When he was six, a strange plague swept through the protagonist’s hometown, and no one in the town escaped it. As he lay dying, a passing immortal saved him, gave him the name Lin Wuyang, and set him on the path to immortality. When he was seventeen, his immortal master mysteriously disappeared, leaving behind only a note promising, “We’ll meet again on the day you become an immortal.”
Lin Wuyang descended the mountain to gain experience and joined the Yunmiao Immortal Sect. He made close friends and met the one fate had chosen for him, Li Ce’an. Yet the seemingly smooth road to immortality led not to a celestial paradise, but to a bloody battle against an ancient demon god breaking free from its seal. To suppress the evil, he spent his entire lifespan, tearfully said goodbye to his beloved, and promised to return.
When he awoke, he was in a hospital in the modern world. He discovered that he had been in a vegetative state, and that a thousand years of cultivation had been a vivid dream during his coma. But the cultivation techniques he retained convinced him it had not all been an illusion. With nothing left to tie him to the modern world, he resolutely activated a formation and returned to the cultivation world, where a century had passed.
He returned and reunited with the lover and companions who had waited for him for a hundred years. Together, they fought the demon god again, and at last he entered the immortal realm. But the ultimate truth awaiting him was chilling: his former master, the “immortal,” was none other than himself, Lin Man, from another timeline of despair. To create the only chance of survival for himself and his beloved, Lin Man had orchestrated everything, including the plague at the beginning and his eventual return. As he faces “another self” who intends to take his life, a brutal battle over identity and existence quietly begins. When he “wins” and merges with the other, no one can answer one sorrowful question: Who, exactly, is the one who ascends to immortality now?
