"Sigh..."
"Master, your disciple has now wasted away seventy-two years of his life. Will I really be able to assist a wise ruler one day and become a high-ranking minister?"
Jiang Ziya wandered aimlessly outside. Watching the fine horses and chariots racing about in the barracks not far away, raising clouds of dust, he couldn't help letting out another heavy sigh.
Although Jiang Ziya knew how to tell fortunes, and on Kunlun Mountain had studied the principles of the I Ching and the Eight Trigrams in addition to fetching water, watering pines, planting peach trees, tending fires, fanning the furnace, and refining pills, he was most skilled at fortune-telling. Still, he didn't dare tell his own fortune. So he remained uneasy about what the future held for him, and whether things would really turn out as his master had said...
"Cough..."
With no leads to follow, Jiang Ziya sighed and continued strolling forward aimlessly.
"Leaving Kunlun for the imperial capital, Ziya shall take a wife today. A sixty-eight-year-old maiden, a rare old bridegroom of seventy-two."
That was right. When Jiang Ziya had left Kunlun Mountain not long ago, departing Jade Void Palace—the place where he had lived and cultivated for a full forty years—to obey his master Yuanshi Tianzun's instructions and descend the mountain to make his own living while waiting for the right opportunity, he had already turned seventy-two. He was an old bachelor through and through!
This was the world of Great Shang, where spiritual energy ran thick. If he had been an old Daoist who'd cultivated until the age of seventy-two before finally having to leave the mountain on Earth, three thousand years later, most of his body would already be in the grave. With no family or friends to look after him, his only prospects would