One Chance a Year, I Live Forever in Fangshi

Lu Qinghe, a young man from the mountains, had a tough life. When he was sixteen, the entire village was attacked by a demonic fog, and only he and an ancestral gray-haired donkey survived. Also on that night, he awakened to a "Sui'an Book" that only turned pages at the end of the year: every year, he could gain steady growth, which could increase his bones, energy, blood, understanding, spiritual energy, and craft proficiency for himself or his spiritual donkey; every new year, he could preview future disasters and see in advance how he might die. But immortality is not invincible, a knife can cut him to death, poison can poison him, and a cultivator can kill him to ashes with a casual palm. Lu Qinghe figured it out: Immortality can be cultivated, but life must be preserved first. So he left the village with his gray donkey and went to the county town to learn blacksmithing, go to the medical clinic to learn about herbal medicine, set up a stall in the market, and worked as a handyman in the sect. He slowly built up his skills by repairing weapons, making talismans, raising animals, and refining elixirs. When others competed for the secret realm, he moved ahead of time; when others seized opportunities, he sold shovels, elixirs, and information; others thought he was just a timid little shopkeeper, but they didn't know that time had built up hundreds of layers of armor on him. It wasn't until the thousand-year catastrophe came that the giants of the immortal sect who had bullied him, chased him, and plotted against him in the past discovered that the honest man who led the donkey and opened the shop had become the behind-the-scenes immortal ancestor that no one dared to mess with.