On the twenty-third day of the twelfth lunar month, while the butcher knife was still warm, Zhang Junqian’s (Qianzi’s) family was slaughtered! His parents, grandparents, all gone!
His enemies chased him like a pack of dogs into a snowy hollow deep in the old forest. With a splinter of wood lodged in his thigh, he was on the verge of death. Then, bam!, he smashed straight through the den of a weasel spirit! That enraged the old immortal cultivating inside: Huang Xiaopao!
“You little brat! You destroyed my home?! I’ll eat you alive!” Huang Xiaopao lunged at him in a fury, only to run into the uncanny force coiled deep in Qianzi’s bones. Just his luck! Instead of eating the boy, he got “bound to a sealed aperture” and tethered himself to Qianzi!
Pain? That was just an immortal being squeezed out from between his bones! But if it meant staying alive, Qianzi was willing. The first time he summoned a spirit to possess him, his eyes glowed yellow, and one stinking fart knocked out three pursuers. Tell me, is that not impressive?
Huang Xiaopao grumbled his way into becoming Qianzi’s “tutor.” Burn incense? No incense? Stick a twig in a snowbank and make do! Recite an incantation? Roar out “The Song of Inviting the Yellow Immortal to Open the Mountain,” and run faster than a dog! Qianzi also carried the strange black stone his father had pressed into his hands before he died. Even the weasel spirit muttered, “There’s something… sinister about this thing!”
At Kaoshan Village, he used a bowl of clear water and a pair of chopsticks to reveal a ghostly face. Wang the Half-Immortal, a local charlatan, tried to play dirty and flung a thunderfire talisman! Qianzi roared out the “Body-Guarding Spell” and took the hit head-on, escaping with his life despite being battered and bruised. But the commotion woke the lord who had been lurking in the nearby old forest: Chang Tianqing, the Willow Immortal! His gaze was as cold as shards of ice!
Just as Qianzi was finding his footing in the village and had finished face-slapping the charlatan, that bastard Zhao Sandao showed up with an evil cultivator who raised ghosts and laid siege to his door in the dead of night!
