A fire burned Gu Ran from modern times to the Canglan Realm - the escape door was locked from the outside. When he woke up, he became a sweeper at a run-down escort agency in Qingniu Town: he had no spiritual roots, and he was carrying a blood feud that wiped out his entire family, and his enemy was still living under his nose.
The gate of immortality cannot be opened, and the spiritual veins cannot be touched. Everyone is telling him: A mortal is born to kneel.
Gu Ran refused. He dug out a stick of withered incense that had been burned for thousands of years from the cellar of Gu's abandoned garden. There is a remnant soul of a half-step true immortal residing in the incense. He calls himself the Lord of the Mountain and teaches him a Juechen Jue - not relying on spiritual energy or spiritual roots, using obsession as fuel and will as the furnace, only burning the anger in his heart that refuses to dissipate.
The purer the obsession, the more prosperous the dust flame; once the obsession is over, the cultivation level returns to zero. Gu Ran has since embarked on a knife-edge road: the more he hates, the stronger he becomes; the more he cannot let go, the less he can look back.
At the end of the road is the ladder to heaven that was cut off by the mountain owner thousands of years ago. The thing anchored under the break is waiting for the next person willing to make the lock.
The fire in his previous life may have been part of a larger chess game.
This novel and its characters are purely fictitious. Any similarity is purely coincidental and should not be imitated.