Cultivating Immortality on a Raft

On the evening the apocalypse arrived, the giant white jade statue of Ye Kong, Han's guardian deity, suddenly turned around and cast its first beam of light upon the city it had protected for three hundred years. A tsunami swallowed the city, and with it, an entire era. College student Cao Hang floated on the boundless sea with three swim rings around him. Wooden doors, suitcases, books, and corpses whose eyes would never open again drifted past.

Other people cultivated because the heavens bestowed divine treasures and the earth granted blessed lands. He cultivated by first learning how not to drown. He learned to tie knots, catch fish, distill fresh water, and recognize which clouds hid storms. He learned the basics of the Spirit Energy Nurturing Method and how to breathe and circulate energy; he learned a crude merfolk technique for holding his breath, and how to last a full minute underwater. Later, he learned to tread the waves, move through water, and command the currents. He learned to turn a little wooden raft into a floating village, then an island, then a sect, and finally an empire.

No System. No old master. No born divine physique. Only a pair of hands, an endless sea, and a breath that refused to sink.

"The gods may abandon us, but we have to survive."