A Mortal's Path to Immortality

In a remote village nestled among towering mountains, another child was born to a poor farming family, making life even harder for a household that already struggled to put food on the table. His older siblings climbed the hills each day to gather firewood, while his parents rose at dawn to work the fields. Yet even after paying their exorbitant taxes, the family's grain jar remained empty.

On the day the boy turned one month old, his honest, simple father specially brought half a basket of mountain produce to the village school, where he begged the gray-haired old scholar, learned in the classics, to give the child a name. Stroking his beard in thought, the scholar swept his brush across the paper and wrote three characters: Li Bufan. They embodied the most heartfelt hopes of his poor parents, and were the most precious gift a farming family could give a child.

Yet as the years passed, the child who had been entrusted with such great hopes showed no signs of being extraordinary. By the age when boys tied up their hair, he was still climbing cliffs and gathering herbs alongside his older siblings, no different from the other village youths. The villagers had long grown used to this sight. After all, generations had lived tucked away in these barren mountains, and tales of anyone making it out had faded into something as distant as a dream from another life.

A blue-green jade gourd he happened upon by chance completely changed the course of the young farmer's life. With the innate caution of his nature, he advanced one careful step at a time through the perilous world of cultivation. With tireless diligence and unyielding resolve, he brought the treasure's potential to the fullest. Every trial between life and death became a chance for him to transform, and every momentous encounter became a stairway to the heavens.

A thousand years passed in the blink of an eye. When the youth from the mountains shattered the void, the immortals beyond the Ninth Heaven were only then startled to realize that the ordinary iron blade concealed in a battered scabbard had long since been tempered by the passage of time into an unparalleled divine weapon. From an insignificant insect to a true dragon, this legend, which all beings regarded as a myth, proved the truth of an ancient saying: the Great Way is simple, and only the steadfast can attain it.