It was a rainy night.
Black clouds bore down on the city, and torrential rain poured from the sky. Not a soul walked the market's dark streets and alleys.
Creak!
The back gate of a courtyard building opened. His hair and beard scorched black, his expression dazed, Lin Changheng stumbled into the curtain of rain with an old cloth bundle tucked against his chest. He trudged on alone, looking from afar like a withered walking corpse.
He had no idea how long it took him to walk that half kilometer. Only when a little warmth reached his rain-soaked skin did Lin Changheng slowly come back to himself.
A crude room and sparse furnishings thrust themselves starkly into his view.
Streams of memories unlocked in his mind. The enormous flood of information felt like an iron shovel churning through his brain, leaving his head ready to split.
He distinctly remembered that the sun had been shining just moments ago. A master's student in agricultural science, he had been working hard in a sorghum field with his senior fellow student, researching high-yield cultivation techniques. Then his vision had gone black, and he had suddenly died.
As a veteran reader of cultivation novels on a certain web fiction site, he was hardly unfamiliar with transmigration and rebirth. In his midnight dreams, he had even pictured himself soaring through the void, sword in hand, challenging the heavens.
But now that it had actually happened, he could not help panicking. Gritting his teeth, he slapped himself. The crisp sound and burning pain drew a sigh from him-
"I really have transmigrated. More precisely, I've broken through the mystery of the womb..."
As he rapidly sorted through nearly thirty years of memories from before his awakening, Lin Changheng's newly relaxed brow furrowed deeply again.
More than a decade ago, after losing both his parents, he had been scraping out a living in a mortal town.
An immortal master had happened to reveal his powers there. The whole city had erupted in excitement, its streets emptying as everyone brought their children to have their spiritual roots tested, hoping for a chance at immortality.
According to the immortal master, children and youths between seven and eighteen could step forward to have their spiritual roots tested.
Rich or poor, noble or lowly, all were welcome!
Yet out of several thousand people, only three possessed spiritual roots.
Fortunately, he was one of them.
Amid the common people's desperate pleas and the dumbfounded envy of the rich and powerful, the three mounted immortal cranes under the master's guidance. With a slight beat of their wings, they vanished over the horizon like streaks of light.
They left behind an immortal miracle that the city would recount countless times, its legend enduring for a century.
High-spirited, he had believed his suffering was finally over, that he would ascend to immortality in a single step. Yet within just three days, cruel reality slapped him out of the sky and into the dust.
"Lin Changheng, mixed spiritual roots!"
This was a spiritual root testing assembly that gathered promising Immortal Seedlings from eight commanderies, as well as a grand occasion for the various powers to divide them up.
Once the announcement was made, Lin Changheng's poor spiritual roots and bone age approaching eighteen ruled out joining a sect. Even the somewhat lesser cultivation aristocratic clans had thresholds too high for him to cross, while Foundation Establishment lineages shook their heads and refused him as well.
Only a Qi Refining lineage called the Blackwater River Xu Family extended an olive branch.
Though he hesitated, he understood that if he refused, he would either become a rogue cultivator, drifting like rootless duckweed through a life of hardship, or return to the mortal world to enjoy sixty years of worldly wealth and glory.
Having set foot on the immortal path, how could he settle for the mortal dust?
Whatever happened, he had to take his chances!
And so he resolutely decided to join the Xu Family.
Without staying for the feasting and festivities afterward, the Xu Family elder immediately took the Immortal Seedlings down the mountain and back to the lineage's lands, where their placements began.
They were offered two paths.
The first was to marry into the Xu Family, take a Xu daughter as a wife, and father children bearing the Xu name.
The more children with spiritual roots they produced, the greater their rewards and the higher their status. The underlying principle was "more children, more blessings"-they simply had to sow their seed tirelessly like breeding boars.
The second was the path of a guest retainer. For twelve years, the Xu Family would provide support according to a set standard, including spirit stones, spirit rice, spirit tea, and the like.
They could also choose one of the cultivation crafts the Xu Family possessed and become an apprentice in it. If they attained a ranked level of proficiency, they would be considered successful, earning higher status and a greater stipend!
But if they failed, they would have to serve as Xu Family members when conscripted to reclaim land in the wilds, an extremely dangerous duty.
Hearing this, Lin Changheng could not help marveling. They truly were an upright lineage: the benefits and drawbacks were clear, laid out for everyone to choose freely, without coercion or deceit.
After agonizing over the decision, eighty percent of the Immortal Seedlings chose to "marry in." Only twenty percent chose "apprenticeship," and his former self had been among them.
He refused to resign himself to his fate. He still wanted to take a gamble.
Since his fire spiritual root had the highest [spirit resonance], at eight wisps, he was advised to study alchemy.
And so he became an alchemy apprentice, tending furnaces and their flames at the Xu Family Alchemy Shop in Zichuan Market. He stayed there for eleven years.
He had first entered the immortal path at eighteen. Eleven years had flown by, and he was now approaching thirty, the age when a man should stand firm.
Yet he had still not attained a rank and become an alchemist.
His cultivation was also stuck at the second level of Qi Refining, unable to advance for some unknown reason.
The Xu Family's twelve-year deadline loomed, and a year from now, mobilization would begin for the "Great Reclamation," held once every twenty years in the endless wilds...
If he still could not become a ranked alchemist, he would be sent to the reclamation front lines, battling ferocious, man-eating demonic beasts day and night and risking his life amid poisonous insects and miasma. With his poor combat skills, he would certainly die.
Moreover, with reclamation approaching, the various powers were pulling back to prepare. The areas outside the Market Ward had grown even more chaotic and dangerous. Even if he wanted to flee, he had nowhere else to go, and he would be a delectable morsel in the eyes of cultivator bandits.
All this had left him anxious nearly to death. When he forced himself to start a batch of pills earlier, the furnace exploded. Exhausted in both body and mind, he lost consciousness.
As the saying went, without breaking, there could be no rebuilding. And so he had awakened in a single night!
After sorting through his memories from before the awakening, Lin Changheng could not help drawing a deep breath.
Things really are looking bad!
Unless he became a ranked Pill Master, he was almost certain to die.
But he soon forced himself to calm down and began considering the crucial points, searching for a way out.
Before long, his eyes lit up. He noticed something amiss and sank into deep thought:
"Generally speaking, there are hardly any bottlenecks at the first two levels of Qi Refining. They only appear in the Mid-Qi Refining and late stages. Why is my cultivation stuck at the Second Level of Qi Refining...?"
"Could it be... connected to the depletion of my blood essence over the years?"
"And could that also be weakening my control during pill refining and leaving me without enough sustained magical power?"
A possibility occurred to Lin Changheng. Ever since birth, he had suffered from insufficient qi and blood. It had been very mild and had not affected his daily life, so he had paid it little attention.
Once he began cultivating, however, it became more frequent and more severe!
Every month, without fail, his blood essence would be depleted once, as though some ghost or monster had secretly sucked it away. For a time afterward, he would be listless and unable to sustain his magical power.
He had taken medicines to replenish his qi and blood and applied protective talismans, all to no avail.
"That's probably it!"
Lin Changheng slapped the table. The more he thought about it, the more likely it seemed. He was about to consider it further when that inexplicable sense of weakness suddenly returned. "Damn it, here it comes again!"
The familiar sensation of his blood essence being drawn away made Lin Changheng's expression change drastically, but he could do nothing to stop it.
He could only endure as it ran its course.
After an unknown length of time, Lin Changheng leaned against the table, drained of strength, his eyes filled with coldness and profound helplessness.
Just then, a wondrously mysterious, vast and upright energy emerged from the unreal and surged straight into Lin Changheng's mind, sweeping away his exhaustion, anxiety, and gloom.
"What is this?"
Once the strange sensation faded, Lin Changheng closed his eyes and shook his head. When he opened them again, the world abruptly changed before him.
His vision pierced through the unreal and fell upon his sea of consciousness.
At the very center of his view, a small, mysterious bronze cauldron of unusual design appeared out of nowhere.