On the outskirts of Mount Buzhou.
In a Human Race tribe that had already grown quite large.
Laozi sat beneath an ancient tree.
He displayed none of the lofty bearing of the Sages' elder brother or Xuanmen's foremost disciple.
He had even exchanged his Taiqing Daoist robes for an ordinary gray robe.
He had been among the Human Race for over three hundred years.
At first.
He gave no Dao lectures.
He took no disciples.
He only watched.
He watched the humans rise to work with the sun.
He watched them hunt, gather herbs, and farm.
He also watched how the first humans to begin cultivating groped their way toward understanding heaven and earth spiritual qi.
The humans were clever.
That was far more apparent than Laozi had initially expected.
An ordinary breathing technique.
Some could imitate it after watching just a few times.
The simplest talisman pattern.
Before long, someone would try modifying it.
Even when the same cultivation method fell into different hands.
They would adjust the rhythm of their breathing and the routes through their meridians themselves.
Some achieved better results, others worse.
At least it showed they could think.
Yet precisely because of that.
More and more problems began to emerge.
The cultivation methods brought to the Human Race by rogue cultivators of the Great Wilderness were a tangled assortment.
Some practiced the Demon Clan's breathing techniques.
Others practiced various body-tempering methods.
Some even tempered their bodies in the manner of the Witch Clan.
Many of those methods simply did not suit the Human Race.
Cultivation deviation and damaged meridians became increasingly common.
In Laozi's three hundred and seventy-second year living in the tribe.
He personally witnessed a young man force himself to practice fire-aspected demon arts.
His meridians were scorched.
His cultivation came to a