Stealing the Dao Through the Ages

Lu Zhao had been stuck at the first layer of Qi Refining for ten whole years.

His father died in Blackwind Gorge, his body never found. His mother clung to life on one Warmth-Nourishing Pill a month, until even that medicine was withheld and she was driven into a woodshed with a leaking roof. One rainy morning when he was sixteen, Shen Qingyi, a true disciple of the Cloudmist Sect, came to break off their engagement. She burned the marriage contract and smashed the jade hairpin his father had left him. His cousin Lu Yuan broke three of his ribs with a single palm strike, and the family dumped him among the corpses in the back hills to die.

It was there that he heard a voice:

[Detected: unclaimed Dao resonance, a wisp of residual sword intent. Steal it, or not?]

From that day on, the people of Qingyang City noticed something strange: the waste spiritual root once sentenced to remain at the third layer of Qi Refining for life had begun climbing a layer a day.

No one knew what he was stealing.

The cultivation world casually threw away dregs from useless pills, lingering force in broken swords, Dao resonance spilling from prodigies as they broke through, and residual echoes of divine abilities left behind when the powerful died. In everyone else's eyes, they were garbage, waste energy, and ill fortune.

In his eyes, they were food.

He stole sword intent, then true essence, and later, other people's lives.

In the end, he stood before the nine great sacred grounds, denounced to his face as a