Early spring frost stained the flowers red. The weather in the capital was very strange this year — it should have warmed already, but the ladies selling ice-cold water looked upon the morning’s cold fog in astonishment and didn’t know whether they should go out into the streets.
Throughout the streets and alleyways, early morning vendors chatted quietly with each other:
“I heard people from uptown say that the days are abnormal, they’re afraid it’s a bad omen…”1妖星 (yāo xīng) is an astrological term for a collection of phenomena (e.g. comets) that portend disaster
“Who’d you hear this nonsense from–”
“Psh, it’s not nonsense, the astrologers at the Observatory calculated it…”
The guards who passed by occasionally scolded them for spreading evil rumours, but when they turned away, the guards also muttered to themselves, “Please don’t let there be a disaster…”
In the dim pre-dawn sky, there was an eye-catchingly bright red star hanging very close to the horizon, which indeed looked like it was about to fall onto the city. It so resembled the rumoured evil star that the stories gained momentum the farther it travelled, and eventually people came to believe that this year would experience a great disaster — Mars was shining brightly, chaos was on its way.
But no matter if it were troubled times or an evil star, it had little to do with the poor folk in the lower city who were perpetually on the verge of starvation, especially an extraneous little girl. A girl around ten years of age crawled out from a pile of hay where she had spent the night with her hair in disarray. She shook off bits of hay from her head and shivered from the chilly morning dew.
Taking advantage of the remaining darkness, she moved her reed-thin legs and scurried to the eastern district. Few people ever went there. In the lower city, on the outer edges of a peach grove, there was a lake; this lake wasn’t natural, it was dug artificially by an unknown wealthy family for their own enjoyment of the scenery. And the lake was filled to the brim with carp.
The girl snuck up to the lake and slipped into the water like an eel. The carp, raised by humans, had grown big and fat, and were unafraid of being caught. It took no time at all for her to catch enough to eat for three days. Although the area was privately owned, the owner seemed to rarely visit, so there were hardly any guards posted there except for the occasional evening banquet. To this little girl, the scenic lake was like the legendary seas that she heard about, and she relied on this lake to avoid the fate of being sold to the West Street butcher.
Huh?
The girl put her fish on the shore where they flopped and struggled, and when she turned around, she saw that the lake surface still had considerable ripples even after she left the water — could there be a huge fish?
She was torn, and finally couldn’t resist going back into the water. The child who had been hungry for a long time became greedy. Even if her catch was already enough to last her three full days, she still wanted to take a look at the bigger fish, even if it was just a glance…
However, before she could go any deeper than chest-high water, there was a plop—
The girl almost choked on water as she flailed, scared out of her wits. Something in the water had grabbed at her ankle — it felt like a human hand!
The ice-cold hand gripped her leg. Before she could react, the water shook violently and something black and white emerged from the depths.
A water ghoul!
The little girl quickly ran through her life in her small mind, trying to think of whether she had done anything harmful to the world that would cause her to be targeted by ghouls and ghosts, as she used her entire body’s strength to retreat towards the shore. At this moment, the pair of pale hands had reached above her knees — oh, the water ghoul’s hands had clear joints and clean nails, they were quite pretty…
Her will to survive was very strong. She soon reached the shore, and with a loud splash, the ‘water ghoul’ also crawled out of the lake, let go of her legs, and coughed violently. Black hair draped wetly over its shoulders and the ends floated in all directions on the water, but it no longer looked anything like a water ghoul. After all, in no myth would a water ghoul have such clear eyes or handsome features.
He truly was a very beautiful man. It wasn’t that the girl hadn’t seen any young men from the upper city, but when compared to this person, those men wrapped in brocade cloth and mink furs couldn’t be called anything but ugly. Even if he was currently wet and miserable, an awe-inspiring aura still lingered around him.
He coughed for so long that someone might worry he would cough out his guts, but thankfully he only spit out a whole bunch of water before tiredly turning over to lay on his back in the shallows and letting out a long breath. His fine eyelashes curled up, catching hold of water droplets. The girl thought that this might be some kind of fairy who had absorbed all the essence of this lake into that single drop. His eyes rippled in reflection of the lake water.
The girl, staring blankly at him, subconsciously crouched next to him and poked his water-chilled face.
It was only then that he came back to his senses and said, “Thank you.”
He burst into laughter just as a white crane landed next to a willow tree. As the morning light shone onto the cold lake, his joy at surviving disaster wasn’t concealed in the least, but neither did it make him appear crass. On the contrary, it was the observer who was struck dumb for half a day, until he raised his hand and pinched the girl’s chin.
“Did I scare you?”
There was silence for three seconds.
Then the girl flinched back as if facing a ghost, rolled into the water with a yelp, and scrambled away. It was at this time that Mister Drowned Rat belatedly cursed to himself, very anachronistically —
This fucking backwards feudal society. If I do that, the ancient people here will probably think I’m a hooligan…
* * *
The unfortunate drowned rat’s name was Chu Xiang.
There was no doubt that Chu Xiang had transmigrated, or perhaps the word ‘rebirthed’ was more accurate. As for what happened before that rebirth…
In 2953, during the 28th century of the Galactic calendar,2Yes the RAWS say 28th century for the 2900s, just go with it the Galactic Federation’s first-class mothership Longque was performing an escort mission in Sector Delta, under the command of Rear Admiral Chu Xiang.
Sector Delta was located very far away from Earth, so the Federation had little control over it. The area was filled with alien militaries, interstellar pirates, and planetless nomads beyond counting — as well as mineral veins which produced extremely rare ores used as industrial raw materials. If it weren’t for this, it would be impossible for a first-class military use mothership to be assigned to escorting merchant ships.
Sure enough, they encountered pirates, and what was even worse was that two separate pirate bands had set their eyes on the merchant ships. They nonetheless fought bravely. Longque and the pirates launched a three-way melee, and the spectacle of quantum missiles hitting their targets in the silent universe was as grand as a fireworks show.
However one group of pirates saw that they could not succeed as long as Longque was present, and they might even be annihilated in turn, so they simply went all in and released a black hole bomb — a xenotech weapon which created an artificial, temporary black hole to swallow everything in its path, equally harmful to oneself as well as the enemy.
Space suddenly became chaotic as gravity grabbed hold of every spaceship. At the last moment, in order to allow more people to escape safely and return home, the captain of the Longque, Chu Xiang, ordered everyone to abandon ship and board the merchant vessels, then he used kinetic energy generated by the self-destruction of the mothership’s core to send his comrades and the merchant ships out of the gravity well and of Sector Delta entirely.
At the moment the spaceship self-destructed around him, Chu Xiang admitted that he had acted impulsively, but he neither hesitated nor regretted it. From the very first moment that he flew into the starry sky, he had been prepared to turn into stardust, because that was one of the logical ends to a spaceship captain’s life.
* * *
But it was certain that crawling out of the water after all that, soaked through, was definitely not part of the plan.
It felt surreal as his soul fell from the stars to land on earth, but as wave after wave of cold water lapped against his cheeks, his sense of reality slowly recovered.
It felt like déjà vu.
Chu Xiang lay in the water. Although it was cold, the excitement of regaining his life warmed him. However, Chu Xiang had no strong reaction to his rebirth, because he held a secret —
He originally came from this world.
It was quite fantastical. At the beginning, after Chu Xiang fell into the water — he couldn’t swim at the time — he thought he would die with regrets just like that, but when he opened his eyes again, he had already arrived in the interstellar era of another Earth.
It took him many years to adapt to a new world and understand his incredible experiences the first time he transmigrated. Fortunately, nothing infants did in their first few years of life would be taken as unreasonable, so there, he had the opportunity to grow up again, reach adulthood, and truly become a human of the 28th century. He graduated from Starfleet Academy’s command track with impeccable grades, took flight above the stars, and then…
Then his death sent him back?
Did this thing give return tickets?
His eyes were still filled with the flames of explosions when he suddenly woke up underwater and almost suffocated to death. Thankfully, although the captain of Longque was a spaceship captain, he drowned to death in his previous life so he made sure to practise swimming in this life!
Thus, he struggled his way out of the water, and the prior scene happened.
He even confirmed, repeatedly, that this was his body from this world. Age, condition, and the location where he fell into the water were all correct. There was… a ridiculous sensation of going to another world to study and graduate, then returning to his hometown. If it weren’t for the fact that his swimming skills were brought back with him from the 28th century, he would suspect that the decades he lived as a spaceship captain were just a dream he had as he was dying.
As it was, the time spent flying among stars was engraved in his bones and blood, even rebirth wouldn’t be able to erase it.
With some strength coming back to him, Chu Xiang sat up again.
Like a Möbius strip, everything went back to where it started.
There was a skinny little girl squatting not far away. Chu Xiang looked at his saviour — without this girl, he might really have drowned. This wasn’t the body of a spaceship captain, after all; the Chu Xiang of this world was so pathetically weak that even a captain’s civilian secretary would be able to beat him up.
It was clear at a glance that the child was severely malnourished, with withered yellowing hair, an overly pointy little face, and a pair of big protruding eyes looking at him warily yet curiously.
Sighing, Chu Xiang waved her closer. “Don’t be scared, I want to thank you for saving me.”
“You…” the girl started saying, shivering, “you’re not a water ghoul, right?”
Tsk, feudal superstition.
Chu Xiang smiled and stretched out a hand. “It’s warm.”
Seeing that Chu Xiang’s movements were so natural, the girl pursed her lips, looking like she was thinking deeply. After a while she carefully stretched out her fingers and speedily tapped Chu Xiang’s palm. In the former captain’s eyes, it was like a trembling kitten testing the range of its claws.
Appearance was useful no matter the world, especially as the Chu Xiang of this world lacked exercise. If evaluated from the perspective of someone from the 28th century, he was a thin, weak, and sickly man, the kind who hardly saw any sunlight or wind.
The girl weighed their respective combat abilities, and came to a decisive conclusion: even if this beauty was a water ghoul, he wouldn’t be able to beat her.
So she plucked up her courage and moved closer, and couldn’t help tugging on Chu Xiang’s long hair. “Then where did you come from?”
“I fell from the sky,” Chu Xiang smiled.
The girl with little knowledge stared at his smiling face in a daze. Maybe it was because she was bewitched by beauty, or she really was so ignorant, that she actually nodded seriously. “Then are you the evil star? Wow, the evil star fell into the lake where I catch fish…”
Chu Xiang: “…”
From a water ghoul to an evil star, well, at least it was progress.
Translator:
I’ll be translating 22 chapters of this novel.
A note on 妖星 (yaoxing), which I’ve chosen to translate as evil star/bad omen: like all astrology terms, it has an abundance of connotations associated with it. To describe it very simply, it’s seen as one of the worst omens possible, the kind that leads to the downfall of dynasties. If someone is unlucky enough to be born on a day the 妖星 is strong, they’re seen as prone to disaster and bringing misfortune to everyone and everything they touch. 妖星 are often in the form of comets.
- 1妖星 (yāo xīng) is an astrological term for a collection of phenomena (e.g. comets) that portend disaster
- 2Yes the RAWS say 28th century for the 2900s, just go with it
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