In the Age of the Spirit Net, cultivating immortality has become a standardized product on an assembly line.
The Heavenly Tribulation Bureau oversees everything, from drawing qi into the body to overcoming tribulation and ascending. Everything has a fixed price, payable in installments.
Lin Wan, whose "inferior spiritual root" has left him stuck at the third level of Qi Refining, scrapes by each month on a 1,200-spirit-coin subsistence allowance.
Then he takes an under-the-table job and, inside a decommissioned conversion tower, gets his hands on a "Heavenly Dao interface" left behind from the old era.
[Warning: You are accessing an unauthorized protocol.]
[Error code: 404_Heavenly Dao does not exist]
[Continue in "guest mode"?]
Lin Wan clicks "Yes."
And so...
The Heavenly Tribulation Bureau's lightning tribulation package comes up as "Second one half off" when he checks out;
The live rankings for the sect tournament suddenly show "Temp worker Lin Wan (probationary)" at the top;
The VIP cultivation manual in the Spirit Net Mall appears in his account as "Developer Preview, free forever."
By the time the "Heavenly Dao Incarnation," numbered 001, finally notices this data anomaly,
Lin Wan is crouched on his balcony, using the Heavenly Tribulation Bureau's public computing power to grow a tomato that can bear "administrator privileges."
"I was just fixing a bug," he tells the enforcer who has arrived. "Your system crashed on its own. What does that have to do with me?"
