Pattern Cultivator

On a snowy night in Qingshi Town, Yong'an City, Jiang Xun copied the first Dao Pattern of his life from a half-burned book. He had no idea what it was. It wasn't a spiritual root or a cultivation technique, nor was it any method of cultivation recorded in the scriptures of the immortal sects. He simply carved the pattern, shaped like a tree root or a blood vessel, into his dantian, stroke by stroke. Only later did he learn that it was called a “Dao Pattern.” The cultivation world regarded it as scrap left over from Foundation Establishment, an accessory to artifact crafting, or a stepping stone for formations. No one believed that an ordinary man without a spiritual root could enter the world of cultivation by copying Dao Patterns. Nor did anyone believe that a descendant of a clan trapped to death by the Tian Shu Hall's restrictions six hundred years ago could use this “trivial skill,” forgotten by the times, to bore through the shackles that had confined his mother for twenty-three years. This is a story about “the margins”: marginal techniques, marginal people, and a path of cultivation so far on the fringes that the entire cultivation world has abandoned it. Jiang Xun spends thirteen years picking up these fragments from the margins one by one, forging them into a tradition called the “Star Furnace.” He gives it a name: Pattern Cultivation. Not to found a sect or attain the Dao and ascend to immortality. He only wants those who come after him to know: The pattern you trample underfoot can be walked into a path.