True immortality is never written plainly.
I learned that after weeks of fruitless searching—scroll after scroll promising eternal life through pills, elixirs, or borrowed vitality. All flawed. All temporary. All reliant on external forces.
Weak methods.
It was only when I stopped looking for longevity and started looking for control that I found Tieguai's work.
The knowledge wasn't stored under his name.
It was scattered—encoded across medical manuscripts, spiritual anatomy diagrams, Daoist meditation records, and fragments dismissed as metaphor. Only when viewed together did the pattern emerge.
Tieguai didn't preserve life.
He commanded the body.
Not through bending.Not through spirits.But through absolute internal authority.
The core principle was simple, yet terrifying:
A body ages because it is unmanaged.
Cells divide blindly. Energy flows inefficiently. Damage accumulates faster than it is repaired. Time exploits chaos.
Tieguai eliminated chaos.
I sealed myself in the empty chamber Wan Shi Tong had granted me and began immediately.
The first stage was awareness.
Not vague spiritual "sensing," but total internal perception. I learned to feel blood pressure change by the heartbeat, to sense micro-tears in muscle fibers as they formed, to track energy expenditure down to individual breaths.
Then came regulation.
I slowed cellular division deliberately—not stopping it, but optimizing it. Damaged cells were recycled efficiently. Telomere degradation slowed to a crawl. Hormonal output stabilized at a precise equilibrium.
The body, I realized, wasn't meant to decay.
It was simply never taught how not to.
Months passed.
I could feel the change.
Not dramatically—not yet—but unmistakably.
Fatigue vanished entirely. Recovery became instantaneous. My muscles grew denser, stronger, without bulk. My bones felt… reinforced. As if my body had quietly rewritten its own blueprint.
Most telling of all—
I looked younger.
Not childish. Not immature.
But perfect.
Despite being biologically sixteen, my body had settled into its physical prime. No awkward growth. No imbalance. Just optimal structure and strength.
Age no longer progressed normally.
It still moved—but slowly. Obediently.
I examined myself calmly in a polished bronze surface.
"This isn't immortality," I said quietly.
Not yet.
Tieguai's writings were clear: complete mastery takes decades. One mistake could result in catastrophic internal collapse. Overcontrol could calcify organs. Undercontrol would revert progress.
This path demanded patience.
But I had time now.
A great deal of it.
And the benefits extended beyond longevity.
My physical strength had increased sharply—not through brute force, but efficiency. Every movement wasted less energy. Every strike carried intent, structure, inevitability.
With a longer lifespan came responsibility.
The Avatar was never meant to burn brightly and vanish.
The world didn't need a legend.
It needed a constant.
I closed the manuscript carefully and exhaled.
"Decades," I murmured. "That's fine."
I had already left mortality behind.
Now I would refine eternity.