A Mortal's Ledger

Gu Ting was merely a low-level bookkeeper at the Wanbao Pavilion, with no spiritual roots and no connections. A seemingly routine spirit-stone payout led him to spot a pattern in the ledgers that should not have been there: the same businesses, the same times, queues growing longer and longer, and twenty crates of spirit stones inexplicably missing from the treasury. Others cultivated immortality with spiritual roots, techniques, and magical treasures. All Gu Ting could rely on was his knack for accounting: reviewing old ledgers, scrutinizing contracts, and finding loopholes. From a single erroneous entry, he could trace the interests and human motives hidden behind the rules. From the run on the Wanbao Pavilion to Heavenly Dao contracts, trade routes, mines, liquidation, and the rules of the Immortal Alliance, he climbed step by step from menial bookkeeper to the very heart of how the cultivation world truly operated. But as the number of accounts he investigated grew, Gu Ting discovered something even stranger: Whenever numbers, contracts, and spirit stones clicked into place in his hands, the dormant disturbance in his chest, silent for years, would stir again. Why could an ordinary man without spiritual roots see the deepest "ledger" of the cultivation world?