Xu Changge botched his tribulation.
Not a minor screwup: his golden core shattered to dust, his nascent soul dispersed completely, and two thousand years of cultivation vanished overnight. He fell straight from the Ninth Heaven into a pile of trash in an urban village. When he got up and tried to cast a fireball to warm his hands, he couldn't even spark a flame at his fingertips.
No phone, no money, and no idea how to use QR codes. He fell off an electric scooter three times before a food delivery girl found him and took him home to wash dishes in exchange for a meal.
He thought that was rock bottom.
Later, while helping out at a barbecue stall, he casually infused a little Samadhi True Fire into the grill. The skewers he cooked drew a line of customers all the way down the street. Old Zhao nearly fell to his knees and begged him to become his master. When making deliveries, Xu Changge used his spiritual sense to scan the addresses, beating the navigation app by ten minutes. Customers who ate his cooking kept saying they had no idea why, but they felt especially energetic that day. One day, as he squatted in the back kitchen washing dishes, he suddenly realized that the bustle of mortal life was more potent than the spiritual energy he'd absorbed during a hundred years of meditation at the Taixu Sect.
Peace didn't last long. Someone was causing trouble underground, the ground split open in the urban village in the middle of the night, and a junior fellow disciple he hadn't seen in eight hundred years had become barely human. Worse, he'd set his sights on the girl who called Xu Changge an idiot every day and always slipped an extra egg into his bowl.
For the first time in his life, Xu Changge felt there was something more important than cultivation.
“Touch her, and see what happens.”
Even though he was only at the Qi Refining stage.
So what if he was only at the Qi Refining stage? He could still fight.
