Venerable Earthworm of the Leyline: Proving the Dao from Rotten Soil

Deep in the rotting soil of a mass grave, the earthworm Jiu Jiu gnawed on fragments of dead souls and awakened. The moment it opened its eyes, it faced the cultivation world's most brutal prejudice: spiritual energy was supreme, appearance determined status, and insignificant spirits were no more than dirt beneath a cultivator's feet, ready to be crushed at a whim.

It had no divine beast bloodline, no innate spiritual roots, only the instincts of an earthworm: regrowing severed parts, burrowing and slipping through the soil, sensing the earth's pulse, and breaking down rotting, turbid matter. Trampled by starving cultivators, it was cut into three pieces and still wriggled on to survive. Hunted by rogue cultivators seeking its core, it escaped underground and laid a rotting-soil trap that sent its pursuers tumbling into a corpse pit. When it went to the underground market to make a living, its sensitivity to the earth's pulse let it uncover ore deposits, while its power to break things down unraveled the seals on magical treasures, face-slapping a host of self-proclaimed master artificers.

The crippled cultivator Liu the Lame risked his life to protect it, allowing it to glimpse the faint light of the Turbid Qi Path. In an ancient cave dwelling in a barren mountain's forbidden zone, the Myriad Transformations of Earth Art allowed it to command the earth's pulse, form armor from soil, and turn the land into a prison. The Qingfeng Sect regarded it as an aberration and surrounded it with the entire sect, hoping to seize its earth-element spiritual root and offer it to the demon realm. High-ranking demon clans mocked it as an insect and disdained associating with an insignificant spirit.

But Jiu Jiu was determined to defy heaven. It gathered ant spirits, mole-cricket monsters, and dung beetle demons under its banner and founded the Earth Path Alliance. It used the turbid qi of rotting soil to resist orthodox spiritual energy, and earth-vein formations to withstand the sects' iron cavalry. When the passage to the demon realm opened and the cultivation world teetered on the brink of destruction, who was it that stirred the earth-veins of ten thousand mountains, shattered its body into billions of clones, and sealed the demon realm's flood in the form of the Earthworm Sovereign?

Appearance is determined by fate, but the Daoist heart is a choice of one's own. Watch as an earthworm of the dark soil crawls out of the rot, smashes the iron rules of class, ascends to rule the earth's veins, and proves the Dao as an immortal born of humble origins!