In the cultivation world, there are no immortals, only man-eating gluttons and potent medicines awaiting slaughter.
After three years as a menial servant, Li Changsheng discovers on the day of the great sacrifice that he is nothing but a crop raised by his master. In desperation, he detonates the formation, snatches a fragment of the Dao Fruit, and plunges into the Myriad Corpse Cliff.
On the brink of death, the future version of himself, seated at the downstream end of the river of time, delivers a chilling oracle:
[Want to live? Then die first.]
He draws upon Yin earth fiends to rebuild his severed meridians, then plants corpse-eating fungi to replace his flesh and blood.
Severing his final shred of humanity, he refines himself into a poisonous tree sprouting from a pit of corpses.
From that day on, Yunzhou loses an honest, simple-minded servant and gains a reclusive old fiend of the deathly path, cloaked in a frail body and steeped in frigid poison.
"You cultivate immortality; I cultivate the path of death. The countless gods and Buddhas filling the skies of this cultivation world will one day become the nourishment that lets me take root."
