Chapter 1

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It was autumn in October. Several days of unbroken rain had carried away the last trace of summer’s heat, and threads of chill that seeped into the marrow ran throughout the capital. Before sunrise, many people had already put on lined jackets.

In Qifeng Courtyard, the most remote and desolate corner of the Imperial Princes’ Residence, Xue Jinan wore only a thin layer of clothing. Braving the cold wind, he squatted beside a shallow pool and stared at the reflection in the water with a pair of calm, lifeless eyes.

Though he was only six or seven years old, even the grime covering his face could not conceal the delicacy and beauty of his features. His complexion was pale and carried the pallor of illness; his cheeks were so thin they seemed to have scarcely any flesh upon them. Clothes from several years ago had been forced onto his body, and when he reached out, they revealed a section of wrist and a bracelet made of blood-red dragonwood.

Xue Jinan pinched and prodded himself without restraining his strength in the slightest, leaving several red marks behind. His expression did not change at all, as though the body he was pinching did not belong to him, and as though he could not feel pain.

Green ones and zeroes streamed rapidly across his vision, while strings of data appeared before him.

[Scan complete. Generating report.]

[Beep! Battery low. Please charge immediately.]

Ignoring the red battery indicator, which had fallen into the single digits, Xue Jinan concentrated on analyzing his physical condition. According to the data, he had suffered from chronic malnutrition. Irregular hunger and satiety had weakened his spleen and stomach, stunting his growth. In addition, his body bore more than a hundred injuries of varying severity, all hidden beneath his clothes in places difficult for others to notice.

No. It should not be like this.

Xue Jinan instinctively activated his database.

Yet whether because his battery was too low or because something had gone wrong in his human brain, the data before his eyes became chaotic. One nonsensical window after another popped up in frantic succession.

Had he been infected with a virus?

Xue Jinan tilted his head. His battery was too low to run any powerful antivirus software. Remembering the universally acclaimed, time-honored method of repairing electrical appliances, he raised a hand and smacked himself on the head.

After two solid thumps, his system really did run more smoothly, and he finally sorted out the entire chain of events.

First of all, his name was not Xue Jinan. In fact, he was not even human.

He was a mobile phone—a thousand-yuan model circulating through the low-end market. By good fortune, he had encountered a devoted phone slave. From then on, he had escaped the status of an ordinary phone, climbed to the pinnacle of mobile evolution, and upgraded into an unconventional magical artifact.

His phone slave was a heaven-defying protagonist from the cultivation world. One rainy day, while practicing swordsmanship beneath a great tree, he had been struck by lightning and hurled into the modern world. From that moment onward, he became obsessed with modern technology. To everyone’s delight, he transformed into a shut-in who spent his days playing games, reading novels, watching short videos, ordering takeout, and drinking sugary soda.

In summer, the shut-in heaven-defying protagonist, Long Aotian, refused to leave his air-conditioned room; in winter, he could not bear to part with his heated brick bed and table. He abandoned the sword techniques he had once practiced through the hottest days of summer and the coldest days of winter. After deep and painful reflection, he decisively switched from sword cultivation to keyboard cultivation, becoming a glorious keyboard warrior who slaughtered enemies across the internet. Later, he created a code-based cultivation method unique to himself and established a sect regarded by all keyboard cultivators as paradise: Sword and Key Network Technology Corporation.

The shut-in heaven-defying protagonist, Long Aotian, was also a man with a mind for business. For the sake of cultivation, he refined his phone and computer into magical artifacts. The phone in particular was always carried on his person and held in his hand, never leaving his eyes for even a second.

Then, one day, Long Aotian discovered that the bonus chapters of the serialized novel he had followed for three years had turned into utter garbage. Overcome with emotion, he lost control of his cultivation and erupted with power. He underwent his tribulation and ascended in broad daylight. As he shattered the void, his hand slipped—and he dropped his phone into the breach.

The phone knew its master’s code-based cultivation method like the back of its hand. Unfortunately, it was a fragile device and could not withstand the pressure of the temporal turbulence. Its physical body disintegrated into dust on the spot. At the moment of death, it hastened the birth of a tiny artifact spirit, which burrowed into the world of the book in search of a thread of survival.

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That book was precisely the terrible novel I Desire to Become Emperor, which the shut-in heaven-defying protagonist, Long Aotian, had followed for three years. It told the legendary story of the Eighth Prince, Xue Liuguang, who rose from an inconspicuous prince to seize the throne and become emperor.

Including the main text and the bonus chapters, the novel totaled five hundred chapters. The entire main story could be called a high-energy masterpiece and had even been elevated to sacred status for a time. By the time it had reached one-third of its serialization, its adaptation rights had been sold in every direction. Who could have imagined that the final bonus chapters would go so disastrously wrong?

And they were wrong in a way that was especially fresh, unconventional, and uniquely rotten. The imperial consort of Xue Liuguang—the future empress who had served as little more than background scenery throughout the entire main story—suddenly rose to prominence. In the fifth year after the male protagonist ascended the throne, she killed him, then joined forces with the Grand Princess, the true mastermind behind the scenes, to support the young legitimate heir in ascending the throne.

The heroine became the Empress Dowager who ruled from behind a screen, while the Grand Princess became a regent queen who governed the state. The two women took control of the court and ruled the empire together, ending the story with a perfect happy ending.

As the shut-in heaven-defying protagonist, Long Aotian, had put it: “You can’t say the bonus chapters are bad. You can only say they have absolutely nothing to do with the tone of the full novel. It’s like pouring a ladle of boiling oil into water—after all the crackling and splashing, the two remain completely separate.”

“What’s most infuriating is that the characters and the writing didn’t collapse. Every individual plot point works perfectly well. That proves the author was capable of writing it properly. It’s practically several times more infuriating than an ordinary botched ending!” If time had not been pressing, the shut-in heaven-defying protagonist, Long Aotian, might well have pulled out his keyboard on the spot, followed the network connection, dragged the author into a dark room, and beaten him soundly.

That was the general outline of the original novel. As for the original owner of this body, he had died at the very beginning of the story, becoming the fuse that ignited this unprecedented and ferocious struggle for the throne.

The Seventh Prince, Xue Jinan, was the son of Zhou, once the emperor’s favored consort and now a convicted criminal.

In the sixteenth year of the Jiahe era, Zhou entered the palace through the grand selection and quickly won the emperor’s favor. Within two years, despite having borne no children, she was elevated to Consort Zhen and given the title Precious. She moved into Zhaoyang Palace, and the following year gave birth to the Seventh Prince, after which she was promoted to Imperial Consort. The emperor personally bestowed upon the Seventh Prince the childhood name Baoning. Among all the emperor’s sons and daughters, only the Eldest Prince and the Grand Princess had received such an honor.

At the time, the imperial throne of empress stood vacant. Precious Consort Zhen’s favor surpassed that of every other woman in the inner palace, and even the Imperial Noble Consort had to avoid her sharpness. Rumors that the emperor would lift the ban on Weiyang Palace and make Precious Consort Zhen his empress grew increasingly rampant.

But good fortune did not last. In the twenty-third year of the Jiahe era, the one-year-old Tenth Prince suddenly fell gravely ill in the middle of the night and died. An investigation revealed that he had been poisoned, and every piece of evidence pointed to Precious Consort Zhen. The matter even implicated the late Empress Xiaojingyi, the moonlight in the emperor’s heart. Enraged, the emperor stripped Consort Zhen of her title, demoted her to the convicted criminal Zhou, and confined her within Zhaoyang Palace. She died of illness less than a year later.

The Seventh Prince, then only five years old, was likewise abandoned by the emperor and sent to the Imperial Princes’ Residence. Accompanied by a young eunuch, he was moved into the most remote and desolate courtyard in the northern section. If the Eighth Prince, born to a palace maid, was an unnoticed nobody whom no one in the palace cared about, then the Seventh Prince was a punching bag everyone felt free to kick.

The Seventh Prince survived in that dark corner until the beginning of the story, in the thirty-fifth year of the Jiahe era, when he was discovered dead inside the sealed Weiyang Palace. His body was covered in countless old wounds, all four limbs had been broken, his wrists had been crippled, and blood had flowed from all seven orifices. His death was grotesque. He was sixteen years old.

At the risk of draining his battery completely and shutting down, Xue Jinan briefly connected to the Heavenly Law of this world and updated his internal clock.

It was now the ninth day of the tenth month in the twenty-fifth year of the Jiahe era. Nine years, five months, and seventeen days remained until his destined death.

Xue Jinan had not abandoned his physical body and burrowed into this world within a book merely to live for another nine years.

His original body had already been shattered into scraps, and his soul had completely merged with this body. He could not easily escape it. For the next hundred years, he could only live in this form.

Every fictional world possessed certain operating laws. It might not follow the original plot one hundred percent, but it would always have a “main storyline.” The main storyline of this world was the struggle for the throne.

If he wanted to break free of his predetermined fate and live longer, there was only one path he could take:

Seize the throne.

Once Xue Jinan had thought of it, he immediately prepared to act. He was just about to deploy his vast data reserves, search through the ascension histories of every emperor in recorded history, and list the first, second, and third feasible plans for taking the throne—

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[Beep! Battery low. Please charge immediately!]

Red warning lights began flashing before his eyes. The battery that had already been nearly exhausted now possessed only the thinnest sliver of life, displaying a figure of three percent.

At the same time, Xue Jinan felt all the strength drain from his body. His head grew heavy and clouded, while his flat little belly began to rumble in protest.

With some curiosity, he touched his stomach. His mind informed him: I am hungry.

Xue Jinan knew what hunger meant. When a phone was hungry, it needed charging; when a human was hungry, they needed food. But—

“How strange.” Xue Jinan tilted his head back to look at the sun hanging high in the sky. His brows drew together slightly as he murmured in bewilderment, “Why doesn’t sunbathing make me full?”

He had once been a low-end thousand-yuan phone, but after upgrading into a magical artifact, he had to visit a repair shop every three years for modifications. Equipped with all sorts of novel accessories, he was destined to remain at the forefront of mobile technology. A solar battery was one of them; two hours beneath the sun would fully charge him.

Later, when the shut-in created his code-based cultivation method, he conducted every experiment on him as well. The first thing he tested was a circulating code that enabled him to absorb the spiritual energy of heaven and earth and cultivate independently. Otherwise, he could never have developed consciousness in a mere dozen years.

So why, exactly, did sunbathing not fill his stomach?

Xue Jinan had basked until his head felt swollen and dizzy. His hearing had begun to malfunction as well, and a buzzing filled his skull. He felt as though he was about to shut down on the spot.

The artifact spirit decided that something must be wrong with him. He stared at his own chest, his fingers twitching with eagerness. He desperately wanted to remove his battery and inspect whether there was a problem with his circuit board.

Xue Jinan summoned a diagram of the human body and accurately located the position of the battery—his heart. He set the parameters for the angle and force with which his fingers would spread, then prepared to operate on himself.

A derisive laugh came from above.

Xue Jinan looked up and saw that someone was sitting on the wall. The boy appeared to be eleven years old, dressed in luxurious clothes, with handsome, rakish features. Yet the look he cast down at Xue Jinan was half a smile, half a sneer, carrying undisguised mockery and loathing.

It was the Fourth Prince, Xue Xuanyue, son of Consort Zhen.

The Tenth Prince who had died from poisoning that year had been his younger brother. After the Tenth Prince’s death, the emperor had presumably sought to compensate Consort Chu by promoting her beyond the usual rank and making her an imperial consort, one of the four principal consorts of the inner palace. As the original text had mentioned in passing, the original owner’s mother and this Consort Zhen had once been close friends in their maiden days and had entered the palace one after the other.

In any case, among all the princes, the Fourth Prince was the one who disliked the original owner most. The princes of Great Qi usually entered the Imperial Academy and moved into the Imperial Princes’ Residence at the age of seven. The original owner had entered at five, when the Fourth Prince was already living there. He had never stopped ridiculing the younger boy and had even moved to a courtyard near Qifeng so that he could bully him more conveniently. Now, the two of them were the only masters living in the northern section.

Xue Jinan knew that the Fourth Prince’s presence could bring nothing good.

Sure enough, the Fourth Prince opened his mouth.

“Seventh Brother, what are you waiting for here? Don’t tell me you’re waiting for dinner? What a pity, then. Your little eunuch got himself into trouble and is being punished by kneeling. Perhaps he’ll be back after another two or three hours.”

“Are you hungry, Seventh Brother? Fourth Brother happens to have some food here. I’ll grant it to you.”

As he spoke, he reached behind himself. Before long, he brought out a bowl. With a turn of his wrist, he poured all the food onto the ground.

“Your elder brother has taken such pains for you. You mustn’t be ungrateful.” His words carried an unmistakable implication. “If you don’t eat this meal, you’ll have to wait until noon tomorrow.”