Programmer Lin Bei died suddenly at his desk and woke up as a servant at Qingyuan Temple, chopping wood and hauling water.
At the first level of Qi Refining, with a mixed Five Elements spiritual root, he was the person in the entire temple least worth remembering.
The examination order from Xuanyang Sword Sect arrived. Not one disciple Qingyuan Temple had sent there in the past three years had returned alive. The temple master handed Lin Bei the letter with a smile and said, "This is your chance."
But Lin Bei had eyes no one else did. Data floated in the cross-sections of firewood. The back of the letter concealed a secret order: "Investigate immediately." Beneath every kindly face lay a line of text no one was supposed to see.
He was supposed to die in this examination.
Instead, he picked up the nine bone seals one by one, retraced a road that had been severed for three hundred years, and uncovered the biggest lie in the cultivation world:
At the end of the road lay nine deaths. Someone had survived the first eight to tell the tale. No one had survived the ninth.
In this life, he wasn't seeking immortality. He only wanted to walk the road to its end, then return and tell everyone what lay there.
Some wanted him to see it. Others wanted him to keep his mouth shut forever.
Lin Bei's "modifications" weren't all-powerful, either. The more he read, the more it felt as if he were completing a record left unfinished by some earlier failure.
Then, deep in the code beneath the back mountain of Qingyuan Temple, Lin Bei read a name that should not have existed.
He hadn't written it.
And it didn't belong to this world.
He had to find out: was the transmigration he believed in truly a beginning, or the end of some old affair?
