Chapter 1 – Whence Come the Immortals

Great Xuan Kingdom, Xuanjing, the Grand Preceptor’s Manor.

Li Fan held his wine cup aloft, surveying the hall full of civil and military officials who had come to celebrate his birthday. Even at seventy years of age, he couldn’t help but feel a secret swell of pride.

After all, of all the lords and ministers in the imperial court, eight or nine out of ten were here in his manor today! What a show of influence!

When Li Fan had first transmigrated into this world, he had been nothing but a destitute scholar.

Over more than fifty years, he had risen from having nothing to his current position as Grand Preceptor, wielding power over all under heaven. The story of his journey could easily fill a novel of several million words.

With a life like this, what more could a man ask for!

Li Fan stroked his beard and drained the fine wine in his cup in one gulp.

“To the Grand Preceptor’s long life!”

The assembled officials raised their voices in unison.

Li Fan’s pride swelled even further.

But just then, a series of alarmed cries erupted from outside.

“Look! What is that!”

“Falling fire from the heavens—it’s an auspicious omen! A blessed sign! Quickly, inform the Grand Preceptor!”

“It seems to be flying straight toward our Grand Preceptor’s Manor!”

……

Hearing the commotion outside, Li Fan furrowed his brow.

The bustling great hall fell abruptly silent.

Li Fan rose to his feet and was the first to walk outside.

Yet before he could so much as reprimand his servants or voice his displeasure, the sight in the sky seized his attention.

Far on the horizon, two streaks of silver light, one chasing the other, hurtled toward them like meteors.

“That’s…” Li Fan stood frozen.

In the blink of an eye, the two meteors arrived above Xuanjing, then abruptly stopped.

At that same instant, a voice descended like thunder from the heavens, exploding in everyone’s ears.

“Daoxuanzi! Don’t push me too far!”

……

Everyone present was struck with bewildered terror. Several even dropped to their knees, crying out to the “Immortal Masters.”

And a word long buried in the depths of his memory, almost forgotten, suddenly leapt to the forefront of Li Fan’s mind.

“Cult… cultivators!” Li Fan stood dumbstruck, murmuring to himself, “How is this possible…”

The two cultivators in the sky clearly had no interest in the thoughts of the mortals below.

Another voice rang out: “Kou Hong! Did you think that by fleeing to this immortal-barren land, I would let you go? Hand over the cultivation method you obtained that day, or I will hunt you to the ends of the earth!”

“What a joke. It was precisely because I lacked a Core Formation technique that I was trapped at the Foundation Establishment stage for nearly a hundred years, watching my lifespan dwindle, on the verge of crumbling to dust. Now that I’ve obtained this Core Formation method, how could I possibly hand it over to someone else!” Kou Hong let out a cold snort, his voice dripping with contempt.

“Indeed!” Daoxuanzi heaved a long sigh. “The path to the Golden Core—there can only be one. Though Core Formation techniques are many in this world, the cultivators trapped at the Foundation Establishment stage are far more numerous!”

Daoxuanzi’s tone turned suddenly vicious: “That being the case, with the path to immortality right before me, how could I possibly let you go? How could I possibly not push you too far!”

Kou Hong laughed wildly: “Then let us settle this with a fight! How laughable that you and I were brothers for a hundred years, yet now draw blades against each other for a sliver of hope!”

Daoxuanzi answered only with a cold sneer.

But then Kou Hong spoke abruptly: “I know I’m no match for you, and today I likely cannot escape this calamity. But with so many mortals gathered below, I wonder—can you withstand the Mortal Taint at such concentration?”

Daoxuanzi’s expression changed instantly: “Kou Hong! What are you planning!”

Kou Hong broke into maniacal laughter: “Nothing more than grasping at a sliver of hope!”

Listening to the exchange between the two cultivators overhead, Li Fan felt a sudden sense of dread. But before he could react, a blast of crimson flame erupted above Xuanjing.

“BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM!”

Tremendous explosions hammered Li Fan’s ears without pause. His vision was instantly consumed by a wash of blood-red, and within moments, he lost consciousness.

……

He didn’t know how long it was before Li Fan came to.

At first, he was dazed. It took a long while before he recalled what had happened.

Li Fan coughed, spitting out several mouthfuls of blood. Trembling, he pushed himself to his feet and looked around.

It was still night. The once-lavish Grand Preceptor’s Manor had been reduced to a field of ruins.

The air reeked of charred flesh.

The full court of civil and military officials who had been here moments ago were all dead—not a single intact corpse among them, their souls departed for the next world.

And Li Fan’s wives and concubines, his five sons—none had been spared.

All expression drained from Li Fan’s aged face. His eyes went vacant.

He stood motionless for a long time before finally dragging his weakened body out of the Grand Preceptor’s Manor.

Xuanjing, which mere moments ago had been the picture of bustling prosperity, had become a hell of blood and fire. Everywhere he looked, there were nothing but broken bodies and collapsed buildings.

Of the citizens who survived this catastrophe, surely not one in a hundred remained.

All of this—every last bit of it—was because of two “Immortal Masters” who had descended from nowhere. Two cultivators.

Li Fan’s strength gave out, and he slumped against a crumbled wall.

His hearing had already been destroyed by the violent explosions. But that hardly mattered anymore.

At this moment, all he wanted to do was laugh.

How could there be cultivators in this world?

From the very day he had entered officialdom, he had wielded every ounce of his power to search for any trace of the immortal path.

After becoming Imperial Preceptor, standing above all others, he had scoured the entire realm! North to the Frozen Sea, south to the Great Ocean, east to the Ruins Abyss, west to the Linked Mountains.

In all of Great Xuan, there had not been the slightest trace of immortals!

Yet today—now that he was old and decrepit, years after he had given up all hope entirely—two cultivators had descended from the sky, appeared before him, and without so much as a word, ground everything he possessed to dust.

So this was what immortals were?

And whence did the immortals come?

All his rage and indignation dissolved at last into boundless bewilderment.

Heaven mocks the ambitions of men!

And yet, Li Fan also felt an immense sense of gratitude.

Gratitude that before his death, he had finally confirmed that immortals existed! Otherwise, when he began his next life, wouldn’t he have wasted another fifty years in vain?!

That’s right! He, Li Fan, a mere mortal—how could he have risen from a humble scholar to the Imperial Preceptor of all the realm without something to rely on? And this was also the reason he had survived the immortals’ devastation.

“Return to Truth!”

Li Fan called out silently in his mind. Instantly, the scenery around him dimmed, as though separated by a thick curtain of water—dreamlike and indistinct.

“When truth is taken for illusion, illusion becomes truth.”

Seven large characters blazed to life in the darkness, then burst apart, transforming into a shimmering screen of light.

“Charging complete.”

“Virtualize current scenario and return to initial anchor point?”

Two lines of small text appeared one after the other.

Simultaneously, image after image materialized, rapidly filling the entire screen of light.

They were the fifty years of Li Fan’s life in this world.

Li Fan gazed at himself in each scene, lost in a daze for a long while.

【Return to Truth】

This was the name Li Fan had given to the mysterious treasure he carried with him.

It possessed only a single function: to turn the real into illusion, to transform substance into void! To transform substance into void meant converting everything Li Fan had truly experienced into simulated, illusory experiences, returning Li Fan to his initially set anchor point—the moment he had first transmigrated into this world.

In truth, this was already Li Fan’s second life.

In his first life, though Li Fan harbored grand ambitions, he was ultimately just an ordinary man. He failed the imperial examinations time and again, and after turning thirty, finally abandoned the idea of seeking a career in government. He went into business on a small scale, became a modestly wealthy man, married, had children, and lived out an unremarkable life. It was only on his deathbed, old and ailing, that he finally awakened 【Return to Truth】.

And so began Li Fan’s meteoric rise in his second life.

It was just a pity that, as things stood now, he had applied it in the wrong direction.

After a moment of deliberation, Li Fan chose not to end this life immediately. There were still several things he needed to do first.

He closed the light screen, returned to reality, and mustered his remaining strength to manage the aftermath of Xuanjing’s devastation at the hands of the immortals.

After gathering some survivors, Li Fan drew on decades of accumulated prestige and managed to restore a measure of calm among the people.

Even though Li Fan could no longer hear, he could still find paper and brush. Communication was cumbersome, but it did not prevent his orders from being relayed one after another.

First, Li Fan ordered his trusted garrison camped outside the city to march into Xuanjing immediately and maintain order in the wake of the disaster. Then he dispatched orders to surrounding cities, summoning provisions and officials to Xuanjing.

Most of Xuanjing’s buildings had been destroyed in an instant. After the garrison took control of the city, Li Fan simply remained in the military camp to oversee the recovery effort.

As Li Fan’s directives flowed outward, supplies and capable personnel from surrounding cities poured steadily into Xuanjing.

A full month passed before the ruin-choked capital began to show the faintest signs of life again.

Only after the Great Xuan Kingdom had finally recovered from the blow dealt by the immortals did Li Fan begin ordering a nationwide search for intelligence regarding the two immortals who had appeared that night.

Where had they originally come from? Where had they gone afterward? Had they exchanged any other words along the way?

Regrettably, months of investigation yielded almost nothing—only that the two cultivators appeared to have come from the direction of the Ruins Abyss to the east. Everything else was a dead end.

The outcome Li Fan had hoped for—that the two immortals would destroy each other—had not come to pass.

“I shouldn’t have gotten my hopes up about something like that,” Li Fan sighed inwardly. “In that case, there is nothing left for me in this life.”

Standing in his newly rebuilt Grand Preceptor’s Manor, Li Fan activated 【Return to Truth】 once more.

“Virtualize current scenario and return to initial anchor point?”

Li Fan did not hesitate. He chose yes.

On the light screen, countless vivid images froze simultaneously. Then, all the stratagems and glory and riches of this lifetime shattered like a bubble in a dream, transforming into streaks of light that flew into Li Fan’s mind.

Scene after scene flashed before his eyes like a revolving lantern, until at last the image settled on the two cultivators hovering high above the Grand Preceptor’s Manor in their standoff.

“Daoxuanzi. Kou Hong.” Li Fan murmured their names softly. “In fifty years, I will be waiting for you here in Xuanjing.”

“Wealth and status are nothing but passing clouds to me.” Li Fan’s consciousness grew dim, but his will and purpose had never been more resolute.

“In my next life, I shall capture immortals!”

The light in his mind faded to nothing, and Li Fan slowly sank into slumber.