Eternal Immortality

He lived for thirty-seven thousand years, yet returned still a youth. In Qingshi Town of the Great Qian dynasty, eighteen-year-old Lu Changsheng sets up a fortune-telling stall on a street corner. When his three-year-old son asks, “Why do people die?” he replies, “If you don’t want to die, you have to cultivate the Dao and practice qi. From then on, you can’t eat.” Then he goes into seclusion on Mount Tian, promising to be gone for fifty years. He is away for thirty-seven thousand years. When he returns, his wife’s grave has been cold for thirty thousand years. His son, Lu Qingyan, waited for his father for thirty thousand years, his black hair turning white and his beard going gray. Stuck at the bottleneck of the middle Golden Core stage, he is nearly spent, held upright only by sheer determination, like a stone statue. The Xuanqing Sect, founded by his grandchildren, has been forced by neighboring powers to flee into a rift in the void, barely surviving thanks to the Chenyu World-Shielding Grand Formation. The entire cultivation world practices “fasting and quiet cultivation,” shunning grains and worldly comforts and treating eating as a vulgar habit. Lu Changsheng says, “What nonsense.” He draws on the worldly warmth and vitality he has accumulated over thirty-seven thousand years. With a black iron pot, he stews spiritual porridge; one spoonful makes a Foundation Establishment disciple break through on the spot. He pours a bowl of hot porridge over the formation’s core, and the grand formation, drained for thirty thousand years, starts running again. Someone asks him what cultivation level he has reached. He says, “Beyond the Tribulation Transcendence stage.” Someone challenges him to an alchemy contest. He sets up his iron pot. “You make pills. What I make is food.” Someone mocks him for not fasting. He turns and looks at his wife in her ice coffin, his son with his gray beard, and his descendants filling the hall, all of them going hungry “Starting today, the first rule of the Xuanqing Sect: no fasting. Everyone eats on time, every meal.” This isn’t a tale of immortal heroes. It’s a homecoming. Thirty-seven thousand years, nine mouths, one pot. The Lu family’s old patriarch is back, and he’s bringing the whole family together to eat.