Something’s Not Right About This Cultivation

Li Xuan is the most forgettable odd-job disciple in the outer sect of the Qingming Sect. He sweeps 362 stone steps every day, has his monthly stipend docked, and lets his senior disciples steal the spirit stones he hides away. He accepts it all. Until someone pushes him off a cliff behind the mountain, and he tumbles into a cave no one knows about, where he finds half of a tattered book with no cover. What the book says is the exact opposite of what the sect teaches. The sect says to still your mind; the book says to take a beating. The sect says ascension is the righteous path; the book says ascension means being refined into pills. The sect says the elders are compassionate; the book says the junior disciples who go "down the mountain on a training mission" every month are all recorded in a different ledger. He never wanted to defy fate. He just wanted to get back the three spirit stones stolen from him this month, eat a whole sack of coarse rice next month, and save enough money to leave the mountain and marry that girl with the slight limp. But the more he practiced according to the book, the stranger the looks people around him gave him. Elder Xuanku, who always smiled as he handed out his monthly stipend, had an abacus hidden up his sleeve.