No romance, strong female lead cultivates immortality, ensemble cast growth, ordinary-person journey, underdog rise
The path to immortality has three thousand steps. Ask not about love, only about the heart.
Thirteen-year-old orphan Lin Shuang walked barefoot up the three thousand steps of the Heart-Questioning Cliff and became the third person in a century at the Xuantian Sect to manifest the Dao Heart. Yet with mediocre wood-and-metal dual spiritual roots, no connections, and no resources, she was tossed into the most dilapidated courtyard in the outer sect, the Ding Courtyard.
The outer sect was the cultivation world's most unforgiving battleground, where the strong preyed on the weak and ranks were rigidly enforced. There was Zhao Ming, the nephew-grandson of an inner sect elder, throwing his weight around to bully others; fellow disciples looking on coldly; and indifferent stewards. Three low-grade spirit stones and ten contribution points a month, plus a shabby hut with a leaking roof: that was all she had at the starting point of her cultivation journey.
But Lin Shuang had only a chipped short dagger and a Dao Heart that had grown from the dust and would never bow its head.
She went to the filthy beast pens to clean, took the hardest jobs in the herb fields, and risked her life fighting silver-thread fish at the bottom of a frigid pool. She struck back with rough-and-ready tricks taught by hunters, traded injuries for victories with her self-created Spirit Explosion Technique, and was knocked down by illusions a hundred times in the trial tower, only to get back up for the hundred and first.
She ruined three hundred talismans before finally making one successfully, and practiced her sword moves five thousand times before finally grasping the basics. She wanted neither the easy path of balancing the five elements nor the shortcut of choosing a single spiritual root. She was determined to use the clumsiest method and carve out a third path amid the clash between wood and metal.
The outer sect tournament was fast approaching, demonic forces were stirring, and her fellow disciples each had their own designs. At the second level of Qi Refining, she had to compete with geniuses at the seventh and eighth levels for one of ten spots. Everyone said she was crazy.
But Lin Shuang tightened her grip on her sword.
"I seek neither carefree immortality nor supremacy over all."
"I only want to prove that even an ordinary person's flesh and blood can..."
