Pay Up Before You Cultivate Immortality

The 86th year of the spiritual qi revival. Gou Fugui, son of Old Gou from the junkyard in the east of town, has been stuck at the third level of Qi Refining for three years. It's not because he lacks talent; he just can't afford to top up his account. Then he awakens his “Scavenger's Eye,” which lets him see the spiritual qi others throw away, discarded magical artifact parts, and spirit cuisine left behind by eliminated contestants. He thinks he'll finally escape poverty and get rich, but everything he picks up is cracked, leaky, or six months past its expiration date. Even more absurdly, he manages to make a name for himself by eating the trash. A poor student who has spent years eating scraps of spirit cuisine, “spirit dregs,” develops a “spirit-dregs physique” that makes him impervious to poison, pressure, and clashes of spiritual power. It's a talent born of poverty, one that even wealthy teams can't buy. So he puts together the poorest team in the city and enters the Spirit-Power Martial Arts League. His teammates: a gluttonous body cultivator who eats five meals a day, a craftswoman who's taken apart every magical artifact under the sun, a trash-talking top student who's invincible on paper but gets beaten up in real fights, and a mysterious master who's broke and full of unconventional tricks. Other teams crush their opponents with resources. They rely on salvaging scraps, eating garbage, and calculating tactics to take down one wealthy team after another. In the arena, poor people aren't supposed to win. But they insist on winning. And they're going to win it all, right up to the moment the person who sets the price of spiritual energy steps into the ring himself.