In Star Calendar Year 127, the eighth year of the war against the Zerg.
Jiang Mo, an external contract worker aboard a mining ship, spent two years saving work credits and took out an installment plan just to buy the cheapest E-grade full-dive headset. The intelligent voice assistant, Qian Duoduo, sweetly called him Master, until a mining accident. He crushed an ancient, broken formation, and a wisp of an immortal's soul entered the headset.
That night, when he returned to the ship, the AI had gone offline. The headset lit up by itself, and an unfamiliar voice asked, "Who is Qian Duoduo?"
Her name was Ye Xin'er, daughter of the Celestial Emperor of the Immortal Realm and a Golden Immortal. Sealed by a dimensional storm for a thousand years, her body had shattered, leaving only her spirit trapped inside this old machine. She could leave it for a distance of two meters, but her spiritual power was gone.
A miner still paying off his headset, and a fallen princess who refused to admit she had fallen.
She protected his path: she gave him his cultivation arts, spotted danger first, and stood watch over him on the night he formed his Golden Core. The immortals called this protecting one's Dao. She could see qi, but could not touch a single thing in this world, so he did the physical work for her.
He gave her spirit stones, and she gave him cultivation arts: nine levels of Qi Refining, nine levels of Foundation Establishment, and nine levels of Golden Core. No one in this era knew cultivation could be divided into levels, because the tradition had been lost for a thousand years. He climbed level by level, from the mining tunnels to the bridge, and from an external contractor to the Marshal's command.
And she returned inch by inch: borrowing qi, forming a body, revealing her true appearance, until one day she no longer needed the headset.
Zerg swarms, military overseers, the shadow of a mechanical empire, and the Immortal Realm beyond the boundary wall.
The lower dimension could not contain a Golden Immortal. He wanted to send her back, but she began to hesitate.
