I Borrow Tomorrow to Cultivate Today

The first time Shen Yan saw the future, a dying man recognized him. “You’re back?” But Shen Yan didn’t know him at all. When he opened his eyes again, he was still an unremarkable outer sect disciple of the Qinglan Sect. With water, wood, and earth spiritual roots, he cultivated more slowly than everyone else and never had enough spirit stones. That half-page of torn paper still lay on his desk, bearing just five words: Here and now, borrow from the days to come. After that, some things began to feel strange. When practicing swordplay, he would sometimes sense that something was wrong before he even struck. When circulating spiritual energy, he would instinctively switch to a method he had never learned. Later, when he studied formations, even parts he couldn’t understand would somehow feel off. It was as if the version of himself from many years in the future had left in his body the motions he had repeated countless times. But those experiences couldn’t always be copied outright. Some were useful now; others would cause problems if he followed them. Shen Yan could only learn, experiment, and figure out why his future self had done things that way, and why, in the present, he might not need to do the same. Then he saw the future for the second time. The peaks of Qinglan collapsed. The sect’s gates were destroyed. That future version of Shen Yan had survived, and had already come a long way. But if he knew more, had cultivated to a higher level, and had experienced more, why had Qinglan still fallen? Shen Yan didn’t know. He only knew that he could borrow from the future, but he couldn’t live by it. And as he gradually left Qinglan and entered a vast world of cultivation, what he would eventually need to understand went far beyond his future self.