[Mortal's Journey + No System] [A Comforting Read]
Xie Lingzhou, a thirty-five-year-old bookkeeper, is dismissed by his employer for being too old. Burdened by a five-hundred-tael mortgage, he jumps off Wangyou Cliff, only to land on top of two ancient monsters who are dueling.
It sounds like a joke. After you finish laughing, you realize it's all true.
At the bottom of the cliff, he learns to cultivate immortality. Not by flying on a sword, but by getting up every day at the hour of the Tiger to meditate for two hours. He learns to control fire, starting with “reducing the flame to a mere wisp,” and practices all afternoon. He watches spiderwebs and leaves, observing how the fine hairs on the undersides of sumac leaves bend in the wind and then spring upright again.
Cultivation is slow, almost indulgently so, but every step makes you believe that he really is cultivating.
Best of all is how human it feels. Driven by his mortgage to jump off a cliff, Xie Lingzhou gets so frightened by a beauty in an illusion formation that he turns and runs. Afterward, he squats by the river and frets: “I ran away. I didn't pass the test.”
The two old monsters are vividly drawn. The red-faced Daoist is tough on the outside but soft at heart, while the gray-robed elder is a man of few words.
The early pacing is slow, the exciting moments are few, and there's plenty of everyday life at the bottom of the abyss. But that's not a flaw; it's the backbone of this book. It simply lets you watch someone slowly climb out of the abyss, one step at a time. The process is slow and painful, but every bit of progress is real.
A very boring novel. Two old men were working desperately, and suddenly they collaborated to teach a suicidal man to cultivate immortality.