Jiang Fan, a programmer who died suddenly from working overtime, wakes up to find that he has transmigrated into the lowest-ranking medicinal garden laborer in the Qingshan Sect. With a Five-Element Spiritual Root, a talent universally regarded as worthless in the cultivation world, he has spent four years cultivating only to reach the second level of Qi Refining. Every day, he is either getting beaten up or on his way to getting beaten up.
But nobody knows that this despised laborer is using a programmer’s way of thinking to dissect the entire cultivation system.
He discovers that the five elements’ spiritual energies are not inherently at odds. Metal generates Water, Water generates Wood, Wood generates Fire, Fire generates Earth, and Earth generates Metal. Arrange them in the right order, and they trigger a “chain effect,” multiplying their power. A genius with a single spiritual root can control only one element for their entire life, but he has all five, letting him combine spells into chained attacks as if he were writing code.
Water generates Wood, Wood generates Fire: a three-element chain unleashes Nascent Soul-level damage.
Metal generates Water: a metal-infused water blade cuts through any opponent of the same rank.
All five elements unleashed, myriad phenomena chained together: the former failure becomes the founder of a whole new system.
But just as he reveals his talent at the sect’s junior tournament, a secret hidden for ten thousand years begins to surface: chain techniques were once a required course for every cultivator in ancient times. Ten thousand years ago, a “War of Severed Arts” wiped out the chain cultivators. Every chain cultivation manual was burned, and even the word “chain” became taboo.
His awakening has already drawn the attention of certain beings who have lain dormant for ten thousand years.
Su Wan, an inner-sect genius, finds him with an ancient fragment of a scroll in her hands. “Jiang Fan, do you even know what you’re holding?”
On the fifth floor of the Scripture Pavilion, the old man who tends the lamps opens eyes that have been closed for ten thousand years. “Five-element resonance… So this day has finally come…”
