Blood of Fate (World 99 Book #1): LitRPG Wuxia Series by Dan Sugralinov

Chapter 2. Interdimensional Universal Traveler

Esk'Onegut, one of the interdimensional universal travelers, ended his life on Earth in the twenty-first century in the body of a Russian student whose name sounded far more exotic than his nickname — Craster. Ilya Pashutin, a student in his final year of a journalism course, had little interest in journalism and studied at the university only at his parents' insistence. More specifically at his father's, a former soldier who had given his son an ultimatum: army or university. Ilya chose the second one, along with... games.

Esk'Onegut found the world of computer games so gripping that he'd spent almost all his waking hours from the age of ten sat at a computer. For Esk, this was his ninety eighth reincarnation, and, like every traveler, he got stronger from life to life as he earned Tsoui, which meant, in a long-dead language, 'balance of deeds', something that determined one's influence on the harmony of the universe. Tsoui points could be spent to turn the Wheel.

You could spend Tsoui points to turn the Wheel as many times as you liked, as long as you paid. Millions of sectors were marked on it. Many were empty or unfavorable, but there were also very powerful ones that gave the current body supernatural abilities: incredible strength, ludicrous speed, deadly combat skills, magical or creative abilities...

The talents spread across the Wheel were split into four levels: from common to peerless, the best in the world. Esk vaguely remembered winning the skill of becoming invisible on the Wheel in a previous life. That had been a good one! That world probably still had legends about the thief whose body he'd inhabited for almost six years.

On Earth, the concept that Esk had found closest to Tsoui was karma. Only he was certain that karma was a blasphemous fiction, because it took into account actions measured by the scales of individuals themselves and those around them. In Tsoui, the traveler's deeds were weighed by their influence on universal harmony. After all, every action, every word, caused ripples in the past and the future of the entire universe.

Esk had ended up in Ilya's body when the latter reached the age of four. While his mother wasn't watching him, the young boy fell under a rapidly moving metal seesaw in the small park outside his house. His innocent spirit was moved to the universal archive to await its next revival, if it had one. And Esk'Onegut set up shop in little Ilya's body. It just so happened that at that very moment, he'd died in the last one.

In his life before Earth, he had reigned as emperor on a peripheral planet in the Galaxy, enjoying total power and his very own cult of personality. The finest women, the best intoxicants and narcotics, delicious meals, the fulfilment of all his whims, from the simple pleasures to the most perverted...

In truth, he had become the worst emperor in the history of that planet, whose name he could not recall due to the effect of the Waning. It was no wonder he'd been poisoned.

The Waning was the curse of every traveler. The effect wiped memories from previous lives, but the knowledge of their existence remained, along with the memories of the last minutes before death. And the shorter the time between lives, the more Esk remembered. Before his imperial reign, he had been a great musician and singer who had wrote his own songs. He knew that, but, lightning strike him down, he could not remember a single line of what he had written.

His memory of his years as an emperor, his ninety eighth life, remained with Esk in Ilya's body. He was so sick of power and authority that on twenty-first century Earth, he wanted nothing to do with it. With the taste of all those accessible and inaccessible joys of life still fresh in his memory, Esk discovered the world of computer games on Earth. Realizing that virtual worlds were basically the same as what he did, only on a smaller scale and with the ability to switch between worlds and virtual bodies at any moment, Esk fell headlong into them.