Form a Dao Embryo, and I'll Come for You in Three Hundred Years

In the year 2026 of the Heavenly Market calendar, in the Ancient Yin Lands of Middle Earth.

The Han State, sixth year of King Cheng's reign.

At year's end, the constellation Shen grew dim and barely visible. A great drought struck the states, and calamities abounded. Ore grew scarce, and so the realm fell into poverty.

That year, Southern Qi invaded Han.

Han said, "I have done no wrong." Southern Qi replied, "I am a barbarian."

In the sixth month of the following year, Han fell. A great famine struck that year, and people ate one another.

Lü Yuan knew nothing of the causes and consequences of any of this. He had no father or mother and came from a little village that did not even have a name, where he had grown up on the charity of a hundred households.

As he remembered it, life had suddenly become hard. But if there had only been less food and greater poverty, everyone could have endured and gotten through it.

War, however, came alongside the unending drought, and that was more than ordinary people could withstand.

Most of the villagers died at the hands of rampaging soldiers. Those lucky enough to escape could only band together and continue down the road as famine refugees.

They had not asked for much. All they wanted was a way to survive.

But in a world like this, they could not find one, not even one.

The refugees on the road numbered in the tens of millions. Wherever they passed, not a blade of grass remained.

Even so, even after most of them had been reduced to eating grass and dirt to survive, there was still no hope in sight.

Lü Yuan did not know how many refugees there were. He only knew that the group he had been with was heading north in search of a way to survive.

But was there a way to survive in the north?

Perhaps there was.

But now that everyone he knew had starved to death, Lü Yuan no longer wanted to search for that so-called way to survive.

Before he died, the young man who had watched Lü Yuan grow up pressed a last half-piece of flatbread into his hand. He had found it by chance in the last deserted village they passed.

He had intended to eat a good meal before he died, but after a long period of thought, he had decided to leave it to Lü Yuan instead.

That was not all. Before closing his eyes, he also said to Lü Yuan, "Make sure no one else takes my body."

Lü Yuan knew what he meant. So, with some difficulty, he dragged his body away from the refugees under cover of night and took a deserted road.

Only when the long procession was out of sight did he stop.

Kneeling before the young man's body, he faced the hardest struggle of conscience in either of his two lives. It was not until dawn that he finally made his decision.

He ate the tree bark and wild grass he had saved, then used the last of his strength to pick up a stone from the road. He dug on and off until evening.

At last, he dug a shallow little pit in the ground, just big enough to squeeze the young man's body into.

In the end, he could not bring himself to eat a person.

Even if doing so might have given him a better chance of survival.

After waking the next day, he finally buried the young man there. Then, after a long period of thought, he decided not to look for the tide of refugees.

Lü Yuan picked a dead-end road at random and set out on the final stretch of his second life.

He walked and walked, not knowing how he managed to keep going.

Perhaps heaven took pity on him. Just as hunger and thirst were making his head swim and his vision blur, a small river appeared before him.

Lü Yuan went over and drank his fill.

Filling his stomach with water was a very foolish thing to do, but at this point he had no other choice.

And just then, perhaps because heaven had seen his earlier foolishness, it actually gave him another chance to live.

It was a child even younger than him, probably only about five. There was no telling how he had made it there alone.

On the other side of the river, the child raised a sharp stone and faced Lü Yuan.

Maybe his parents and elders were all eaten. That's why he's so afraid of an adult like me, even though I'm not much older than him...

Lü Yuan did not blame him, nor could he hate a child who could barely hold a stone steady and was clearly even hungrier than he was.

This was a real child. Natural disasters and human calamities had brought him to this, and it was not his fault that he was acting to protect himself.

After some hesitation, seeing that the child was so hungry he could barely go on, Lü Yuan gave him half the flatbread.

The bread was even harder than stone, but after it had been soaked in water, the child still wolfed it down.

When he had finished, the child burst into tears, as though he meant to pour out all the grievances he had suffered along the way.

"Big brother, how can I repay you?"

"Did I give you the bread because I wanted a reward?"

The child fell silent.

Just like that, they lived through another day.

The next morning, the child asked Lü Yuan, "Big brother, where should we go to find a way to survive?"

Lü Yuan shook his head. "Not we. You."

He pointed the child in the direction the refugees had gone. "Go that way. That's the direction I took when I left the group. You won't catch up to them, so you don't have to be afraid of those people."

"Follow behind them and eat the remains of the corpses they leave behind. Maybe you'll find a way to survive."

The child asked him, "If there might be a way to survive there, big brother, why did you leave?"

Lü Yuan smiled when he heard that. "There might be a way to survive there, but I don't want one anymore."

With that, he left. Before he went, he gave the child one last instruction. "If you don't want to go that way, you can go in the direction I'm going. If you see my corpse farther along, eat it."

Lü Yuan was three years older than the child, who could not keep up with him at all.

Eating wild grass and tree roots along the road, Lü Yuan lived through another day. It was not that he did not want to die sooner, but that hunger was too painful.

By then, he could no longer see the child behind him.

But at noon, he found a dying old man in a patch of grass.

The old man kept calling out that he was hungry, hungry...

Lü Yuan knew that even if he fed him something now, he would not survive.

So he ignored him and walked straight on. But after two steps, he closed his eyes, and tears fell.

He did not know why he turned back.

He took out the last of his water, thoroughly softened the remaining quarter-piece of flatbread in it, and fed it to the starving old man.

The old man died in the end.

But Lü Yuan could feel no relief. He truly had no strength left to bury the old man, so he apologized to him and left.

He did not know whether the child behind him would come looking for him, or whether, if he did follow, he would eat the old man's corpse.

He really could not concern himself with any of that.

Lü Yuan simply walked slowly along the final stretch of his life, that long and painful journey.

That evening, he looked at the wild dog before him, its left hind leg injured, and did not know whether to marvel that heaven did not want him dead or something else.

He was truly hungry, and the wild dog before him was not one of his own kind. Should he make it his last meal?

Before a person departed, they ought to eat something good, shouldn't they?

Lü Yuan was about to do it, but after catching the wild dog, he merely stood there with trembling lips, making no move for a long time.

Because, to his surprise, he had seen pleading and tears in a dog's eyes.

He gave up.

Why make himself unhappy in the final stretch of his life?

He tore a strip of cloth from the hem of his clothes and made a simple covering for the wild dog's wound.

Lü Yuan did not know whether it would help. He treated it as a comfort to himself, then let the wild dog go.

As for him, he lay alone beneath a dead tree by the refugees' road, waiting for heaven to take the life of someone who did not know what was good for him.

The next day, dawn broke. Literally, the sky before his eyes was brighter than ever.

For a man dressed in white, godlike and immortal, had appeared before him.

Long ago, Lü Yuan had heard the village elders speak of the existence of immortals.

Back then, he had thought they were folktales. Only now did he learn they were real, and that he had come to a world where immortals existed.

But at this point, none of it mattered.

It was not that the immortal could not save him, but that Lü Yuan himself no longer wanted to live. He was finally about to starve to death.

The immortal was perhaps the most beautiful person Lü Yuan had ever seen. When He smiled, even the sun paled before Him.

He curved His lips and offered Lü Yuan a flatbread. It looked exceptionally soft, and perhaps even had a meat filling.

But Lü Yuan did not reach out to take it. It was not that he lacked the strength; he truly did not want to take it.

"Do you no longer want to live? Why? Why are you so set on dying at such a young age?"

"Even if you have no wish to live for yourself, do you not have the will to live for the sake of hatred?"

"Do you not hate those who destroyed your home and your country?"

"Do you not hate those at the Qi State's court who brought all this about with a few words?"

"Do you not hate immortals like me, who stand high above you yet turn a blind eye to whether you mortals live or die?"

"If you hate us, then eat. Stay alive, and you will have a chance to take revenge on people like us."

But Lü Yuan still did not take it. Instead, he asked the immortal before him:

"Why should I hate them?"

"How am I to hate them?"

"Among those rampaging soldiers and deserters were men from both Qi and Han. Who should I hate?"

"Along the way, those who saved me and took pity on me came from both Qi and Han. Who should I hate?"

"And there's even less reason to hate an immortal like you, isn't there? You cultivate on a mountain or in the heavens. That has nothing to do with us in the first place, does it?"

The immortal said nothing in response to the first few questions, but the last made Him speak softly.

"But we immortals had the power to intervene. We could have stopped it."

Lü Yuan still shook his head. "It had nothing to do with you. To hate you just because you had the power to stop it but didn't-there's no sense in that."

The immortal said nothing. Only after a long silence did He ask in a low voice:

"What about you, then?"

"Why did you do those things along the way?"

Lü Yuan lowered his head, then slowly gave his answer. "Because I wanted to. I simply wanted to do them."

The immortal laughed, a laugh of utter delight.

He looked down at Lü Yuan with a gentle gaze and said softly, "The Dao and virtue lie within it!"

He asked Lü Yuan again, "Do you want to live?"

This time, Lü Yuan fell silent. To live or to die was a question worth pondering.

Who did not want to live?

He had been determined to die, but that was also because he had seen no hope for so long.

And now hope was right before his eyes...

At last, Lü Yuan gave his answer, trembling. "I do."

He said he did. He wanted to live.

He had yet to see the sights of this world, had yet to truly live freely as a complete person.

He gave his answer, and so the immortal would not let him die.

His body, ravaged by all manner of things along the way, returned to health. His stomach, which had constantly cramped with pain, finally felt simple hunger.

Lü Yuan took the meat pie the immortal gave him and ate it in great mouthfuls.

He could be said to have had no manners whatsoever. No one could have eaten more grotesquely.

But the immortal showed not the slightest disgust. He even reached out and patted Lü Yuan's ragged back to help him digest.

Lü Yuan rediscovered what it felt like to live as a human being and thanked the immortal through choked sobs.

He said he could never repay such immense kindness.

But the immortal merely said, "Eat slowly."

Lü Yuan had fled the famine to this place at a tender age and suffered every hardship. Hearing those words of concern, he wailed like a lost child.

The immortal brushed the tears from his face and gently stroked his head.

Before leaving, He tucked a book titled "The Five Luminaries Treatise, Bestowed Upon My Son by the Lord of the Realm" into his arms and said warmly:

"Form a Dao Embryo, and I'll come for you in three hundred years."