Grinding Toward Immortality: Starting as a Library Scribe

[Eight Characters Cultivation + Story Arc Format + Dark Cultivation]

"Holy shit! I'm a cultivator on the verge of dying in meditation, so how the hell does a mortal like you get to live this long?"

Mo Chen only wanted to live an honest, peaceful life. But despite being nearly thirty, he still looked seventeen or eighteen. Rumors spread through his village that he was a ginseng root transformed into a human-and that killing and eating him would grant eternal youth. Those rumors brought a mountain bandit gang down to surround the village and hunt him. To avoid being drained of blood for pill refining, Mo Chen used a family token to seek refuge under a scribe in the royal capital, becoming a junior copyist and secretly cultivating.

Once he began cultivating, Mo Chen discovered that everything people said about spiritual roots was a lie. Cultivators hoarded the secret of drawing spiritual energy into the body to cut off mortals' path to advancement. In truth, the favorable and useful elements in each person's Eight Characters birth chart were their spiritual roots. Even their Na Yin elemental classifications bestowed unique effects.

[Furnace Fire] allows fire spells to build up power continuously, doubling their potency.

[Thunderbolt Fire] adds lightning damage to fire spells.

[Stream Water] gives water spells the ability to corrode cultivators' bodies and magical treasures.

[Pomegranate Wood] allows a Hundred-Seed Tree of Returning Ruin to grow within the sea of consciousness. In magical combat, it can unleash secret arts at a tremendous cost to bombard other cultivators' souls.

But all these enhancements come at a terrible price. Cultivators must continually consume [Five Elements Remnant Essence] to temporarily replenish their spiritual roots-and that essence can only be refined from spiritually cultivated beings, such as demonic beasts and other cultivators. Even after becoming a cultivator, a single misstep can reduce you to Five Elements Remnant Essence, consumed to replenish someone else's spiritual roots.