Elegy of Ash and Spring

Who poisons a boy everyone's already given up on?

Lin Rui used to be a private investigator in Los Angeles. Used to be alive, too. His lover fixed that with a bullet in a parking garage. Now he's eighteen years old in a body that isn't his, in a world where people trade punches with thunderbolts, and the clan he belongs to can't be bothered to notice he survived.

Nobody expects the corpse to start asking questions.

The poison was precise. Targeted. The kind of job you pay real money for, except nobody pays real money to kill a talentless kid on the edge of nowhere. Which means the boy mattered. Which means Lin Rui, wearing the boy's face, inherits whatever made him worth killing.

His father's disappearance. A buried cultivation art. A clan elder who flinches at the wrong questions. A rot spreading under the town that the elders won't name. Lin Rui starts pulling threads. The threads pull back.

Then a stranger shows up with the exact face of the man who put him in the ground, ten thousand miles and one lifetime ago.

Xianxia noir. Transmigration, progression, alchemy, clan politics, and slow-burn danmei (M/M) romance.