten, drunk, pissed, or shat like an ordinary man in a very, very long time.

Back then, he had carried the body of an Immortal Exalt. He fed on the essence of heaven and earth. There was no need for these mortal routines, no need to bother with such trifles day after day.

The corner of Sebastian’s mouth lifted.

Fine, he thought. I’ll just treat this as tasting what it means to be human again.

But the moment he rose to his feet, noise burst from the front of the carriage.

A woman was crying.

A man was roaring at the top of his lungs.

All around, people heard the commotion, got up one after another, and crowded forward to see what was happening.