Chapter 473: Ding! Welcome, Host!

With a roar of unimaginable agony, Lin Feng tore a glowing fragment of his own soul away from his core.

The pain was so absolute it caused the cosmic void around him to warp and bleed. His main body slumped forward, reduced to a barely conscious, hollowed-out husk of spiritual energy.

But the fragment he had torn away, a bright, fierce, protective orb of pure golden light, did not hesitate.

It dove directly into the dimensional crack, plummeting through the abyss, crossing the vast, infinite expanse of the multiverse, chasing the silver shard of his little sister’s soul.

****

The darkness of the Corridor dissolved, replaced by a vision so shockingly familiar, so mundane, that Transmigrator Ji’an actually gasped.

Stainless steel countertops gleaming under harsh, fluorescent lights.

The rhythmic symphony of a high-end commercial kitchen.

The hiss of boiling oil, the aggressive clatter of cast-iron pans, the smell of reduced wine, truffles, and searing wagyu beef.

It was Earth.

It was the five-star Michelin restaurant where she had spent the last five years of her life.

The vision centered on a young woman standing at the epicenter of the chaos. She wore a pristine, double-breasted white chef’s coat, her dark hair pulled back into a severe, no-nonsense bun.

She held a pair of long plating tweezers in one hand and a heavy, cast-iron skillet in the other.

It was her. The Earth-version of Lin Ji’an.

"I SAID MEDIUM-RARE, MARCUS, NOT A HOCKEY PUCK!" the Earth-Ji’an roared, slamming the skillet down on the pass with the force of a thunderclap, causing three grown men in the kitchen to physically flinch. "IF YOU SEND THIS OUT TO TABLE FOUR, I WILL PERSONALLY JULIENNE YOUR FINGERS! RE-FIRE!"

"Yes, Chef!" the terrified line cook shrieked, scrambling back to his station.

Transmigrator Ji’an watched her Earth-self with a bizarre mixture of nostalgia and deep sadness.

She looked so strong. She looked so in control.

She was a tyrant, yes, but she was a tyrant who had earned every single inch of her authority through blood, sweat, and burn scars.

But as she watched, she noticed something in the periphery of the vision.

Hovering just above the fluorescent light fixtures, completely invisible to the bustling cooks and the aggressive Head Chef... was a small, glowing orb of golden light.

The soul fragment of Lin Feng.

He had found her.

He hung there in the rafters of the commercial kitchen, watching her.

He didn’t understand the stainless steel boxes that shot fire. He didn’t understand the strange, white garments she wore, or the bizarre language she shouted.

But he understood her.

He watched her plate a delicate, towering spun-sugar dessert with hands that possessed surgical precision.

He watched her aggressively defend her junior cooks from a rude customer in the dining room, standing her ground with a fierce, immovable pride.

He watched her wipe the sweat from her brow at the end of a fourteen-hour shift, completely exhausted but victorious.

The golden orb pulsed with a overwhelming, universe-spanning brotherly pride.

"You grew up so well, Xiao-An," Lin Feng’s voice whispered in the void, filled with a gentle, tearful warmth. "You are fierce, unyielding, and do not cower in the snow anymore. You rule your domain with your head held high."

For years, the soul fragment simply stayed there.

He watched over her.

He was the invisible hand that occasionally nudged a falling knife away from her foot. He was the faint, comforting warmth she felt on her shoulder when she was sitting alone in her apartment after a grueling holiday shift.

He was the brotherly guardian angel of the Michelin-star kitchen.

But the tragedy of the fractured soul could not be outrun.

The vision shifted to a quiet, rainy Tuesday night on Earth.

Earth-Ji’an was standing in the walk-in refrigerator, doing inventory. She looked pale. The dark circles under her eyes were bruised and heavy.

Suddenly, she staggered.

She dropped her clipboard, clutching her chest, a sudden agony ripping through her heart. It wasn’t a heart attack.

It was the failure of a soul that had been ripped from its original dimension. Her lifeline was too weak to sustain a physical body in a higher dimension without the rest of her core.

She collapsed onto the cold tile floor of the walk-in, gasping for air, her vision tunneling into darkness.

Up in the rafters, the golden orb of Lin Feng’s soul fragment flared with a terrified panic.

"No!" Lin Feng screamed into the ethereal plane. "I just found you! You cannot wither here! Your light is dying!"

He knew what he had to do.

He could not heal her physical body on Earth.

Her soul was incomplete.

To save her, he had to guide the silver shard back through the dimensional crack, back to the Azure Empire, and fuse it with her original body in the Seventeenth Timeline.

He had to initiate a transmigration.

But he faced a terrifying obstacle.

His sister was no longer the sheltered, innocent noble girl of the Lin Estate.

She was a cynical, modern, pragmatic woman of science and culinary discipline. If a ghostly, ancient Chinese general appeared in her walk-in refrigerator and told her he was dragging her soul back to a magical cultivation world, her modern mind would completely reject the reality.

The psychological shock would shatter her remaining soul fragment instantly.

He needed a disguise.

He needed a vehicle that her Earth-brain could comprehend, accept, and trust.

The golden orb accessed the surface-level memories of her Earthly consciousness and sifted through the novels she read on the subway, the web-dramas she watched while prepping vegetables, the common tropes of her generation.

He found it.

The ultimate, undisputed crutch of modern transmigration fiction.

"I will be your guide, Xiao-An," Lin Feng whispered, his golden light shifting, compressing, altering its fundamental resonance to mimic something cold, mechanical, and deeply familiar. "I will hold your hand and teach you how to walk in that cursed world, just like I did when you were a child. Every single time."

The golden orb flashed a blinding, digital blue.

On the cold tile floor of the walk-in refrigerator, as Earth-Ji’an’s heart took its final beat, a mechanical, synthesized, artificial voice echoed directly into her fading consciousness.

[DING! HOST SOUL DETECTED. SYSTEM BINDING INITIATED.]

Transmigrator Ji’an, kneeling in the Corridor of the Eclipse, completely stopped breathing.

The entire universe ground to a catastrophic halt.

"No," Ji’an whispered, her eyes wide, staring at the vision in horror. "No, no, no, no."

The pieces fell into place with the crushing force of a collapsing skyscraper.

The System.

The robotic, slightly annoying, heavily gamified "Culinary Tyrant System" that had greeted her when she first woke up in the bruised, beaten body of the original Ji’an.

It wasn’t a cosmic AI.

It wasn’t a generic transmigration perk.

It was him.

It was Lin Feng.

[Welcome to the Azure Empire, Host.

Initializing survival protocols.

Quest 1: Pick up the spatula.]

The vision showed the first days of her transmigration.

She saw herself waking up, panicked, screaming at the blue holographic screen in front of her. She saw herself yelling at the System, cursing its mechanical prompts, furiously demanding to be sent back to Earth.

And she saw what was happening behind the blue screen.

She saw the golden orb of Lin Feng’s soul, burning its own life force to project the holographic interface, absorbing every single one of her furious, terrified insults with boundless, infinite, brotherly affection.

"Curse at me all you want, Xiao-An," the golden orb whispered silently, while the System projected a clinical text box. "As long as you are yelling, you are breathing. Yell at the machine. Focus on the quests. I will keep you moving until you are strong enough to stand on your own, Host."

The corridor showed her a montage of her first year in the Azure Empire.

When she was trapped in the kitchen of the Drunken Peak, overwhelmed by demonic beasts, and the System randomly gifted her a "Beginner’s Cast-Iron Spatula"... it wasn’t a randomized loot drop.

It was Lin Feng, expending a massive chunk of his soul’s energy to materialize a weapon he knew she would instinctively know how to use.

When the System gave her absurd, mundane quests like "Perfect the Maillard Reaction on a Spirit-Boar" instead of martial arts quests... it wasn’t because the System was a joke or trying to commit a fraud with her.