Devouring Spirits to Ascend to Immortality

Guanchenzong waited for eighteen hundred years.

And got an inverse spirit root.

A person who didn’t even know what he was.

Six years ago, the spirit stone crumbled to dust in his hands. The people of Xuantian Sect called it a trash spirit root: it absorbed spiritual energy but couldn’t retain it, and cultivating the Dao would only destroy him. Kneeling beneath the ninety-nine steps, he swallowed the words “I’ll come back” until they were nothing but bitterness in his throat.

A little sect on the verge of falling apart took him in. A broken courtyard, walls that let in the wind, seven people crowding around one table for a meal. No one despised him. No one feared his spirit root. They called themselves Guanchenzong: observing the dust of the world, waiting for someone to return.

Later, that courtyard was gone. His master took a palm strike for him and vanished. His senior brothers and sisters were scattered, their whereabouts unknown.

Only later did he learn that his spirit root wasn’t defective.

Its name had been changed. Its origins had been erased. The people who sat at the very top ten thousand years ago didn’t want anyone to know it still existed.

But someone was waiting for him. Someone had taken a palm strike in his place. People were scattered across the land, and he didn’t know if they were still alive.

Shang Mo had to keep moving forward. Not for revenge, but to gather the scattered one by one, and to find out what had really happened back then.

Along the way, some people blocked his path, some avoided him, and some saw the old wounds hidden on him but didn’t ask.

Someone recognized him.

Someone was still waiting.