Shen Changjun, the founding patriarch of the Taixu Sect, was born with an extraordinary spiritual root. The sect discovered him as a child and took him in. After nine thousand years of arduous cultivation, he was pushed all the way into the patriarch’s seat. He had only ever done one thing in his life: cultivate. The sect master and elders handled sect affairs, while his disciples were sent to him by the sect. Once he had taught them, he left them to practice on their own and never asked how they were doing.
One day, he failed his tribulation and died on the Heaven-Questioning Platform.
When he opened his eyes again, he had become Shen Ye, a rogue cultivator and a young man with a four-element, mixed spiritual root in Qinggou Town. He was at the second level of Qi Refining. His father was an honest man who had spent twenty years drawing talismans and still fretted over five spirit stones. Next door lived a stout alchemist who had spent half his life blowing up pill furnaces, and the old talisman master who sold his wares at the town entrance had a scar on his wrist that had not healed in thirty years.
In his previous life, he had followed one straight path for nine thousand years, never lowering his head to look at the road beneath his feet. Now he stood in the mud, unable even to enter the gates of the Taixu Sect. He held the jade slip he had personally sealed away in his previous life, listening as the obsession trapped within it for who knew how many years whispered to him. The sword cries of the seventy-two peaks still echoed in his ears, but first he had to learn to recognize who he was.
