The Dust-Cleansing Stairway

Lin Yan, an outer disciple of the Xuanyuan Sect, joined at the age of seven. He was found to have a mid-grade wood spirit root, but his meridians were congenitally defective, leaking spiritual energy as soon as it entered his body. After seven years of cultivation, he was still stuck at the first layer of Qi Refining. The sect thought he was wasting a spot and eating food for nothing, so they sent him to the Sutra Repository in the back mountains to sweep the three hundred old stone steps nobody else wanted to maintain. Nobody paid any attention to this taciturn sweeper. Even he thought he would spend his whole life clutching a bamboo broom, watching disciples from the front mountain fly off on their swords, and growing old among the repository’s stacks of old books. That changed when, on the 127th stone step, he found a little clay figurine dressed exactly like him, right down to the identical patch on its sleeve. The ancient Cleansing Array, dead for several hundred years, had been quietly revived by the spiritual energy he had scattered across the steps every day for seven years. Everyone else fought to cram spiritual energy into their bodies, competing for cultivation techniques and magical treasures, scrambling to advance their cultivation and reach immortality in a single leap. But he held a bamboo broom he had woven himself, sweeping fallen leaves, dust, and one stone step after another. While others cultivated the sword, pills, and power, he slowly cleansed his spirit root, worldly impurities, and inner demons through day after day of sweeping, forging the clumsiest yet steadiest path of cultivation. This novel and its characters are entirely fictional. Any resemblance to real people or events is purely coincidental. Do not imitate.