The system he brought with him was the single-player game he had been playing before he transmigrated, called Jin Yong Heroes Reborn. It wasn’t the original Jin Yong Heroes, but rather a fan-made remake by a large group of gaming enthusiasts. The art style was the same, but the content was completely different—a Jin Yong martial arts game with a whole new twist. When he played this game, because he was overly ambitious, he jumped straight into the highest difficulty, Legend Mode, and got thrashed by the NPCs a hundred times over. In a fit of frustration, he asked a hacker friend to crack the source code, then modified a save file. The modifications weren’t even that excessive: he simply put all the martial arts manuals in the game into his inventory. For example, the top-tier skills like Dragon Subduing Eighteen Palms, Dugu Nine Swords, Nine Yin Manual, Nine Yang Divine Skill, and so on. He also changed the protagonist’s martial arts slots from ten to twenty. That was it… And then, when he loaded the save and eagerly entered the game, he was instantly transmigrated into this world.

Heaven knows, at nearly thirty years old in that world, he had long since outgrown his adolescent fantasies. Magic, martial arts, gods, other races—he hadn’t imagined any of that in ages. All he wanted was a stable, high-paying job, to buy a house, find a pretty and well-behaved woman, have two kids, and spend his free time reading novels and playing games. But who could have guessed this world would be so extraordinary, actually causing him to transmigrate? And just when he was in utter despair and wanted to die, he was given the Jin Yong Heroes game system. How was he supposed to die now?

Even an ant clings to life. After obtaining this system, Henry Harper gave up any thoughts of suicide. He carefully examined the system, and after cautiously probing this world for several months, he gradually developed the desire to keep living.

First of all, his system contained his character template—in other words, all the martial arts manuals he had modified were in his inventory! Yes, those legendary martial arts he had drooled over as a child were now all his! And he could choose to practice any twenty of them! Twenty!

Practicing Nine Yin and Nine Yang at the same time, playing with Star Absorbing and Northern Darkness together, combining Dragon Subduing and Shifting Stars—this was just too exhilarating!

Then there was this world—a truly baffling place… Well, after Henry Harper gradually learned more about it, he had no other thoughts except this: it was a modern world with martial arts. Not like those urban martial arts novels, but a world where martial arts had become a subject like physics or chemistry, with technology roughly equivalent to the 1930s and 1940s of his previous world.

This world seemed enormous. The Blue Shadow Republic, where he lived, was recorded in books as having an area of 820,000 square kilometers—almost twice the size of Sichuan Province in his previous world’s Z country, nearly two and a half times the size of Japan, or one and a half times the size of France. That’s not a small country, yet in this world, it was still called a small country. And in this eastern Blue Sea region, there were more than twenty countries of similar size…

The world is so big, I want to see it all!

Time is the best healer. Henry Harper spent more than half a year in depression, missing his parents, relatives, friends, and lover from that other world. Then he gradually pulled himself together. During those months, he also learned to play the part of a weak orphan and a curious participant in this world.

This was a world where everyone practiced martial arts. Even ordinary civilians were trained—fists, kicks, leg techniques, staves, swords, eighteen types of weapons, you name it. The government vigorously promoted martial arts in every household; even elementary schools had dedicated martial arts classes.

At the same time, this was a stratified world. Ordinary people who practiced martial arts were still just ordinary people. They worked, paid taxes, and labored. As long as they hadn’t cultivated internal energy, they were no different from the common people of Earth before Henry Harper transmigrated—just with a few more sets of physical exercises.

The biggest difference between the two worlds… was internal energy!

Only one in a hundred thousand people could cultivate it—internal energy. According to this world’s path, whether it was external martial arts, internal boxing, or internal skill manuals, all of them had only one goal: to guide a person to cultivate internal energy. That was the threshold to surpass the ordinary world. Once someone cultivated internal energy, the books described them as instantly becoming a match for a thousand men, possessing great strength with every move. As long as they didn’t put themselves in a desperate situation, no ordinary person could defeat them by sheer numbers. This was also the guarantee of a nation’s core military strength. Yes, even though this world’s technology had reached the level of the 1930s and 1940s, with guns, cannons, and even the earliest planes and missiles, the true determinant of political power was still those who possessed internal energy. This was a world where internal energy had flourished for countless years, and would likely continue to flourish for the foreseeable future!