## Chapter 1: The Azure Primordial Tree and the Path of Endless Spring
Pain. It was a sharp, splitting agony that felt as though a rusted cleaver was rhythmically hacking into the very center of his skull.
Li Han gasped, his eyes snapping open. He expected to see the familiar, water-stained ceiling of his cramped apartment in the city, the blinking LED of his cheap alarm clock, and the dull gray light of early morning pollution filtering through the blinds. Instead, his vision swam with unfamiliar shapes: heavy wooden beams black with age, a tattered mosquito net swaying gently in a non-existent breeze, and the faint, flickering amber glow of a dying oil lamp.
He tried to sit up, but a wave of nausea forced him back down onto the hard, uncompromising wooden bed. His limbs felt incredibly heavy, and a deep, throbbing ache pulsed in his chest, as if he had been struck by a speeding truck.
*Where am I?* he thought, panic beginning to claw at the edges of his mind. *Did I get hit crossing the street? Is this a hospital?*
But the scent in the air was wrong. There was no sterile smell of bleach and rubbing alcohol. Instead, the air was thick with the scent of moldering earth, bitter medicinal herbs, and a faint, ozone-like crispness that he couldn't quite identify.
Before he could process his surroundings further, a secondary wave of pain hit him—this time, not physical, but mental. It was an avalanche of memories, a torrent of foreign images, emotions, and knowledge forcing its way into his consciousness. Li Han clenched his jaw, swallowing a scream as two entirely different lifetimes violently stitched themselves together in his mind.
He saw steel skyscrapers, glowing computer screens, and the mundane life of an ordinary office worker on Earth.
Then, he saw towering mountains piercing the clouds, men soaring on flying swords, beasts breathing fire, and a world governed by the ruthless, uncompromising laws of cultivation.
He was Li Han. But he was also Li Han, a sixteen-year-old outer disciple of the Qingling Mountain Li Clan.
When the pain finally subsided to a dull, manageable throb, Li Han lay perfectly still, staring blankly at the wooden canopy above him. The merging of souls was complete. He had transmigrated.
"Qingling Mountain Li Clan..." Li Han muttered, his voice raspy and unfamiliar. It sounded younger, weaker.
The Li Clan was a minor, struggling Foundation Building cultivation family situated on the outskirts of the sprawling Yunzhou region. Their greatest asset was a low-grade Tier-2 spirit vein that ran beneath Qingling Mountain, which barely provided enough spiritual energy to sustain the clan's patriarch—their sole Foundation Building cultivator—and the upper echelons of the family.
As for the predecessor whose body he now occupied? He was the absolute bottom of the barrel.
The previous Li Han possessed a Five-Element Pseudo Spiritual Root. In the brutal world of immortal cultivation, having spiritual roots of all five elements—metal, wood, water, fire, and earth—meant that one's affinity for spiritual energy was disastrously scattered. Gathering the Qi of heaven and earth was like trying to fill a bucket full of holes.
Despite practicing diligently since the age of six, the original owner had only reached the pitiful Second Level of Qi Condensation by his sixteenth birthday. In the Li Clan, anyone who hadn't reached the Fourth Level of Qi Condensation by age sixteen was essentially abandoned, relegated to tending spirit fields, managing mortal businesses, or serving as cannon fodder.
The original owner had died just an hour ago. Desperate to break through to the Third Level before the clan's annual assessment, he had ventured into the dangerous outer rim of the Bloodwood Forest to harvest a low-grade spirit herb. He had succeeded, but had been ambushed by a lowly Tier-1 Demonic Wind Wolf. Although he managed to escape, his internal organs had been heavily damaged by the beast's wind blades. He dragged himself back to his isolated, dilapidated courtyard and swallowed the raw, unrefined herb in a last-ditch effort to heal and break through simultaneously.
Instead, the violent, unrefined medicinal energy clashed with his injuries, shattering his fragile meridians and extinguishing his soul.
"A textbook tragedy of the weak," Li Han whispered, his Earth-born pragmatism instantly analyzing the situation. He felt no particular sorrow for the predecessor; in a way, they were now one and the same. But the situation he had inherited was dire.
His body was a wreck. His meridians were torn, his Dantian—the spiritual center beneath his navel—was dry and cracked, and his life force was rapidly fading. At this rate, the transmigrator would die less than an hour after arriving.
*Is this a joke?* Li Han thought, a cold, ruthless glint flashing in his eyes. *I finally escape the rat race, only to die in a moldy hut?*
Just as despair threatened to set in, a sudden, blinding emerald light erupted from the deepest recesses of his mind.
Li Han gasped as his consciousness was forcibly pulled inward, plunging into the mysterious void of his Sea of Consciousness. Normally, for a low-level Qi Condensation cultivator, the Sea of Consciousness was an empty, dark, and impenetrable fog. But now, it was illuminated by a radiant, magnificent presence.
Floating in the center of his mind was a tree.
It was neither overly large nor impossibly ancient in appearance, but it exuded an aura of profound, primordial antiquity. Its bark was the color of deep jade, swirling with natural, profound Dao patterns that seemed to contain the secrets of life itself. Its leaves were a vibrant, crystalline green, glowing with an inner light, and its roots extended deep into the dark void of his mind, anchoring itself to his very soul.
As Li Han gazed at the tree in awe, a stream of information flowed directly into his understanding.
*The Azure Primordial Evergreen Tree.*
It was a divine object, an anomaly born from the origin of chaos, and it had somehow latched onto his soul during his transmigration. It had become his Golden Finger.
Suddenly, the tree pulsed. A single, shimmering drop of emerald dew formed on the tip of one of its leaves. The drop fell, splashing into the dark void of his Sea of Consciousness.
Instantly, an overwhelming tide of pure, unadulterated vitality flooded out of his mind and washed over his physical body.
Li Han's eyes flew open in the real world as he let out a sharp, involuntary breath. The sensation was indescribable. It was as if a cool, soothing spring had suddenly erupted within his chest. The agonizing pain of his torn meridians vanished in the blink of an eye. He could physically feel the shattered pathways within his body rapidly knitting themselves back together, becoming thicker, wider, and more resilient than before.
The damage to his internal organs from the demonic wolf's wind blades dissolved. The stagnant, clogged blood in his veins was purged, replaced by vibrant, energetic lifeblood.
Within ten breaths, Li Han was completely healed. Not only was he healed, but he felt a vigor and strength he had never experienced in his previous life on Earth, let alone the meager existence of the predecessor.
"This... this healing speed is terrifying," Li Han muttered, sitting up and examining his hands. The calluses from years of hard labor remained, but his skin had a healthy, jade-like luster beneath the grime.
He closed his eyes and focused on the information the Azure Primordial Evergreen Tree had imparted to him. The healing was merely a secondary function. The true, terrifying power of the tree lay in its two primary abilities.
First: **Eternal Youth.**
The tree was deeply rooted in his soul. As long as the tree lived, Li Han's lifespan was effectively infinite. He would not age past his physical prime. His cells would not degrade. The greatest enemy of all cultivators—the relentless march of time and the looming threat of sitting in meditation until one's lifespan expired—meant absolutely nothing to him.
In the cultivation world, prodigies rushed to build their foundations before the age of sixty, because after sixty, the body's vitality began to decline, making breakthroughs nearly impossible. High-level cultivators waged wars, slaughtered millions, and destroyed entire continents just to fight for life-extending pills that might grant them an extra hundred years.
Li Han now possessed endless time.
"Immortality..." Li Han breathed, his heart pounding against his ribs. He immediately recognized the sheer, unadulterated terror of this gift. If a single soul in this ruthless world discovered that a sixteen-year-old trash cultivator possessed infinite lifespan and a divine tree in his soul, he wouldn't just be killed. He would be captured, his soul subjected to soul-searching techniques, and he would likely be refined into a human pill or kept as a blood-slave for ten thousand years by some demonic patriarch.
"I must hide this," Li Han concluded instantly. His Earthly experiences had taught him cynicism; the memories of this cultivation world taught him paranoia. The strong preyed on the weak without a second thought. Morality was a luxury reserved for those with the power to enforce it.
He needed to lay low. He needed to be invisible. Let the supposed "geniuses" of the Li Clan and the surrounding sects fight over magical treasures, ancient ruins, and fleeting fortuitous encounters. Let them risk their lives in secret realms and slaughter each other for a single foundation-building pill.
Li Han didn't need any of that. He didn't need to take risks. He just needed to stay alive. If an enemy was too strong, Li Han could just hide, cultivate for a thousand years, and then go piss on the enemy's grave after they died of old age. Time was the ultimate weapon, and he had an infinite supply of it.
But the tree had a second, passive ability that was equally heaven-defying, and significantly more dangerous in the short term.
Li Han focused his senses, drawing upon the basic Qi Condensation manual the predecessor had memorized: the *Verdant Wood Art*. As he breathed, he noticed something incredibly strange.
The air in his dilapidated, remote courtyard—located on the absolute fringe of the Li Clan's territory, where the spiritual energy was thinnest—was changing.
He closed his eyes and felt the flow of the world. The Azure Primordial Evergreen Tree in his mind was slowly, imperceptibly breathing. It absorbed the chaotic, thin, and impure spiritual energy of the surrounding environment, cycled it through its divine roots, and exhaled it.
What it exhaled was spiritual energy of the highest purity.
Li Han opened his eyes, staring at the dust motes dancing in the dim light of his room. He wasn't just recovering; the tree was passively terraforming the environment around him. Slowly but surely, the area immediately surrounding Li Han was having its spiritual density increased and purified. It was as if he himself was a walking, living, evolving Spirit Vein.
"This is a problem," Li Han muttered, his brow furrowing.
While having a highly concentrated aura of pure spiritual energy was incredible for cultivation, it was a massive beacon in the dark. Cultivators were highly sensitive to spiritual energy. If the spiritual density of his trash-tier courtyard suddenly spiked to rival the central chambers of the Clan Patriarch, the elders would immediately investigate. They would dig up his floorboards, scan his body with their divine sense, and eventually find his secret.
"I need to mask it," Li Han realized. "And I need to limit my time in one specific place, or at least ensure no one ever visits."
Fortunately, his current reputation served him well. He was the clan's trash. He had no parents—they had died in a beast tide ten years ago, leaving him an orphan. He had no friends, only people who mocked him or ignored him. His courtyard was located at the very edge of the mountain, near the mortal servant quarters. No elder would ever lower themselves to visit this slum.
Suddenly, the sharp sound of footsteps crunching on the gravel outside broke his concentration.
Li Han's eyes instantly snapped to the wooden door of his courtyard. The footsteps were heavy, deliberate, and carried an arrogant swagger. He recognized that sound from the predecessor's memories.
It was Li Mang.
Li Mang was an outer clan steward, a man in his early thirties who had peaked at the Fifth Level of Qi Condensation. Knowing his cultivation would progress no further, Li Mang had transitioned into administration, bullying the weaker outer disciples and skimming resources from the clan's lower-end operations. To the elders, Li Mang was a useful dog. To people like the predecessor, he was a tyrant.
"Li Han! You dead or alive in there?" Li Mang's coarse voice bellowed, followed by a heavy kick that rattled the flimsy wooden gate. "It's rent collection day, you piece of trash! Three spirit stones for the month's lodging, plus your quota of ten bundles of Spirit-Thread Grass. Bring them out, now!"
Li Han's eyes narrowed. In the cultivation world, the weak were expected to pay the strong for the mere privilege of existing on their land. The predecessor had risked his life in the Bloodwood Forest precisely because he was short on his quota and desperate to avoid Li Mang's wrath.
If this were a typical story, the transmigrator might burst out of the room, display his newfound power, and slap the arrogant steward in the face.
Li Han had no such intention. That was the behavior of an idiot who wanted to draw attention to himself. He was currently at the Second Level of Qi Condensation. Even with his healed meridians and the purified spiritual energy in his body, fighting a Fifth Level cultivator openly was incredibly risky and utterly pointless. It would only bring the clan's enforcers down on his head.
He needed to be ruthless, but he needed to be a ghost.
Li Han quickly assessed his room. He grabbed a small, sharp skinning knife used for processing herbs, made a tiny, shallow cut on his own forearm, and smeared a little bit of blood onto his clothes and pale face. He messed up his hair, adopted a posture of weak, trembling exhaustion, and suppressed his breathing to make his life force seem faint. He forcibly sealed off the pure spiritual energy the tree had provided, letting only the weak, chaotic Qi of a Second Level cultivator circulate through his outer meridians.
He staggered to the door, pulling it open just as Li Mang raised his foot for another kick.
Li Mang, a burly man with a thick beard and eyes full of contempt, sneered as Li Han practically tumbled out of the doorway.
"Look at this pathetic sight," Li Mang spat, crossing his arms. He wore the standard gray robes of an outer steward, but the fabric was of good quality. "Did you trip over your own feet and cough blood, trash? I don't care if you're dying. Three spirit stones and the grass. Now."
Li Han kept his head bowed, his shoulders slumped. He forced a violent cough, letting a drop of real blood spill from his lip. "Steward Li... I... I encountered a Demonic Wind Wolf in the outer forest while gathering the grass. I barely escaped with my life. My meridians are damaged. I... I don't have the quota."
Li Mang's face darkened. He took a step forward, his Fifth Level Qi Condensation aura flaring. To a normal Second Level cultivator, this pressure would feel like a boulder resting on their chest. To Li Han, whose soul was anchored by the Azure Primordial Tree, it felt like a light breeze. But Li Han played the part flawlessly, his knees buckling slightly as he gritted his teeth in feigned agony.
"You think your pathetic excuses matter to the clan?" Li Mang growled, reaching out and grabbing Li Han by the collar of his blood-stained robe, lifting the sixteen-year-old slightly off the ground. "The clan provides you with shelter and the protection of the Qingling formation! If you cannot pay, you will be sent to the Black Sand Mines. You know what happens to trash like you in the mines, boy? You die of exhaustion in a month."
Li Han's eyes, hidden behind his messy bangs, were cold and calculating. He didn't feel anger; he only felt the cold logic of survival. This man was a threat to his peace. A threat to his secret development.
*If I show weakness and pay him later, he will keep coming back,* Li Han analyzed rapidly. *If I fight him and win, he will complain to the inner sect and bring stronger enemies. I need to solve this problem permanently, but cleanly.*
As Li Mang held him by the collar, shouting spit into his face, Li Han made his move. It wasn't a punch, or a kick, or a flashy martial art.
Li Han raised his trembling hands, as if weakly trying to pry Li Mang's thick fingers off his robe.
"P-please, Steward Li, give me three days..." Li Han begged, his voice cracking perfectly.
As his right hand brushed against the inside of Li Mang's wrist, where the pulse point lay over the crucial Taiyuan meridian, Li Han focused a microscopic, needle-thin thread of his newly purified, highly concentrated spiritual energy.
He didn't attack. He merely *injected* this tiny thread of pure energy directly into Li Mang's meridian flow.
The Azure Primordial Tree's energy was fundamentally different from normal spiritual energy. It was unimaginably pure, almost primordial. When injected into the coarse, impure meridian pathways of a low-level cultivator like Li Mang, it was like dropping a single drop of boiling water into a vat of cold oil.
Li Mang didn't feel pain. He only felt a sudden, strange numbness in his wrist, which he immediately dismissed as his own Qi surging. Disgusted by Li Han's pathetic begging, he shoved the boy backward.
Li Han fell onto the dirt, coughing violently and clutching his chest.
"Three days!" Li Mang barked, wiping his hands on his robes as if he had touched filth. "You have exactly three days, Li Han. If you don't have three spirit stones and the grass by then, I'm dragging you to the Enforcement Hall myself and throwing you in the mines. Waste of clan air."
With a final, contemptuous sneer, Li Mang turned and strode away, his heavy footsteps fading down the mountain path.
Li Han remained on the dirt until he was absolutely certain Li Mang was gone. Then, the trembling stopped. The pathetic, fearful look vanished from his eyes, replaced by a gaze as deep and still as an ancient well. He calmly stood up, dusted off his robes, and walked back into his courtyard, closing and barring the gate.
"Three days," Li Han muttered to himself, a chilling, faint smile playing on his lips. "He won't live to see tomorrow."
Li Han knew exactly what he had just done. The *Verdant Wood Art* was a low-level healing and cultivation technique, but with his understanding of human anatomy from Earth, combined with the terrifying purity of the Tree's Qi, he had created a delayed time bomb.
That microscopic thread of pure Qi would circulate through Li Mang's body. Because it was so pure, Li Mang's body would instinctively try to absorb it during his next cultivation session. But his impure, Fifth Level meridians couldn't handle the strain of primordial energy. When the energy reached his heart meridian, it would cause a catastrophic, instantaneous blockage.
To the clan elders, it would look exactly like a classic case of Qi Deviation—a common, fatal accident that occurred when a low-level cultivator forcefully tried to break through a bottleneck or cultivate too recklessly. There would be no signs of a struggle, no wounds, and no foreign Qi signatures, because the primordial Qi would have dispersed harmlessly back into heaven and earth the moment the host died.
A perfect, untraceable murder.
"Decisiveness is the only way to survive," Li Han reasoned, washing the smeared blood off his face in a cracked wooden basin. He felt no remorse. In his memories, Li Mang had beaten several outer disciples to death over minor infractions and forced young female servants into unspeakable situations. The man was a parasite. Eliminating him solved an immediate problem and removed a piece of trash from the world.
With the immediate threat handled, Li Han sat cross-legged on his worn futon. It was time to formulate a long-term plan.
He closed his eyes and began to circulate the *Verdant Wood Art*. Instantly, he noticed the difference. The spiritual energy in his room, which had been slowly enriched by the Azure Primordial Tree over the past hour, rushed into his body.
Normally, the Five-Element Pseudo Spiritual Root would bottleneck this energy, rejecting ninety percent of it and making cultivation agonizingly slow. But the energy had already been refined by the divine tree in his soul. It was so pure, so perfectly aligned with the Dao of Nature, that his spiritual roots didn't need to filter it. It poured directly into his Dantian like water flowing into a parched lake.
*Crack.*
A soft, almost imperceptible sound echoed within his body.
Li Han's eyes snapped open, glowing with a faint azure light. He had just broken through to the Third Level of Qi Condensation. It took him less than an hour of meditation to achieve what the predecessor had failed to do in three years.
"The quality of the Qi is everything," Li Han murmured, marveling at the newfound strength flowing through his limbs. His senses were sharper. He could hear the scuttling of insects in the walls and the rustle of leaves outside his courtyard.
But this rapid breakthrough only reinforced his earlier caution. If he went from Level 2 to Level 3 in a day, someone might dismiss it as a fluke. If he reached Level 5 by next month, people would investigate. If he reached Foundation Establishment by age eighteen, the Patriarch would capture him and slice him open to find out his secret.
"I need a cloaking technique," Li Han decided. "I must find a way to suppress my outward cultivation base. I will remain at the Third Level of Qi Condensation to the outside world for the next five years. To them, I will just be an unremarkable, untalented disciple who barely managed to scrape by."
He stood up and began to pace the small room. He needed resources to buy array flags to set up a concealment formation around his courtyard. The tree's passive terraforming was great, but if the spiritual energy density kept rising, it would leak out of the courtyard. He needed a formation to lock the Qi inside his room, creating a perfect, isolated cultivation sanctuary.
"I have three days before Li Mang's death is discovered," Li Han calculated. "When a steward dies, there will be chaos in the outer sect administration. The inner sect will send someone to investigate, conclude it was Qi Deviation, and then appoint a new steward. In that transition period, no one will care about the rent of a trash disciple."
That gave him a window of opportunity. He needed spirit stones to buy the array flags from the clan's market, or better yet, a black market in the nearby mortal city where he wouldn't be recognized.
But how to make money quickly and secretly?
Li Han looked inward, focusing on the Azure Primordial Tree. The tree thrived on spiritual energy, but what if he fed it something else? What if he fed it the raw, unrefined herbs the predecessor had risked his life for?
He walked over to a small wooden chest in the corner of the room. Inside lay a few dried husks of low-grade herbs, and one relatively fresh, faintly glowing stalk: the Spirit-Thread Grass that had nearly cost the predecessor his life. It was a common Tier-1 medicinal herb, used as a filler ingredient for low-level Qi gathering pills. On the market, this single stalk was worth barely half a spirit stone.
Li Han picked up the grass. He channeled a tiny amount of his spiritual energy into his hand, connecting his aura to the Azure Primordial Tree, and willed the tree to interact with the plant.
Instantly, a faint, emerald glow extended from his palm, enveloping the Spirit-Thread Grass.
Before Li Han's astonished eyes, the grass began to change. The slightly withered edges plumped up. The dull green color deepened into a vibrant, almost luminescent emerald. The faint spiritual aura radiating from the plant skyrocketed, becoming dense and rich. The single stalk grew, split, and refined itself until it looked like a masterpiece of nature.
The process took only a few seconds, draining a noticeable fraction of the spiritual energy Li Han had just accumulated in his Dantian. He stumbled slightly, feeling a wave of exhaustion, but his eyes were wide with shock.
The plant in his hand was no longer a standard Tier-1 Spirit-Thread Grass. Based on the predecessor's memories of the clan's herb manual, its spiritual age had just been forcefully advanced by fifty years. Its quality had been purified to the absolute peak. It was now a premium ingredient that an alchemist would easily pay ten spirit stones for.
"It doesn't just heal," Li Han whispered, his heart racing. "It manipulates vitality itself. It can rapidly age and purify spiritual plants."
A slow, wide smile spread across Li Han's face. It was the smile of a man who had just found the key to the universe.
He didn't need to risk his life in dangerous ruins. He didn't need to fight arrogant young masters for secret inheritances. He didn't need to kiss up to clan elders for a meager allowance of low-grade pills.
He was a one-man agricultural empire. He could buy cheap, trash-tier seeds, grow them in his passively enriched courtyard, use his tree to instantly mature them into centuries-old premium herbs, and sell them on the black market under a disguised identity to fund his cultivation indefinitely.
"The path of the Hidden Dragon," Li Han declared softly to the empty room. "I will be the most unremarkable, useless trash the Li Clan has ever seen. I will sit in this ruined courtyard, watching the seasons change, watching geniuses rise and fall, watching empires crumble into dust."
He walked over to the small window, looking out at the sprawling, majestic peaks of Qingling Mountain. The sun was just beginning to rise, casting long, golden shadows across the valleys. Somewhere out there, cultivators were fighting and dying over scraps of power.
"I have eternal youth. I have endless resources," Li Han murmured, his gaze piercing through the morning mist, filled with absolute, unshakeable resolve. "I don't need to fight you today. I will simply outlive you all. And anyone who tries to disturb my peace..."
He glanced down at his right hand, the hand that had seamlessly injected death into Li Mang's veins.
"...will simply cease to exist, naturally and without a trace."
Li Han closed the wooden shutters, plunging the room back into dim twilight. He returned to his futon, sitting cross-legged, and closed his eyes. The Azure Primordial Tree gently swayed in his Sea of Consciousness, continuously drawing in the world's breath, slowly turning his squalid hut into a holy land of cultivation.
The sixteen-year-old trash of the Li Clan began his first true session of cultivation, taking the first silent step on a journey that would span eons. The legend of the immortal hidden in the shadows had quietly begun.