Today, they too are going to their deaths.

Cui Xun broke free from the deathly daze and opened his eyes.

He found himself lying in a field of snow.

Snow?

It took Cui Xun about two seconds to regain his senses, and another half second to confirm the abnormality.

His city has a spring-like climate all year round, and even if the global climate miraculously regressed to the Little Ice Age, it would never snow.

What Cui Xun saw now was not a thin layer of frost, but knee-deep snow. It stretched to the horizon, tinged with a dull orange hue under the dim light.

Cui Xun raised his head.

He saw a cast iron lamppost in the distance with an ancient style, as if it had been directly cut from a 19th-century print.

Its column has decorative grooves, and the top is a multifaceted lantern through which a flickering flame can be seen.

The flames turned a small patch of snow around them amber before being swallowed up by the darkness further away.

The streetlights are spaced far apart, leaving large areas of darkness between them, as if the city's administrators are only willing to illuminate the city's most essential streets.

Cui Xun thought that either he was lucky enough to be blown hundreds of kilometers away to a Victorian-style cosplay district that he had never heard of before, where he could experience the life of a black slave without a ticket, or he had traveled to another world.

He prefers to believe the answer is the latter.

After all, he underwent a change that was no less significant than that of someone who had traveled through time.

He could feel every joint, muscle, and internal organ of his body operating in a way he wasn't used to, with performance many times greater than before. Even though the snow was up to his calves, he felt no cold at all.

The cold air that should have pierced the skin like needles seemed to hit a wall, breaking off and sliding away, leaving only a dull, isolated sensation.

Cui Xun looked down at his own body.

He doesn't go to the gym often, relying more on his talent and youth to maintain a reasonably decent physique, training only when necessary. But now, he looks more like a marble statue meticulously sculpted by an artist than a living person.

Every inch of him was so perfect it seemed unreal, without a single hidden injury, scar, pimple, or even a mole. His entire body seemed to proclaim his strength and tenacity.

With a figure like that, you could walk around a women's gym twice and enjoy having cash stuffed into your chest.

Cui Xun tried to clench his fist.

His bones made a metallic cracking sound, like steel meshing together, and his neatly arranged, angular muscles gave him the feeling that he could punch right through a human body with the slightest force.

Siegfried bathed in dragon's blood.

This metaphor suddenly popped into Cui Xun's mind.

He remembered the story: after Siegfried killed the dragon Fafnir, he bathed in its blood, making his skin invulnerable. He hadn't bathed in dragon blood, but he had bitten into the monster's core, and that thing seemed to reshape his body.

Cui Xun didn't know if this new body could be invulnerable to swords and spears, but he was certain of one thing: he was no longer afraid of the cold.

Moreover, the power he calls "willpower," the force that can influence reality, is still within him, only with a minor problem.

If, when fighting monsters, the world around him is like flowing water, he can change its shape with just a little effort.

Back then, he could hover in the sky, deform his cloak with his mind, forge blades with his blood, and turn an ordinary steel bar into a spear that could pierce through monster scales, triggering an illogical explosion.

So now, the world around him is like solidified cement.

For willpower to take effect in this environment, it requires not a gentle nudge as before, but violence—real, unreasonable, brute force that can break through everything and make one swim in cement.

Without this level of strength, "willpower" could probably only slightly speed up his reaction or help him get dressed.

Cui Xun stood up and exhaled.

The white mist briefly formed in the air before dissipating.

Red patches, resembling dragon scales, appeared on his body. They interlocked and, through the combined effect of his willpower and the monster's adaptability, transformed into a well-made Victorian-style outfit.

Cui Xun's fashion sense is terrible. He usually wears either pure black long-sleeved shirts and trousers or gray short-sleeved shirts and shorts, at most with work clothes and a white lab coat. The only Victorian style clothing he knows is the hunter outfit from the game Bloodborne.

Wang Yu felt that if he changed into this outfit, pulled down the brim of his tricorn hat, and covered his face, he would exude the aura of an old hunter. He would definitely dominate the comic convention, win the hearts of female otaku, and make a fortune just by taking some photos.

So, after changing into his new clothes, he was so terrified by the security guards that his unique demeanor made him look like he was about to commit a shooting or bombing that he was politely asked to leave.

Since the compensation was enough for them to enjoy three days of lavish meals, Cui Xun didn't cause any more trouble at the time, but he never went to a comic convention again after that.

I never imagined that this strange experience could be used for exploring other worlds.

Cui Xun tidied his clothes slightly to make sure he wouldn't attract too much attention, and then began walking along the direction of the lampposts, looking for something that could provide information.

After several intersections, he saw a group of people.

They gathered at the edge of the lamppost's shadow, a total of eight people, both men and women, all wrapped in tattered gray-black cloth.

Their faces appeared exceptionally pale under the light, a grayish-white from malnutrition and prolonged lack of sunlight, like pulp that had been soaked in water and then dried. Each of them looked as if they might collapse at any moment and never get up again.

At this moment, their movements were remarkably synchronized.

They all turned to look at Cui Xun, then resolutely turned their heads back, pretending they hadn't seen anything. Some even tried to hide in the shadows and escape the area.

But Cui Xun still caught a fleeting glimpse of greed and scrutiny in their eyes.

They treated people as something that could be sold for money, trying to determine exactly how much their corpses, skin, hair, teeth, and bones were worth.

It is well known that the body trade was quite serious during the Victorian era.

Don't ask about the origin of dentures provided by dentists, and don't ask if mummy aphrodisiacs are from authentic mummies. It's best not to know the origin of wigs, bone specimens, fertilizers, sugar, and especially bone char.

The demand for anatomical dissections from emerging medical schools has spawned an entire industry of corpse theft, with the most extreme cases involving the murder of homeless people and the sale of their fresh bodies.

Later, with the invention of formaldehyde and the increasingly stringent related laws, the awareness of "voluntary donation" rose, and the figure of professional corpse thieves disappeared from the historical stage and went underground.

If this were the original world, Cui Xun felt he could reduce the error in the current time period to fifty years, but since this was most likely another world, such a thing seemed meaningless.

Moreover, no matter how you reason, it's not as useful as asking directly.

Cui Xun randomly picked someone and walked forward.