Chapter 1: What Is Going On Here?

"Sandro, Sandro, wake up!"

In the depths of semi-consciousness, Liu Zhi heard this voice ringing by his ear. He struggled to open his eyes, yet found that his eyelids had grown impossibly heavy—no matter how he tried, he could not open them.

Then the voice spoke again: "This is your last chance. Seize it well..."

Before the voice finished, Liu Zhi cried out loudly. It felt as if his head were about to explode, as a torrent of information and memories poured into his mind—some coherent, some chaotic, some rational, others utterly bizarre.

Clutching his head, he rolled on the floor for a while before gradually calming down. In that interval, he roughly understood what had transpired. The moment he could finally open his eyes, he couldn't help but murmur, "No need for a last chance; that poor Sandro has run out of opportunities."

It turned out this was the graduation trial of a necromancer named Sandro. Unlucky as he was, Sandro had already failed three times in succession; if he failed once more, he would be doomed to wander the underworld forever, becoming nothing more than part of its scenery.

But who could have foreseen that Sandro, proud and stubborn, had become half-mad from his repeated failures? He forcibly initiated an even more difficult graduation trial, and in the process of transferring himself here, was disrupted, turning to dust—leaving his vessel for the unwitting Liu Zhi, who had crossed over accidentally.

After grasping the general situation, Liu Zhi barely had time to examine the fragments of Sandro's memories before he was flung outward, landing heavily on the wooden floor.

A strong tang of brine washed over him. As the world rocked, Liu Zhi finally came to his senses. He saw that he was in a wooden ship's cabin, having just tumbled from a hammock onto a pile of cargo crates.

He scrambled to his feet, regaining his balance after some effort, though the ship still swayed relentlessly. From beyond the cabin came the sounds of hurried, chaotic footsteps.

Before he could sort through the memories of this body, Liu Zhi pushed open the cabin door, and a strange language slipped from his lips. "What's happening out there?"

"Pirates! Civilians, get below deck and hide. If we fail, offer your goods to them—maybe they'll spare your miserable life."

Amid raucous laughter, several ragged sailors, cutlasses in hand, passed by the cabin. One of them answered Liu Zhi's question.

They did not linger, hurrying up to the deck. Only one sailor glanced back and said, "Draw your sword and guard your things. If pirates break in, protect your cabin yourself."

Shutting the door again, Liu Zhi reached under the hammock and retrieved a sailor's cutlass. Feeling a measure more secure, he began to sort through the memories of this body.

This body, too, was named Sandro—a nobleman's descendant, reasonably handsome, with a mane of golden hair inherited from his family. Yet his family had fallen on hard times, so he sold all his remaining property to try his luck in the East by ship.

He had rented a cabin from the Silver Fleet of Sise, bringing all his accumulated wealth with him, intending to return home and sell it. This was, in fact, a standard method for many impoverished nobles in the seventeenth century to restore their fortunes.

But the reason this nobleman Sandro became the vessel for the necromancer was not due to their shared name. It was because, while trading in South America, Sandro had inadvertently acquired a peculiar item.

It was this object that attracted the necromancer's attention and led him to pin his last hopes on this fallen noble.

Having reviewed all the memories, Liu Zhi immediately rummaged through the cabin's crates—these were spices and valuables that Sandro had painstakingly collected across South America.

To ensure his goods did not spoil at sea, Sandro had gone to great lengths, guarding his assets with almost obsessive care. He even brought ample provisions and stayed in the cabin day and night, weapon in hand, for fear that thieves would slip in and steal his treasures.

Were the cabin not so cramped and his cargo less abundant, Sandro would have inventoried his goods daily. Nevertheless, he knew the contents of every crate by heart, which made Liu Zhi's search much easier. He shifted several large crates near the hammock and withdrew a small box hidden among them.

This little box was the most precious of all Sandro's belongings. Upon opening it, he found it was filled with jewels, each wrapped in cotton.

Carefully moving some of the gems aside, Liu Zhi extracted a gold pendant of peculiar design.

At a glance, the pendant was unmistakably Mayan in style—a sun god's face, with tiny rubies set as eyes, surrounded by a ring of ancient, mysterious hieroglyphs.

It looked undeniably old, and holding it in his palm, Liu Zhi could feel its subtle warmth.

No sooner had he picked up the pendant than several ideas sprang into his mind.

He sensed that, by using this pendant as a focus, he could communicate with the dead Inca emperor Atahualpa. If he agreed to fulfill Atahualpa's curse—to slay the treacherous Francisco Pizarro's descendants—then Liu Zhi could use this treasure to summon the heroic spirit of an Inca warrior as his retainer.

Alternatively, he might gain access to the Incas' training methods for sun warriors. Failing that, he could let the Inca hero's spirit fuse with his own body and thereby inherit all its powers.

Turning the pendant over and over in his hand, Liu Zhi felt a trace of doubt. The artifact was certainly valuable, and any one of these three choices would make for a formidable beginning. Yet none seemed worth Sandro risking his life for. Judging from the memory fragments left behind, his previous three graduation trials had also begun with similar choices.

Puzzled, Liu Zhi sifted through the shards of memory and soon found a different clue.

It seemed this pendant allowed contact with the departed Atahualpa's soul, facilitating some kind of spiritual exchange.

There the trail went cold, leaving only scattered fragments—words like "divine kingdom on earth," "pyramid," and "ruins"—without enough context to form a coherent message.

This surprised Liu Zhi. He was just about to attempt the soul-communing method Sandro had left behind, to reach out to the spirit within the pendant, when the ship suddenly lurched beneath him once more.