Fire Thieves in an Age of Waning Spiritual Energy

Toxic fog blankets the wasteland, and the Immortal Court has lain in ruin for a thousand years. When the last spiritual leyline is drained and cultivators become devouring machines, a boy with awakened "pollution resistance" crawls out of a mass grave.

He can plunder other cultivators' power, but must endure the curse running wild. He earns a hundred thousand spirit stones a day by purifying toxic spiritual energy, yet three sects scramble to seize him and hunt him down. Only after reading someone's memories does he discover that he is the ninth-generation test subject in an artificial spiritual root program!

He massacres the Burning Heaven Alliance to seize its flesh-to-spirit formation, turns the tables on Coffin City by detonating anti-spirit bombs, and clashes with his cloned nemesis Night Owl in a battle of devouring atop a spirit-marrow train... After traversing the wasteland, the boy finally realizes that he is the purification vessel of the "Spirit Ancestor" at the planet's core.

Will he trigger a self-destruct to restart the era, or don a crown and become the next plunderer? When the "spiritual leyline shackles" binding all worlds are torn apart, the wasteland boy uses the pollution clinging to his body to ignite the final cultivation era.

This novel and its characters are entirely fictional. Any resemblance to actual people or events is purely coincidental. Do not imitate.