The Calamity of Withering and Flourishing 1

Synopsis of The Withering and Flourishing Calamity 【The Story in One Sentence】 This is a world without inner energy, where the only way to practice martial arts is to become symbiotic with plants. The stronger a martial artist becomes, the shorter their life. The protagonist becomes symbiotic with a parasitic flower that lets him imitate any martial art, at the cost of devouring one human life every day. 【Full Synopsis】 Ordinary people cannot generate true qi on their own. In this world, martial artists must form symbiotic contracts with spiritual plants and cultivate by drawing on the energy of plants and trees. The higher their cultivation, the more deeply their lifelines are bound to their plants. If a plant withers, the martial artist becomes a “withered one,” forever unable to practice martial arts again. The imperial court and sects monopolize all the spiritual plants in the realm and collect a “blood tax” from the people every year, draining the symbiotic essence from low-ranking martial artists. Those who cannot pay are forcibly sent to relief camps, where they die in the muddy grounds of the spiritual plantations. Shen Ye grew up in Withered Town. For three years, he was symbiotic with a patch of wall moss as worthless as dust, yet the true qi he accumulated was not even enough for an ordinary person to take a single breath. Then, on the night the blood tax was collected, the moss withered. With nowhere else to turn, he pressed a seed left at his mother’s grave into his chest, and a purplish-red parasitic flower burst out of his body. The parasitic flower contains a hundred times more true qi than he does, and can imitate the martial arts of any spiritual plant he has encountered. The price is that he must devour fresh spiritual-plant essence every day, or the flower will begin consuming his flesh and lifespan. More deadly still, the flower’s previous host was his mother, who guarded a secret all her life. From the moss of Withered Town to the Plant Emperor’s tomb beneath the imperial capital; from the first ancient seed core to unlocking the genetic shackles on all the spiritual plants in the world, Shen Ye discovers that the ancient catastrophe that destroyed martial civilization was not…