Lu Ming felt as though he had been having an extremely long dream. In the dream, he was an overworked corporate drone, doing nothing every day but running around trying to entertain clients or endlessly revising project proposals, until he suddenly dropped dead at his workstation.
When he regained consciousness, he found that he had turned into a small blade of grass. A lonely patch of green grass growing on the sheer face of a cliff.
Along with his awakening came a cultivation technique called the *Mystic Heaven Spirit-Binding Manual*.
This technique was rather peculiar, focusing on absorbing the sun's radiance at dawn and bathing in the moonlight at night. By condensing one's spiritual power into an Immortal Seed, the practitioner could bestow a foundation for cultivation upon others.
Simply put, anyone who swallowed a grass seed condensed by him would obtain a foundation for cultivation. Just like cultivators possessing Spiritual Roots, they would be able to practice immortal arts and seek eternal life.
After gaining a deep understanding of this technique, Lu Ming was quickly shocked by both its miraculous nature and its eerie qualities.
For Lu Ming himself, this technique would not bring about any increase in spiritual power.
However, it contained various profound mysteries and could nurture two kinds of grass seeds.
The first was the seed of the Spiritual Root, which he called the Immortal Seed.
While this seed brought benefits to others, it could also enhance Lu Ming's own strength. Aside from receiving a feedback of about ten percent of the cultivator's progress whenever they broke through to a new realm, the techniques and skills they practiced would also be fed back to Lu Ming.
In addition, Lu Ming could attach his divine sense to the Immortal Seed of the seed-bearer at any time to observe and learn about the outside world.
He could also use the Immortal Seed at any moment to communicate with the seed-bearer without any restrictions.
Once the seed-bearer died, all the essence they had cultivated would return entirely to Lu Ming.
One Immortal Seed could be nurtured every year. It was about the size of a red cherry, completely ordinary and unremarkable.
The second kind was the Puppet Seed. It required a living person as a sacrifice, taking their blood, flesh, bones, and soul as a vessel to be condensed.
Swallowing this seed still offered many benefits such as replacing a Spiritual Root, but the person who received it would gradually lose their sense of self, eventually transforming completely into a clone of Lu Ming.
There was no limit to this seed, but it required the sacrificial offering to be as fresh as possible.
The Puppet Seed was green, brimming with vitality and harboring an inner spiritual glow, resembling a rare treasure of the immortals.
After two years of absorbing the sun and moon, Lu Ming had finally managed to condense two Immortal Seeds, but he was rooted in the mountain rock and unable to move.
Therefore, even though he had condensed the Immortal Seeds, he could not take the first step of cultivation.
"When will someone come to help me escape this sea of misery?"
Finishing his morning practice, the tender leaves on Lu Ming's body swayed gently in the sunlight.
During this time, he had gained a basic impression of the world from the immortals who occasionally flew past overhead on flying swords.
First of all, this was a world where one could cultivate immortality. From the fragments of conversation he had overheard over the past two years, the cliff where Lu Ming resided fell under the jurisdiction of a sect named the Hengyue Sword Sect.
Secondly, this Hengyue Sword Sect opened its gates every five years to accept disciples and absorb fresh blood.
Most of the outer disciples were ordinary people with poor Spiritual Root aptitudes or even no Spiritual Roots at all, who had been coaxed into coming here to be used as laborers.
Over the span of two years, because he was unable to move, Lu Ming had witnessed a portion of the sinister side of the cultivation world like a mere spectator.
The first time was one night half a year after he awoke, when a man and a woman in the Sword Sect held a tryst in the mountains and were exposed. The scheming couple then murdered an inner sect senior brother together and threw his corpse down the cliff.
The second time involved the same two people, except that what was once sweet affection had turned into mutual enmity, with both drawing their swords against each other. In the end, the woman won, and the man was thrown down the cliff.
The third time, an outer sect male disciple was bullied by his peers and ultimately jumped off the cliff in bitter resentment.
With his expanding horizons, Lu Ming's original rosy impression of the cultivation world vanished completely, replaced by a profound understanding of its treacherous reality.
Therefore, aside from his daily practice, he would never expose the grass seeds he had condensed, even though he was only a blade of grass and the fruit was entirely ordinary, leaking no spiritual energy whatsoever.
Yet he feared someone might pluck it away and turn it into experimental material for alchemy.
For the past two years, Lu Ming had been waiting for an opportunity.
He needed to find an investment target with decent intelligence who could take him away from the cliff and thereby kick-start his own journey of cultivation.
As the date for the Hengyue Sword Sect to open its gates and accept disciples drew closer, he felt that his opportunity might finally be coming.
That night had no moon.
Howling winds whistled through the sky, blowing Lu Ming's body until it swayed precariously. The humidity in the air was noticeably greater than usual, and thanks to his innate talent, Lu Ming knew that at most half an hour later, a heavy rain would strike the mountains.
Sure enough, muffled thunder rolled from the clouds, followed by a flash of lightning that cleaved the sky asunder, illuminating the night sky over the cliff as bright as day.
"Father, Mother, I've failed you. I've made it impossible for you to hold your heads high in front of the family."
On the cliff, a young man in coarse cloth garments looked down at the abyss below with tear-filled eyes, a hint of unease and resentment lingering in his voice.
His name was Wang Ran, a child from Wang Family Village within the sphere of influence governed by the Hengyue Sword Sect.
His father was a carpenter, an honest and dutiful man.
Wang Ran had been clever and sharp since childhood, earning praise from many people around him. Especially his fourth uncle, Wang Tianhai, who doted on him dearly.
To give Wang Ran a chance to enter the immortal sect, his fourth uncle not only gave up the opportunity meant for his own son, but also somehow managed to find a piece of iron crystal and hand it over to an outer sect deacon of the Hengyue Sword Sect.
That was how Wang Ran got the chance to participate in the sect trials; it was only a pity that Wang Ran's aptitude and physical stamina were too poor, failing even the most ordinary trial.
Meanwhile, his eldest uncle's son, Wang Zhuo, who had participated in the trials alongside him, was not only handsome and wealthy, but also possessed excellent aptitude, directly being accepted as an inner sect disciple.
Wang Ran had returned home in utter dejection. His face-saving father had assumed for certain that his son would be accepted into the immortal sect and had even prepared a banquet for the entire village. He never expected that his son would fail to be selected, leaving him unable to face the biting, gossipy remarks of his clansmen.
During the banquet, Wang Ran's father, Wang Tiezhu, got into a verbal altercation with someone and ended up getting injured in the ensuing scuffle.
Wang Ran, who had yet to witness the sinister nature of the mortal world, was heavily provoked. That very night, he quietly ran out, intending to find a place to end it all.
Watching all this unfold, Lu Ming couldn't help but feel a sense of inexplicable familiarity. Subconsciously, he glanced at a cave not far from the precipice, thinking to himself, "Could there actually be a glowing bead inside that cave?"
Immediately afterward, Wang Ran leaped forward, seemingly hurtling toward certain death.
Yet unexpectedly, fierce winds suddenly surged all around, violently blowing Wang Ran's body onto a ledge on the cliff face, after which Wang Ran lost consciousness.
"So it really is like this? The protagonist template of jumping off a cliff and refusing to die. I just wonder if this is Old Devil Wang, and whether I should meddle in this?"
With the current situation unclear, Lu Ming decided to wait and see. He was also curious to find out if there would be any fortuitous encounters inside this cave.
The next morning, Wang Ran woke up in the sunlight, the intense pain causing him to wince and bare his teeth.
He looked around, turning pale as he saw the bottomless abyss beneath his feet.
"I'm not dead."
He crawled into the cave, barely shielding himself from the howling wind. But this cave was utterly mundane, lacking even a scrap of food. If things went on as expected, he would eventually end up starving to death.
This stirred a sense of regret in his heart, and remembering that his father and mother were probably searching the world for him everywhere, he panicked and tried to scramble up, only to be overwhelmed by piercing pain, bursting into tears.
"He's still just a child, heh."
Lu Ming sighed inwardly, and a bold idea instantly sprouted in his mind.
He began to execute a minor spell from the *Mystic Heaven Spirit-Binding Manual*, the green leaves surrounding his body swaying rhythmically in the wind.
Accompanied by the swaying of the leaves, the gentle breeze seemed to carry special ripples, spreading outward toward Wang Ran in circles.
Immersed in sorrow and remorse, Wang Ran did not notice any anomalies. Under the influence of these peculiar ripples, his crying gradually subsided, and he finally fell fast asleep.
Wang Ran seemed to be having a strange dream. Before his eyes was a sea of stars, and beneath his feet was nothingness.
"Sob, sob, where am I?"
He murmured, looking around with a dazed expression.
"Child, why do you weep?"
The sudden voice startled him. When he looked up, he saw a handsome, extraordinary youth clad in dark cyan Taoist robes smiling gently at him.
"Ah, you—are you human or demon?"
He instinctively took a step back, but no solid ground met his feet.
"That's right, I must be close to death. This is a dream."
"Ah, neither dream nor reality. The place where you are is called the Mystic Heaven Star River, which is one of this deity's domains."
Lu Ming cupped one hand in greeting, smiled brightly, and continued.
"In that case, are you an immortal? A real immortal?"
Wang Ran looked up, gazing at Lu Ming in front of him dressed in dark cyan Taoist robes, his eyes filled with adoration.
Lu Ming smiled without a word, and just as he was about to speak, he saw Wang Ran actually drop to his knees on the spot, kowtowing loudly to him.
"I beg the immortal to show great mercy and take me as your disciple."
Lu Ming chuckled. "Child, meeting one another is a matter of fate. As for whether I will take you as a disciple, answer this deity's question first before we decide.
Why do you weep, and why do you wish to take a master and cultivate immortality?"