Enshrined by a Bowl of Rice

Chapter 1: Welcome to the Other World — Now Take a Hit

Chen Xifan had always figured he had a lot in common with cobblestone: pitted, worn down, and something everyone stepped over without thinking. The occasional crack where a tuft of dark moss pushed through was as close to decoration as either of them got.

He was making his way back through one of the lower district’s narrow alleys, the crooked mud-brick walls on both sides squeezing the sky down to a pale grey sliver. Cheap cooking oil and damp stone mold — that combination had been the most consistent thing about his three months in this world. Somewhere in the distance, the muffled thud of magic colliding with something told him another cultivator was showing off a new trick.

“Move.”

The voice came from behind him. Flat. The kind of tone you’d use to address a piece of furniture. Chen Xifan turned. A young man was coming up the alley toward him, amber-colored embroidery tracing the edge of his sleeve — a Dew-gatherer, second of the four ranks. Not exactly elite, but for someone with no rank at all, completely unchallengeable.

Chen Xifan stepped sideways against the wall. The alley was that narrow. His shoulder nearly touched the magic-moss growing on the bricks.

The man stopped right in front of him anyway, brow creasing like he’d stepped on something unpleasant.

“I said move. Not shuffle over.”

“The alley’s only this wide —”

An amber light flared from the man’s palm. Before Chen Xifan could process what was happening, he slammed into the wall. The back of his head met the brick and his vision went white. By the time his eyes cleared, the Dew-gatherer was already gone, not a backward glance. The alley held nothing but slowly drifting flakes of moss scraped loose from the wall.

”…Are you serious?”

Chen Xifan pushed himself off the wall and brushed off his rough-cloth tunic — the kind of garment that had given up any claim to a specific color long ago. He looked himself over. Dirty, a bit scuffed. Back in Taipei, at least a customer throwing hot coffee at him came with a workplace injury claim. Here there wasn’t even a complaints hotline.

“Getting yelled at by a cab driver in Taipei was bad, but I could leave a Google review. This place doesn’t even give me that.”

He exhaled and kept walking. A figure in deep-blue embroidery swept overhead, the wind pressure ruffling his hair. A Grain-bearer — elite rank. In this world, flying was a privilege. Walking was what people at the bottom did.

“Fine.” He muttered to himself, turning into an even narrower dead-end passage. “Just another ordinary day.”

---

The abandoned storage closet wedged against the city wall — just barely long enough to lie down in — was Chen Xifan’s entire real estate portfolio in this world. No door, just a scavenged rag hanging in the doorway. Stone floor, a layer of old cloth and dried grass that still managed to dig into his back, but better than sleeping in the open. At least when it rained, the water didn’t hit him directly in the face.

Light from the magic streetlamps outside leaked through the cracks in the wall and turned the whole space a dim, washed-out blue. Chen Xifan lay down and stared up at the ceiling he couldn’t quite make out.

Three months.

Three months ago he’d been working the night shift at a convenience store in Miaoli, stuffing a box of rice balls into the refrigerated display case. Then a flash of light — not some gentle summoning glow, more like a flashbang going off in his face — and here he was. The light had incinerated his backpack and everything in it, but somehow the stuff in his pockets had survived. A thirty-gram sample pack of Chishang brown rice from a store promotion, grayish-yellow, barely worth calling polished; and a punch card with most of the stamps filled in, just a few away from redeeming a thermos.

“Other people get isekai’d with game systems, cheat codes, at minimum a cute guide character to explain things. I show up with a rice sample and a loyalty card.” He turned over, the dry grass rustling. “And I really did want that thermos.”

The language had sorted itself out automatically — the moment he’d opened his eyes, he could understand everyone and speak back without thinking. That was probably the one perk that came with the package.

He scooped some water from the cracked clay bowl by his head using the thing that might or might not be a spoon. Three months of surviving at the bottom had built up a certain kind of callus. He’d learned which alley garbage piles were likely to have yesterday’s bread, which wells went unguarded past midnight, and — most crucially — that anyone with embroidery on their sleeves required immediate right-of-way, no exceptions.

Earlier that evening he’d overheard a few fellow no-embroidery vagrants talking. Three days from now was the Guidance Ritual — held every spring equinox, one chance per lifetime, absolute results with no retesting and no appeals. For a civilian with no magic, it was the only door that could change your place in society.

Assuming you had magic to be guided out of you.

Chen Xifan closed his eyes. He hadn’t felt even the most basic flicker of a magic pulse in three months. Going to the ritual was probably a waste of time. But if he didn’t go, he’d keep rooting through garbage cans in this alley.

“Might as well try.” He said it to the dim blue ceiling. “It’s not like things can get worse.”

Then he remembered there was a three-day fast required before the ritual.

”…If I’d known, I wouldn’t have picked up that moldy bread this morning.”

---

Three days later, at first light, the lower district’s magic streetlamps finally gave out — more precisely, the handful that had been flickering for weeks finally surrendered after one last night. Nobody would fix them. The upper district’s lamps were always perfect, cold blue columns that never wavered. Down here, working was already enough.

Chen Xifan followed the main street toward the ritual plaza. The city was waking up around him, and for once he had a proper chance to look at how this world functioned — not from his usual dead-end crouch, but out in the open, where there were actual storefronts and actual pedestrians.

Fire-kindlers with their dull-red sleeve embroidery made up most of the crowd. They walked with a specific posture, somewhere between confident and watchful — heads up when passing civilians without any marks, automatically edging to the side when an amber-sleeved Dew-gatherer came through. When a deep-blue Grain-bearer swept overhead, everyone looked up. No one bothered hiding the envy.

Chen Xifan glanced at his own sleeve. Blank. No embroidery at all. He was roughly on the same social tier as the lamppost he’d just passed.

He stopped at a small stall along the way.

A thin old man sat behind a palm-sized crystal case, inside which lay a small heap of white powder. The powder caught the morning light and gleamed like pearl dust. The vendor leaned in and murmured: “Straight from an ancient ruin, purity around seventy percent…”

White Jade Soul Essence. He’d heard of it — a divine relic from ten thousand years ago, turning up only as scattered fragments in the ruins of the old world. A single intact grain could break through a cultivator’s ceiling; this pinch of ground-up powder was probably worth what an ordinary person couldn’t save in a year of not eating or sleeping.

He stared at the little heap for a moment.

“That looks exactly like rice.”

He shook his head and straightened up. “Never mind. I’ve been fasting for three days, everything looks like food right now. I’m hallucinating.”

The vendor was watching him with sharp eyes. Chen Xifan got the hint and moved on. A nobody without so much as a sleeve mark hovering over a White Jade Soul Essence stall — of course the man was nervous.

The ritual plaza was at the far end of the main street. Even from a distance, Chen Xifan could make out the oval open-air space — two hundred meters across, its dark stone floor carved all over with ancient script that looked dull and unremarkable most of the time but now, in the morning light, faintly pulsed with a soft glow. At the center stood the Guidance Stone: a three-meter-tall column of translucent crystal. Even from here, Chen Xifan could feel something pressing outward from it. Or possibly it was just the body heat of the several thousand people packed together.

The noise of thousands of voices merged into a continuous low hum. The queue wound from the Guidance Stone all the way to the plaza’s edge and out onto the street. The tiered spectator stands were mostly full, and at the top, beneath canopied shade, sat the spots reserved for gold-embroidered Granary-keepers and high-ranked Grain-bearers. The nobility and senior cultivators had their own entrance, naturally. They didn’t queue with thousands of ordinary people.

Chen Xifan walked to the very back of the line. A few hundred people still ahead of him.

The teenager in front of him flipped his wrist and a silver-white blade of light shot from his fingertips, splitting a paving stone. Cheers and whistles erupted from the people around him, friends clapping his shoulder, excited voices saying he had to be at least Dew-gatherer rank.

Chen Xifan swallowed.

“Great,” he said under his breath. “I don’t even know the basics.”