In the second year of Tianfu, near the end of the Tang dynasty, Lin Yuanshan was born in Medicine King Valley, at the southern foot of the Qinling Mountains. His father died in the chaos of war, and his mother passed away from illness in the mountains. He and his grandfather made a living gathering herbs, scraping by in the narrow gaps between blades during the turmoil of the Five Dynasties.
At sixteen, he was discovered to possess a spiritual root for cultivation, but it was a mixed root with all five elements weak, universally regarded by the cultivation world as worthless. When the Taixu Abbey on Mount Zhongnan recruited disciples, no one was willing to take him. Only an unkempt old Daoist who looked like a drunken beggar, Xuan Qingzi, made an exception and accepted him as a disciple.
From then on, the poor boy everyone mocked embarked on a cultivation path strewn with thorns. He fell from his cultivation realm five times and clawed his way back up each time. He used the medicinal knowledge his grandfather taught him to make up for his lack of talent, and carved out a bloody path through sheer stubborn refusal to give up. He traveled across the Qinling and Zhongnan Mountains, Mount Longhu and Wudang, and the Miao frontier and Kunlun, honing himself amid the fires of war and transforming through desperate battles for survival.
Yet fate never let him be. His grandfather exhausted himself saving him, his master was gravely injured protecting him, and his family plotted against him out of greed for his secret. Again and again he was cast into the depths, only to rise from despair each time.
The mixed spiritual root once scorned by all would eventually awaken as a Chaos Spiritual Root, one unseen in ten thousand years. When he finally became worthy of ascending to the immortal realm, he made a choice no one could have anticipated: he gave up his immortal cultivation and returned to the little mountain village deep in the Qinling Mountains, where he planted medicinal herbs and kept a lamp burning.
Because his grandfather had once told him: No matter how great your abilities, if you do not use them to bring blessings to the living, you have not found the true Way.
Where does the Way begin? It begins in the mortal world.
