A Record of a Mortal's Journey to Immortality: My Brother's Name Is Wang Teng

Liu Neng is a farmer's son from the mountains of southwestern Dayin. His parents gave him his name, and he has a four-element false spirit root, a talent so poor that, by the standards of the cultivation world, he's not even fit to lace someone's boots.

Beneath an abandoned alchemy room at the Iron Sword Sect, he digs up a dusty gray pottery basin. Plant a spirit herb, and one night makes it grow as much as a hundred days. Wash a discarded pill, and an inferior one becomes a good one. Spirit stones, magical artifacts, fragments of cultivation manuals: put anything inside, and it comes out transformed. The catch is that every use burns through the spirit stones he can barely afford.

He also has a fellow disciple named Wang Teng, who hit his head and woke up spouting bizarre sayings: “Secret realms always have a hidden trick,” “An elder who offers to pass on his power must have an ulterior motive.” Stranger still, he's right every time.

Wang Teng has a secret, too. The busted System in his head only wakes up every few months. When it does, it assigns him a mission, and the target is always Liu Neng.

One is so cautious he's practically stingy; the other is so reckless he's begging to get punched.

Many years later, the cultivation world is abuzz with talk of Daoist Wang Teng's unfathomable depth, while the fellow surnamed Liu by his side is said to be nothing more than his brother. After hearing this, Liu Neng silently slips the seventy-third bamboo sword he'd just finished refining back into his sleeve.