Ten Tribulations of Tortoise-Breathing: I Pickle Immortality in the Mortal World

[Mortal's Journey] [Cooking Dao Cultivation] [Cultivating Together with a Dao Companion] [A Shocking Conspiracy] [play the pig to eat the tiger] A poor young man cleaves through fate with a single stroke; even the humble smoke of the kitchen can lead to immortality!

In the rigidly stratified Li household, the young kitchen hand Li Qing spends his days among the bones and flesh of demonic beasts, enduring scorn and humiliation. Then, by chance, he glimpses an ancient tortoise-breathing secret art in the patterns of his ancestral pickle jar. Beneath his cleaver, the essence and blood of demonic beasts become cultivation resources; within the pickling array, a decade-long ordeal of feigned death conceals a chance at survival.

But when he enters the Dao through cooking and creates his own “Ox-Cleaving Blade Art” to break through the barriers of martial cultivation, the strange signs of his shattered fate-lock expose a shocking conspiracy: beneath the Li ancestral hall, a bronze coffin holds a corpse with his exact face; the scales beneath the matriarch's embroidered shoes and the blood-sacrifice array in the cold spring's source all point to a demonic clan's body-snatching scheme that has continued for a thousand years!

As the prophecy of nine coffins appearing and the black tortoise weeping blood comes to pass, Li Qing raises his blade to the heavens. “They say the poor can never raise a noble son. Then I'll use this pickle jar as my cauldron and my kitchen knife as my guide, pickle away every injustice under heaven, and sever the chains between immortals and mortals!”