Dear readers! Each volume has a new protagonist! He Qingzhu is the one and only main character throughout the entire book! The story will gradually unfold. As a new author, I’m not very good at pacing yet, so I used the first volume to establish the worldbuilding. The second volume is also relatively slow-paced, but I’m working hard to get the pacing under control TAT
A Mortal’s Journey to Immortality is a cultivation novel told in separate volumes, each with a different protagonist. Every volume focuses on one ordinary person’s fate and choices. There are no unshakable protagonist plot armor, only little people struggling and rising in a vast world.
The story first sets the board straight: the Three Realms have no hierarchy, and of the fifty paths of the Great Way, one slips away. That “one that slips away” takes form as an exceedingly lazy “Time Immortal,” who sleeps on a mountaintop for millions of years. When he wakes, he gives himself a name and begins watching the bustle of human life below.
The first volume’s protagonist is He Qingzhu himself, an idle, creation-level being who is so bored that he accepts the villagers’ offerings at the foot of the mountain and becomes the “Immortal Qingzhu.” The second volume shifts perspective to Chen Ping: a refugee boy with nothing to his name, who climbs the mountain late at night seeking not immortality, but wealth. The first lesson the immortal teaches him isn’t a cultivation technique, but “how to make money.”
Each volume brings a new person, a new perspective, and a new way of life. Some seek wealth, some power, some the Dao, and some simply don’t want to die. The paths of all these ordinary people converge under the same fundamental rule: the world has boundaries, cultivation has limits, but life itself has no bounds. With compelling worldbuilding, an expansive setting, and an ensemble cast, come along as we journey from the foot of the mountain to the world beyond the heavens.
