Spiritual energy had been depleted for ten thousand years. Cultivation techniques were lost, alchemy recipes vanished, powerful cultivators fell, and the cultivation world retreated to the realm of mortals.
In the tenth year, spiritual energy inexplicably returned. Ancient ruins appeared one after another, and slumbering factions awakened in succession. Everyone said this was a once-in-ten-thousand-years age of great contention.
Everyone, that is, except Lin Qing.
A medicine boy in the alchemy room, he was born without a spiritual root. Even the spirit-testing stele couldn't be bothered to light up for him. He should have spent his whole life tending the pill furnace, resigned to his fate. Until one night, when he "saw" spiritual energy for the first time: the life force flowing through blades of grass, the broken channels in tattered scrolls, the fleeting flaws in the bodies of powerful cultivators, and even the mechanisms hidden deep underground in ancient ruins. Nothing could escape his sight.
He didn't want to fight for anything. He only wanted to stay alive and protect one person.
But he gradually discovered that this so-called return of spiritual energy was a game that had been in motion for ten thousand years. All living beings were pieces, and the revival was a harvest. Even his ability to "see" seemed like a piece someone had deliberately left off the board, missing by just enough to become the only one capable of overturning the game.
The ten-thousand-year game began to unravel the day the medicine boy opened his eyes.
