“Just how high am I?”
I pressed my chest flat against the rock and waited for my heartbeat to slow. It didn’t. It hammered hard enough that I could feel it in my teeth.
Okay. Okay.
I forced myself to breathe through my nose. Cold air burned my lungs, metallic and thin. The altitude was no joke. Every inhale felt painful and borrowed. I wasn’t dreaming. That realization settled with unpleasant clarity.
Dreams didn’t have this much texture. The stone beneath my palms bit into my skin. My blazer flapped violently, snapping like a flag. My sunglasses were tinted just enough to keep the sky from blinding me, but not enough to hide how vast it was.
Clouds stretched endlessly below, glowing faintly like spilled moonlight. Peaks pierced through them like black spears.
This was… xianxia. Or so the DLC claimed. High mountains, immortal aesthetics, or dramatic verticality. If there were flying swords nearby, I wouldn’t even blink.
“What the hell did you do, Yakuza Man?” I muttered to myself. “Oh, man…”
My voice sounded wrong. It was not unfamiliar, just fuller and thicker, like it carried weight behind it. When I swallowed, my throat felt different. I shifted my grip experimentally. My fingers dug in. They sank into the stone with alarming ease, leaving shallow grooves behind.
Slowly and carefully, I pulled one hand back and stared at a calloused and steady hand with slightly scarred knuckles, pronounced veins, and strong and steady fingers . I flexed them and power answered, with actual and physical responsiveness, like my body was an engine that had been idling for years and was finally allowed to rev.
“…Oh,” I said softly.
I wasn’t ‘me’ anymore. At least, not fully.
Memories pressed at the edges of my mind. They were foreign, intrusive, and sharp. Street fights under neon lights. The weight of a bat resting against my shoulder. The instinctive understanding of spacing, momentum, when to strike and when to back off.
They didn’t overwrite me. Instead, they layered on top.
Yakuza Man wasn’t a mask. He was… installed.
A sudden pulse throbbed behind my eyes. Pain spiked, then spread outward like cracking ice. I clenched my jaw as fragmented and incomplete images flooded in. A city that wasn’t Binondo but felt similar. Rain. Blood. A burning sign written in characters I couldn’t read but somehow understood.
A title.
‘A king who refused to kneel.’
I hissed and shook my head. “Nope. Not unpacking that right now.”
I focused instead on not dying.
The mountain ridge curved upward to my left, jagged but climbable. To my right, the slope dropped away into nothing. I tested my footing, then began moving sideways, hugging the rock. Every motion felt… natural. My balance was perfect. Even with gale-force winds tugging at me, my center of gravity never wavered.
If this was a game, my stats were absurd.
After a few tense minutes, I hauled myself up onto a narrow ledge and collapsed onto my back, chest heaving. Above me, the sky was a washed-out gray-blue, streaked with slow-moving clouds.
That’s when a translucent interface blinked into existence in front of me.
NAME: Yakuza Man
STATUS: Transmigrated
CULTIVATION: ???
PHYSIQUE: Abnormal (Sealed)
KARMA: Severely Entangled
NOTES: Error. Error. Error.
“…You’ve got to be kidding me.”
I tried to swipe it away. It didn’t budge. I focused on one line, Cultivation, and a dull pressure built behind my temples, like the system was warning me not to pry.
“Fine. Be mysterious.”
The world lurched and text slammed into my vision.
[QUEST COMPLETE: BECOME YAKUZA MAN]
[REWARD: SEALED ABNORMAL PHYSIQUE UNLOCKED]
[LEVEL CAP REMOVED]
[UPDATING SYSTEM INTERFACE…]
I sucked in a sharp breath as the interface reassembled itself.
Gone was the vague, half-glitched overlay. In its place appeared something achingly familiar with clean lines, sharp borders, and that unmistakable YKU UI blue-gray palette I’d stared at for years.
A stat sheet unfolded in front of me.
[NAME: YAKUZA MAN]
[LEVEL: 100]
Awesomeness: 40
Swiftness: 32
Toughness: 31
Life Token: 3 / 3
[INVENTORY]
[SHOP]
Level 100. Maxed. Just like endgame YKU. That at least provided me a bare minimum of protection in this strange new world. I focused on [Inventory]. The tab expanded with a soft chime. The sight before me was painfully sparse.
No healing drinks. No stamina meals. No novelty items. No stupid cosmetics I’d unlocked for laughs. Just two entries.
- Wooden Bat
? Black Iron Pot
“…I almost forgot about the pot,” I muttered. “Crazy yakuza!”
The pot sat there innocently, its icon dull and unassuming.
I closed the inventory and turned my attention to the [Shop] tab. That one was new. The moment I opened it, my jaw clenched. Most of the listings were grayed out, locked behind conditions I have no idea how to fulfill.
One item sat among them, glowing faintly.
[Return to Earth Ticket]
Cost: 999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999… Spirit Coin
I stared.
I blinked.
I stared again.
“…What the fuck is wrong with this price?”
This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.
Nine-nine-nine zillion whatever-the-hell wasn’t even a real number. It just kept going, trailing off like the system itself had given up on counting.
“Might as well tell me I can’t go home,” I snapped.
Spirit Coin.
Not yen.
YKU had always used yen in there currency system.
“…So you changed the currency to match the world,” I muttered. “That’s real cute.”
My jaw tightened. Scam DLC. Absolute scam.
As if summoned by my irritation, another notification slid in.
[MAIN QUEST UPDATED]
[FIND CIVILIZATION]
“Oh, I was gonna do that anyway,” I said flatly. “Because fuck it, I need directions.”
The interface faded back, leaving the world front and center again. Cold wind. Endless clouds. The mountain still didn’t care about my existential crisis. I turned and began hugging the rock face, carefully working my way downward. My body moved with confidence my mind hadn’t caught up to yet.
As I climbed down, I tested the system.
“System,” I said calmly. “Open map.”
Nothing.
“System, status report.”
Silence.
“…Please?”
Ignored.
I exhaled through my nose. “Alright. Let’s try a different tone.”
“Hey, you useless piece of shit,” I muttered. “You gonna help me out or what?”
Still nothing. I kept climbing down, muttering curses under my breath at the system, at Meng Po, at the pills, at the soup, and at my absolutely rotten luck.
The clouds thickened as visibility dropped sharply, white mist rolling in until the world shrank to a few meters around me. The wind grew erratic, tugging at my clothes. Moisture clung to my skin.
I shut up immediately.
Rain followed soon after, light at first, then heavier with fat droplets pattering against stone, darkening my blazer. My footing slowed as the rock grew slick. I scanned the mountain face desperately, eyes catching on a dark shape ahead.
It was a cave, a shallow hollow carved into the stone.
“Good enough.”
I took a careful jump, heart leaping into my throat despite my body’s confidence. My shoes hit stone. I pitched forward and caught myself with one hand. Stone cracked slightly under my palm. I froze, then slowly straightened.
“Okay,” I whispered. “I got this… You are Yakuza Man now.”
I retreated into the cave’s mouth, staying close to the entrance, not eager to explore whatever might be lurking deeper inside. The rain intensified outside, thunder rumbling distantly as clouds churned like something alive.
The thunderstorm didn’t pass.
It stayed.
Rain hammered the mountain day and night, sheets of water cascading down stone like the sky was trying to erode the world out of spite. Thunder followed with no rhythm, sometimes distant, and sometimes so close it rattled my bones and made my ears ring.
I had a bad feeling about the rain.
At first, I told myself to wait it out. A day. Two. A week.
The week bled into another.
I squatted near the cave entrance, arms wrapped around myself, watching water pool and spill, listening to thunder growl like a living thing. My clothes never dried. My hair clung to my neck. My skin stayed perpetually cold.
Food became a problem almost immediately.
I possessed what I could from roots torn from cracks, and moss scraped from stone. When insects crawled too close, I caught them and ate them without thinking too hard about it. Crunch. Bitter. Sometimes still wriggling.
I didn’t throw up.
To keep myself sane, I practiced my bat swings again and again. The bat felt natural in my hands, balanced and obedient. I swung it through the air until my shoulders burned, until rainwater flew off it in arcs. My body adapted quickly. Muscles responded with precision, and footwork stabilized on instinct.
A month passed.
The rain never stopped.
Neither did the thunder.
Hunger became constant. It was a gnawing ache that hollowed me out from the inside. My mouth felt dry even when rainwater soaked everything else. I drank when I could, cupping my hands, licking moisture from stone like an animal.
I felt filthy.
If I had money, I’d buy food, water, toilet paper, wipes, etc. Hell, I’d sell my soul for that stupid gimmick consumable from YKU, the one that cleaned you instantly in a flash of sparkles.
Months passed.
I kept track by scratching lines into the cave wall with a sharp rock. One line per day. They stretched farther and farther along the stone, disappearing into the dimness. The cave felt smaller every time I looked at them.
Eventually, the need to move outweighed the fear and I explored deeper into the cave, only to realize the cave wasn’t deep at all. Just a shallow scar in the mountain. A hollow bite taken out of stone. No hidden chambers. No secrets. No miracle waiting at the back.
Another week crawled by.
Something in me snapped.
“This can’t continue,” I muttered, voice hoarse.
The thunder answered immediately, louder than before. Rain fell harder, violently, like it was angry at the idea of me leaving. Out of impatience or desperation, I stepped back into the storm and began climbing down again.
I wasn’t keen on dying, not when I didn’t know what would happen if the Life Tokens ran out.
That’s when they came.
Blue-haired monkeys.
They burst from the mist without warning. They were small with lean bodies moving wrong, too fluid. Their fur was soaked dark blue, hair hanging in wild clumps around red, glowing eyes. They cried and laughed in high-pitched, broken sounds that echoed off the mountain walls and crawled straight into my skull.
“What the fuck!?”
I swung and the bat connected with a sickening crack, sending one monkey spinning off into the fog. It vanished mid-fall.
Another one appeared behind me, and another. They blinked in and out of the clouds, their bodies dissolving into mist, reappearing where I least expected. They darted close, slashed, retreated, laughing all the while.
I fought with everything I had. My arms moved fast. Bat whistling through rain, cracking skulls when I landed hits. One monkey screamed as its ribs caved in, and then it dissolved into fog. One slipped past my guard. Another struck my knee. My footing failed for half a second and that was enough.
Something slammed into my chest and the world tilted.
I reached out, fingers clawing at air, rain blurring everything into gray streaks.
“No—!”
I fell and the mountain peeled away above me as I tumbled downward, clouds swallowing my body whole. The laughter faded, replaced by roaring wind. I struggled, and failed. Finally, I pierced the final layer of clouds.
The rain stopped.
Silence crashed down on me harder than the thunder ever had. Below, a vast forest spread out. It was an endless green, vibrant and alive, untouched by the storm above. Sunlight filtered through the canopy. It was beautiful.
With a resounding thud, I died.
…
..
.
Cold air slammed into my lungs.
I was hugging stone, again.
My fingers dug into the mountain peak, body pressed flat as wind howled past me.
A familiar prompt hovered in my vision.
[Life Token: 2 / 3]
“It worked,” I breathed. “It actually fucking worked.”
Life Tokens had a ridiculously low drop rate in YKU, and I’d just burned one of them. Relief curdled into rage. “WHY HERE?!” I screamed at the sky, voice tearing apart. “OF ALL PLACES… WHY HERE?!”
The mountain didn’t answer as I climbed down the same way I had before. Same grips. Same ledges. Same misery. Rain returned halfway through, thunder cracking like the mountain itself was mocking me.
When I reached the cave, it was exactly as I’d left it.
The markings were still there with long rows of scratches stretching into darkness. It was proof that I hadn’t imagined the months. I slumped against the wall, soaked, shaking, and exhausted beyond words.
“What the hell am I supposed to do?” I whispered. “This might be too tough for me, but I can’t just give up. There has to be a way. I’m Level 100,” I said aloud. “A Yakuza! No way I lose to a bunch of monkeys.”
A memory surfaced from the game.
“…Skate-Anything.”
I laughed, a sharp, disbelieving sound. “You’ve got to be kidding me.” I stepped out of the cave and onto the slope, rain hammering down as hard as ever.
Carefully, I placed my bat on the wet stone, perpendicular to the descent. It wobbled slightly, slick with water. I took a breath stepped onto one side of the bat. I bent my knees, spreading my weight, arms lifting instinctively for balance. My heart pounded with anticipation. I leaned inward.
Memories stirred with blurred flashes of neon streets, reckless stunts, and laughter edged with madness. I nudged the bat forward and it slid.
Slowly at first, but then faster.
Rain streaked sideways as gravity took over. I shifted my weight, leaning to one side, correcting, feeling the bat glide beneath my feet.
I was skating!
“Haha—!” The laugh tore out of me, raw and wild.
Air whipped against my face. Clouds rushed past in white smears. The mountain roared beneath me as I shot down the slope, bat screaming against stone. And with the speed came memories of Yakuza Man fighting alone, losing friends, and getting back up anyway, despite the bruised knuckles and broken ribs.
“You lived a harsh life,” I said through the wind. “And you did great.”
Rain stung my eyes.
“I’m not really in a position to ask,” I continued, voice steady despite the chaos, “but lend me your strength.”
A blur of blue dropped out of the mist. It was a monkey landing squarely on my chest, claws digging in, red eyes wide and laughing. Time slowed and my body moved. I swung my fist without thinking.
“Ora!”
My arm connected with the monkey’s throat and the creature shrieked as it went flying, body tumbling down the mountain in a spray of mist and rain. I leaned forward, accelerating, then reached out as another monkey lunged.
I grabbed its leg, and it screamed as I swung it.
“Ora—ora—ora!”
Using the monkey like a club, I unleashed a three-strike combo, each hit punctuated by that word, sending another blue-haired body spiraling away into clouds. Laughter bubbled up in my chest as the slope blurred beneath me.
"Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha~! Yakuza Man’s coming to town! You can’t stop me! Ora—ora—ora!”