Spiritual qi suddenly revived, and the atmosphere changed dramatically. Plants died on a massive scale, followed soon by animals.
The world became a wasteland, except for the oceans, which were affected the least and underwent the smallest environmental changes. To make it easier to find food and survive, people had no choice but to consider migrating to the coast.
Chaos began to spread.
Spiritual qi revived on Earth, and the age of cultivation began.
When Shen Xian was six, she inherited keepsakes passed down through her maternal grandmother's family: an old-fashioned little pouch, an antique hairpin, several Taoist scriptures, and handwritten notes from several ancestors about strange and unusual events. She happened to have a knack for this sort of thing. Somehow, she could puzzle out the obscure writing in those scriptures, and the more she read, the more fascinated she became, until she was completely hooked. She devoted a huge part of her youth to studying those books.
She focused on the path of cultivation, determined from childhood to reach the legendary state of drawing qi into her body. Whenever she had time, she would sit in meditation and recite the incantations, but after twenty years, she still hadn't succeeded.
People around her laughed and called her a little nutcase who had gone off the deep end. Shen Xian also read fortunes and told people's faces for a living, so they muttered that she was a charlatan who used tricks to deceive people.
When spiritual qi revived, all kinds of extraordinary people began to appear.
Relying on those scriptures and the years she'd spent doggedly studying obscure, unorthodox practices, Shen Xian gathered her strength and, in a single night, succeeded in drawing qi into her body.
Feeling triumphant and refreshed, she was delighted to discover that the tiny, coin-sized pouch she'd always worn, one of her ancestral keepsakes, was actually a storage bag! And the hairpin she'd always used to tie up her hair, also inherited from her maternal grandmother's family, turned out to be a magical artifact.
Shen Xian let out a breath, suddenly feeling as if she'd struck it rich overnight.
Looking at her dying father lying in bed and her mother quietly shedding tears, Shen Xian thought her alcoholic dad might still be saved. Now that cultivation was real, surely miraculous elixirs couldn't be far off?
Theme: When weak, look after yourself; when strong, help the world
