Four Thousand Years of Life

(Not traditional immortal cultivation and longevity) (Not fantasy-style longevity)

Volume One moves at a very fast pace, covering roughly a thousand years every hundred chapters.

Volume Two is just a little slower. If you don't like a fast pace, you can skip Volume One and go straight to Volume Two, the Tang Dynasty arc.

Song An is a bystander to history.

Amid the raging floods of Yu the Great's flood-control campaign, he presents a strategy of combining diversion with containment, then politely declines an official post, choosing instead to be a humble doctor in a thatched cottage.

In the political machinations surrounding Hou Yi's overthrow of the Xia, he heals a ruler's broken bones and urges him to put state affairs before hunting. Yet he witnesses Han Zhuo usurp power and Shaokang restore the kingdom, another bloody cycle of dynastic upheaval.

On the eve of Tang's conquest of Xia, he dreams of mountains of corpses and seas of blood. After leaving behind a treatise on epidemic control, he quietly moves south, where he faces the soul-searching question of whether immortality is a curse, alone in a fishing village on the Yangtze.

He has endless time, yet again and again he experiences the pain of mortality. He marries, becomes a widower, takes on disciples, and bids them farewell. He lives for six hundred years in the Shang Dynasty, yet remains an outsider. Only on the day the Zhou overthrow the Shang does he finally understand: immortality is not for changing fate, but for remembering.