A Sesame Cake Shop: One Oven of Mortal Life, Cooking Immortals and Demons Across the Nine Provinces

In the autumn of the fifteenth year of Jinghe, in Pingyang Prefecture of the Long Kingdom, Lin Zhezhe, the youngest son of the down-and-out Lin family, sold steamed flatbreads in a street-corner market on the west side of town.

He was sixteen, with nothing to his name but a pair of hands for kneading dough and a mind that counted every copper coin. His father lay sick in bed, waiting for money for medicine. His younger brother needed tuition to study, and his older sister worked as a hired hand in someone else's home. The whole family was crammed into two old, leaky rooms, and even their last bowl of porridge was about to be taken from them.

Then, on a rainy night, he stuffed a blood-soaked man in black into the wooden box he used to carry his flatbreads, fooling the government runners who were hunting him.

The man in black was Luo Lie, the greatest cultivator in three thousand years, the only one in the cultivation world to break through the Divine Transformation Realm. Down on his luck, gravely wounded and on the verge of death, he was taken home by a boy who sold steamed flatbreads.