A New Life for an Ordinary Person

When Liu Xiyu was one year old, his mother left for a big city because she couldn’t stand their poverty, and never came back. When he was eight, his father brought home a stepmother, and his affection for Liu Xiyu gradually waned. The ones who truly raised him were his elderly grandparents. His grandmother dragged herself up five flights of stairs despite her illness, while his grandfather bent his back hauling cement at construction sites. He vowed to protect the only two people in the world who treasured him. At sixteen, eager to start earning money for his family as soon as possible, he gave up on regular high school and enrolled in a five-year technical program to study electromechanical repair. At nineteen, unwilling to stop there, he gave it everything he had and earned a place at a full-time junior college, where he studied mechatronics. His life plan was clear and practical: start out as a repairman, save up to start a business, and use his own hands to get his grandmother a home with an elevator. Then, one ordinary night when he was twenty-three, he witnessed something on the street that shattered everything he thought he knew: a man in white drew golden energy out of someone’s body, then casually sliced through a concrete utility pole with a single palm strike. Everyone around him acted as if they hadn’t seen a thing. He searched frantically, only to discover that the internet had no information about cultivators. Such content was either dismissed as fiction or quietly erased. A terrifying truth emerged: cultivators existed in this world, and ordinary people’s knowledge of them had always been deliberately suppressed. Liu Xiyu’s life took a different course from that moment on. He would have to face not only the grueling struggle to survive at the bottom of the city, but also enter a mysterious world that had been hidden for a thousand years. And what would always keep him going was the vow he had made at nine years old He would grow strong, strong enough to protect everything he cherished.