The Immortal Path Is a Scam

Su Jianwei thinks she's the most honest, generous, and harmless person in the world.

She doesn't understand why everyone in Qingya City calls her “Su the Skinflint.”

All she wants is to save up twenty taels of silver. To that end, she collects charcoal ash, gathers medicinal dregs, takes the blame for others, and keeps watch for them. She stretches every copper coin until it splits in two, and even saves the meat pie her second uncle gives her to eat over two meals. Then, on a rainy night when she was seventeen, she crouched beneath the back window of the study and heard her second uncle sigh: “I've raised her for seventeen years. It would be a lie to say I don't feel a thing.”

Only then did she learn that the Nourishing Glory Art she'd practiced for ten years was a technique for cultivating medicinal humans. Every bite of meat she'd eaten in those seventeen years had been added to the ledger. On her birthday next year, they would open the furnace and draw her blood.

So Su Jianwei made a decision: if you're going to treat me like merchandise, don't blame me when I grow legs and run.

She laced her second uncle's birthday banquet with croton seeds, made off with eight hundred taels from the storeroom, stole the ancestral blood-jade coral, and fled in the dead of night.

The man who climbed out of the river wore white from head to toe, his eyes as cold as the depths of winter. The first thing he said was:

“You owe me a life. I've done the math: principal and interest come to eighty million taels.”

“Also, throw away the salted duck in your arms. I can't stand the smell.”

One wants to run, the other wants to collect a debt. One is so miserly she'd clutch her moneybag even in death; the other is so fastidious that even three hundred years at the bottom of a river isn't clean enough for him. Together, they go from conning people at Luomatan to working the markets of the Three Realms, rising from lowly medicinal servants to leaders of a merchant clan. Trailing behind them are He Xiaoshou, who can never get enough to eat; a muscular hulk called “Huajiaojiao”; and a fat goose that bites everything in sight.

Su Jianwei feels deeply wronged: “I'm the most reasonable person there is.”

The road to immortality is full of scams. The real scam is this world.