A vast, boundless void.
No sun, no moon, no stars. Not a whisper of sound. Only an endless dark that seemed to swallow even thought.
In that emptiness drifted an asteroid belt shaped like a crooked gourd-vine, lopsided and winding, gliding in ghostly silence. No one knew where it had come from, nor how many tens of thousands of years it had wandered the deep. Asteroids of every size lay scattered without pattern—some hundreds of meters wide, others no bigger than a fist—each pocked and cratered, worn by ages beyond counting.
Less than five kilometers from the belt, the darkness abruptly flared with a small ring of blue light. It began the size of a marble—then expanded in a blink to more than fifty meters across.
In the next instant, a long black shuttle emerged out of nothing.
It was uncanny. The blue ring looked like a mirror made of light, and the black shuttle rose from it as if breaking through the surface of a lake—except the "mirror" held no reflection, and on the far side there was only emptiness. The sight was profoundly wrong, as though reality had been punctured.
By sheer coincidence—or fate—the ring was only slightly wider than the shuttle's thickest section.
When the last of the shuttle's eighteen whip-like appendages slipped through, the blue ring snapped smaller, shrinking to a single point of light before fading into annihilation.
The black shuttle was rounded on top and flattened below, needle-nosed and wide-tailed. It measured one hundred and twenty meters in length and fifty meters in height. Its hull was sealed tight without a single seam, giving off no glow, no heat, no hint of life—silent and still, blending into the surrounding black as though it were part of the void itself.
Inside, however, a hollow compartment opened up—just over a hundred square meters, ten meters high. A faint light spilled down from the ceiling, leaving everything dim and shadowed.
At the center sat a meditation cushion. Upon it, cross-legged in stillness, was a youth with the air of an immortal sage.
He looked about fifteen. Raven-black hair was gathered into a high topknot secured beneath a silver crown. His brows were bold, his eyes bright and heroic. He wore a simple, antiquated robe of milky white. With palms upturned in a classic cultivation posture, he sat in deep meditation, breath so slight it was almost imperceptible.
Behind the shuttle, the eighteen long "whips" moved like the tendrils of a jellyfish, rapidly locking into a fixed, umbrella-like array. A thin white light then burst outward in all directions, spreading fast.
A harsh alarm shrieked through the cabin.
"Warning! Warning! Unknown obstacle cluster detected nearby! Execute emergency evasive action!"
Mo Xuan's eyebrows snapped up. With a thought, he connected to the spirit vessel's operating system—and saw the radar scan: the gourd-shaped asteroid belt was less than five kilometers away.
He s*ck*d in a sharp breath. Two beads of cold sweat slid slowly down his forehead.
In the endless void, five kilometers might as well have been five millimeters.
The spirit vessel he piloted was the lowest-grade model used for void transport—its defenses thin, its offensive capability nearly nonexistent. If his void-jump destination had contained even a fist-sized rock, it would have been instant destruction: vessel shattered, pilot dead.
Mo Xuan had cultivated in bitter hardship for two hundred years. Half a year ago, he had finally crossed the chasm between mortal and immortal and stepped into immortality—yet his resources were so scarce that he still couldn't establish an Immortal Garden of his own.
An Immortal Garden was essentially a miniature world-domain: self-sustaining, capable of crossing the void, even able to digest and refine void-asteroids to accelerate cultivation.
By the hierarchy of the Qingyuan Minor Immortal Realm, Mo Xuan was still only a "half-immortal." Only after forming an Immortal Garden could one be considered a true immortal. Without such a domain to anchor him, drifting in the infinite void meant only one outcome: death by slow attrition.
Having just brushed past the gates of the underworld, Mo Xuan wiped his sweating brow and exhaled heavily. Only then did he remember his teacher's earnest warnings before departure, the words looping in his mind like a broken record.
"Xuan'er, the void holds too many unknowns and too many dangers. The Qingyuan Minor Immortal Realm has explored for ten thousand years and still seen only the tip of the iceberg. This is your first trial beyond the realm—be careful, and then be careful again. Unless you face immediate danger, do not attempt long-distance void-jumps. Slow is fine. Time means little to immortals. Safety comes first. Remember that. Remember it!"
When Mo Xuan first set out, excitement and dread had warred in his chest.
A spacecraft—an actual vessel for voyaging the cosmos. Back on Earth, he would never have sat in one in his entire life, much less piloted it through the void.
So he proceeded cautiously, inching forward through darkness. Every half hour he made a short-range void-jump, advanced again, jumped again… and so on.
Half a year vanished like that.
During that time, there was only blackness. Always blackness. Endless, featureless void. Not even a few scattered stars to break the monotony.
What little patience he had was ground down to dust.
Eventually, he threw Teacher Kong's cautions behind him and activated an ultra-long-range random void-jump, darting through the void like a headless fly, gambling on luck.
And it wasn't entirely unreasonable.
Mo Xuan was desperate to hurry because his family had paid for his cultivation with everything they had—so much that they might as well have split a single copper coin into two just to make it last.
For more than two hundred years, every man and woman, young and old in the Mo Clan rose before dawn and worked until nightfall in the spirit fields, all for one purpose: to scrape together enough cultivation resources to feed Mo Xuan's path.
Two hundred years.
In the Qingyuan Minor Immortal Realm, even a healthy mortal rarely lived beyond three hundred.
His parents had gone gray early, their bodies ruined by exhaustion. His uncles and aunts were no different. His grandparents could no longer walk—confined to wheelchairs—yet they still refused to rest, helping with chores by hand every day.
Because of Mo Xuan, the clan had also lacked spare money for the next generation. For two centuries, they could not afford to send new children to the lower academies. Kids began working the spirit fields at an age when they should have been playing. As adults, they struggled to marry. Many Mo men were already over a hundred and still single; those in their fifties and sixties were even more numerous. After two hundred years, the clan still hadn't prospered—its bloodline thin, its household small.
"One man attains the Dao, and even his chickens and dogs ascend"—the saying wasn't quite so literal here, but an immortal truly could transform a clan's fate.
Only—he had to be an immortal in truth.
Merely being a student of the Grand Academy, merely being allowed to cultivate, did nothing to help the family. It was a bottomless pit. The Mo men couldn't marry partly because they couldn't afford bride-prices, and partly because any daughter who married into the clan would be expected to toil for two or three hundred years providing resources for Mo Xuan's cultivation.
For an ordinary woman, two or three hundred years was an entire lifetime.
Most families wouldn't sacrifice their daughters for that.
Of course, a few far-sighted households were willing—betting on the future—but they were rare.
Mo Xuan had to become a true immortal. Only then could he repay the clan.
The Grand Academy had miraculous pills and elixirs. A "return to youth" pill was far too expensive, but longevity pills weren't impossibly priced. That was why, the moment Mo Xuan stepped into immortality, he rushed out to take work as a void-scavenger.
If he drifted aimlessly for ten years, eight years… his grandparents might already be gone.
That was why he dared the ultra-long-range jumps.
Now, staring at the asteroid belt nearly in his face, Mo Xuan felt his heart go cold.
Immortals were supposed to be indifferent to life and death—but he carried his entire clan on his shoulders. If he died pointlessly to a lump of rock, then the Mo Clan's two centuries of sacrifice would become a joke, a tragedy without even an enemy to blame.
He pressed a hand to his chest and exhaled hard.
Another stroke of absurd luck.
His first stroke of absurd luck.
Back on Earth, he'd been a perfectly ordinary middle school student, a ninth-grader. One stormy day, he ran home under an umbrella—and lightning struck.
He should have died.
Instead, his soul tore free. Somehow, impossibly, it crossed worlds and arrived in the Qingyuan Minor Immortal Realm—a realm where Dao techniques manifested openly.
He possessed the body of Mo Xuan, a five-year-old child of the Mo Clan who had died young, and was reborn.
A world where the Dao was real—how glorious it sounded. A xianxia world: soaring on clouds, eternal life, piloting immortal vessels through the cosmos.
Beautiful.
And yet Mo Xuan had complained countless times in secret: something about this world's "settings" had to be wrong.
Because the Qingyuan Minor Immortal Realm was… poor.
Not just poor.
Shockingly poor.
Everyone can cultivate? Impossible.
Having talent means you can cultivate? Still impossible.
You needed a cultivation quota.
Cultivate in secret without permission?
Three words: death without mercy.
So where did quotas come from?
Examinations.
Examinations on what?
The Dao scriptures passed down by the three Dao Lords.
You were allowed to read them. You were not allowed to cultivate them.
How many examinees?
Any youth under twenty-five could sit the test. In a single commandery, there would be hundreds of thousands.
How many quotas?
One exam per year. Each commandery accepted only the top three.
Mo Xuan could have wept.
On Earth he hadn't even finished nine years of compulsory education, and here he had to study until his head ached and his eyes burned—ten years of misery—only to fail again and again.
Classical Chinese had always been his weak point. The Dao scriptures were vastly more obscure.
What could he do?
He could retake the exam—until the year he turned twenty-five. If he still failed then, he would lose the chance forever.
With hundreds of thousands competing, and only three admitted each year, the backlog only grew; the field became a sea of monsters.
Mo Xuan knew exactly what he was worth. Back on Earth, he'd been top three in class, maybe top twenty in school—but in his district he'd be lucky to place top hundred, and in the entire county maybe top thousand.
To fight for top three among hundreds of thousands?
His inner voice: I might as well go home and farm.
But every time he remembered that the spot at the local starter academy had been given to him by his older half-brother—who had handed it over with tears in his eyes—Mo Xuan could only grit his teeth and endure.
The Mo Clan was weak: three hundred mu of third-rank spirit fields, and ten mu of second-rank spirit fields.
Third-rank fields could only grow the lowest-grade spirit grains and spirit vegetables—the kind barely better than plain food. They were the worst category of land in the realm.
Second-rank fields were slightly better and could grow low-grade spirit herbs—the primary source of income for most ordinary clans.
Above those were first-rank spirit fields, which could produce more precious herbs; only powerful commandery clans could afford to own any significant acreage.
Yet even those "first, second, third" ranks were laughably shabby for a realm that dared call itself immortal. In a true minor immortal realm, only Earth-rank spirit fields—or even Heaven-rank—were worthy of being called spirit fields. By comparison, the "A/B/C ranks" here were little more than green groundcover.
The entire Mo Clan numbered only sixty-three souls—too small to matter even in their own township.
And entry into the starter academy required an exorbitant tuition fee. The Mo Clan could only afford to send one child.
To do that, they tightened their belts until they were hungry half the time.
So how could Mo Xuan allow himself to quit?
He had no choice but to bite down hard and struggle alongside those hundreds of thousands for a single, vanishing thread of immortal fate.
His saving grace was that he possessed the one legendary advantage all transmigrators from Earth seemed to share—
Three hundred Tang poems and Song lyrics.
He had memorized them thoroughly in elementary school.
In a realm where Dao scholarship was king, composing poetry was considered idle nonsense. But at the Grand Academy there happened to be an immortal surnamed Kong who loved verse.
When Kong Immortal heard Mo Xuan recite—cough—his "original" version of Smoke Locks the Pond Willows, that famous five-element couplet, he was stunned. He descended personally to the mortal lands and summoned Mo Xuan.
Seizing the moment, Mo Xuan offered up several immortal poems by Li Bai, presenting them with a straight face as his own creations.
Kong Immortal was awestruck. He kept slapping Mo Xuan's shoulder so enthusiastically he nearly dislocated it, leaving Mo Xuan baring his teeth in pain.
That year's commandery exam, Kong Immortal lowered himself to serve as chief examiner of Qing Mountain Commandery.
And that year, Mo Xuan placed third.
He entered the Grand Academy, became Kong Immortal's disciple, and no matter what rumors others whispered, he had finally taken the first step on the path of cultivation—through a door narrower than a needle's eye.
But the harder trials…
Were still waiting ahead.