"You like that girl?"
A kindly voice sounded beside Fang An's ear, as though an amiable old man stood at his side.
Fang An watched Fang Qiao'er walk away and shook his head. "Master, Qiao'er is wonderful, but someone else in the village would suit her better. Not me."
"Ever since you showed me how vast the world is, I've had no heart for romance. The Great Dao is all I seek in this life!"
As Fang An spoke, someone seemed to nod approvingly beside him. But he knew there was no one there.
The speaker was the immortal who had saved Fang An, and the master he had never told anyone about.
That had been Fang An's first encounter with a true immortal. Just as the stories described, he wore a bamboo crown and hemp robes, with the bearing of an immortal, white hair, and a youthful face.
The immortal had shown Fang An the lands beyond the hundred-thousand-li Wild South Mountain, the stars in the heavens, and even, during a brief journey beyond Nanzhao Realm, the vast universe.
There were boundless plains beyond Wild South Mountain, towering cities, great rivers surging eastward, a sky thick with stars, and countless worlds beyond the heavens that outnumbered those stars.
Fang An had been shaken to his core. A boy from the mountains, he had never seen such sights. Gazing at the magnificent billions of worlds beyond the sky, at new realms vastly larger than Nanzhao Realm, an ambition he had never known rose within him: All Heavens and Myriad Worlds were so vast. I want to see them.
Beneath the radiance of those billion worlds, surrounded by an endless river of stars, the immortal had told Fang An who he was:
"My Daoist title is Tianzheng. I was lord of