Lin Yuan spent 800 yuan on a bronze cauldron.
Inside it was an entire destroyed world of immortal cultivation, and he was the only one who could open it.
The bad news: he had late-stage lung adenocarcinoma, and the doctor said he had only six months to live.
The good news: immortal cultivation could save his life.
He sent his divine sense into the cauldron and walked into the ruins.
Spirit herbs still grew in the medicinal fields. Cultivation manuals could still be practiced in the library, and ancient puppets lay sealed in the training rooms.
A breathing technique from the Scripture of Mystic Heaven Qi Guidance gave his cancer-ravaged lungs a cool sensation for the first time.
His cough eased, the pain lessened, and he had a chance to live.
But one man couldn't handle an entire world.
He couldn't make sense of the pill recipes or identify the spirit herbs. The training rooms were sealed, puppets guarded the core vault, and he could only recognize half the ancient characters on the jade slips.
Even more terrifying, a warning from tens of thousands of years ago lay within the cauldron:
"The outer demons have come. The sect master seals the cauldron."
This wasn't a treasure. It was a final message.
Lin Yuan made a decision:
He would hand the cauldron over to the state.
While other countries fought tooth and nail over a drop of oil or a single chip, Great Xia had already lit entire cities with spirit stones and rewritten medical history with pill recipes.
And Lin Yuan gradually discovered that the teleportation array inside the cauldron was more than a passageway.
It was also a door.
On the other side of that door, the outer demons had never left.
As eyes opened once more in the depths of the starry sky,
as the fates of two worlds were linked by a single key,
as the forces that had once sought to contain Great Xia began to tremble,
this time, Lin Yuan would no longer stand alone.
An entire nation stood behind him.
