At Sixty, I Passed the Provincial Exam; Reading Helped Me Ascend to Immortality

[Poverty-Stricken Old Provincial Graduate + Cultivation Through Literature + Comedic Contrast + Ordinary-Man Protagonist] Chen Yanqiu, sixty-two years old, is the poorest provincial graduate in Qingyang County. He spent forty years chasing scholarly honors without passing the palace examination, and taught for forty years while his tuition fees dwindled year by year. He married a butcher’s daughter and gets chased around and beaten with a rolling pin every day. He thought his life would be just like this: poor, proud, and waiting to die. Until one day, a spirit-testing jade pendant crumbled to dust in his hand, and he finally realized: All the Confucian classics he’d read his whole life were damn cultivation manuals! “Confucius said” is a protective incantation, “zhi, hu, zhe, ye” is a sword art, righteous energy is his dantian, and once his literary palace opens, the tip of his brush becomes the tip of a sword! Martial cultivators fly on swords? With one stroke of his brush, the character for “Get lost” makes a Golden Core master cough up blood three zhang away! A demon king appears and massacres a city? The old man opens the Analects and recites, “A gentleman is open and at ease,” and ten thousand demons bow their heads, trembling in fear! The Li family of Liuyun kneels and begs to become his disciples: “Please accept us, Senior!” Chen Yanqiu: “What disciples? Copy The Doctrine of the Mean a hundred times first!” While the entire cultivation world is refining qi and establishing foundations, a poverty-stricken old provincial graduate uses the Four Books and Five Classics to forge a path to immortality through literature, lost for three thousand years.