In the pitch-black night, a fat and massive bird squatted in a ruined neighborhood. Beneath it lay the wreckage of two buildings, crushed under its weight in a single breath.
Above and to the side of the fat bird hovered its lifelong rival—a massive eagle-like creature. It had chased the bird all the way from the deep mountains and now circled high in the air, letting out triumphant cries.
Not far behind the fat bird, near a flower bed, stood Luo Cheng. He wore sweatpants and a loose T-shirt, his hair slightly messy. In his hand, he tightly gripped an old-fashioned phone.
At the same time, the piercing sound of an air raid alarm echoed throughout the city.
Luo Cheng looked up at the enormous, bloated bird in front of him. His heart pounded wildly. This scene, this moment...
He couldn't help but lower his gaze to the phone in his hand. It was an old model from at least forty to fifty years ago, bulkier and rounder than the modern spirit-powered phones widely used today. However, those who loved vintage items often praised its unique design.
But Luo Cheng wasn’t focused on the phone’s design. He stared hard at its casing. There was no sign of the silver-gray glow he had seen earlier. Whether in a dream or reality, he wasn't sure.
Luo Cheng instinctively felt it was a dream—a dream of forewarning. In the dream, he had been sleeping at midnight when a loud crash shattered the silence. His house collapsed completely, burying him under the ruins. His entire body felt crushed by broken walls and heavy debris that had fallen from above.
In the dream, he could barely breathe or move. As someone only at the Body Training stage, he had no ability to struggle free from such a disaster. Even if he managed to crawl out, the severity of his injuries meant he wouldn’t survive without a life-saving elixir. When he barely turned his head to see what had happened, the only thing visible in the wreckage was a phone near his bedside—round in shape, glowing with silver-gray light.
He had received this phone just yesterday from a delivery courier. It was said to be a relic from his parents, sent by an old teammate who had once fought alongside them. For some reason, he hadn’t powered it on yet. He never expected that on the very same night, such an accident would occur.
In the dream, the silver light on the phone suddenly shattered like breaking glass the moment he looked at it. Right after that, he woke up.
At the moment he woke up, Luo Cheng felt a chill deep in his heart. Acting on instinct, he grabbed the phone and jumped out of his third-floor window. Thanks to the widespread cultivation courses, which allowed everyone to learn basic body training for free starting in high school.
Even if someone had no talent for cultivation or couldn’t afford expensive pills to raise their level, they could still reach the Body Training stage before graduating from university. While such a level wasn’t enough to explore dangerous mountains, it was at least enough for Luo Cheng, who was young and agile, to land safely from a three-story fall without serious injuries.
After that, a thunderous crash made Luo Cheng realize what had crushed his apartment complex.
—a massive demonic beast! Any creature that could accidentally break through the city's protective barrier while fighting and end up flattening his home had to be at least at the Golden Core stage!
The bird was extremely fat. From Luo Cheng’s angle, he could see its brownish feathers, with patches of blue-green plumage around its wingtips and neck. Its claws were those of an ordinary sparrow-like bird, but its massive size made it look anything but nimble.
"Chirp!" The fat bird let out a sharp cry. From the furious screech it directed at the bird circling above, it was clear that it was spitting fragrant words. (口吐芬芳 literally translates to "spitting fragrance," but in modern internet slang, it is a humorous euphemism for swearing. Instead of saying "cursing loudly," the phrase jokingly implies that the bird is "spitting fragrant words." Basically foul language.)
Hearing this cry, the eagle-like bird flapped its wings hard, gathering greenish air currents in the sky. The energy was about to crash down upon the fat bird, the surrounding buildings, and even Luo Cheng, who stood nearby!
Suddenly, a sharp and piercing noise came from behind the residential complex. A huge burst of light exploded into the sky, startling the eagle-like bird into freezing mid-air. The green air currents instantly scattered. The fat bird on the ground also reacted, leaping up in shock. With a loud boom, a wave of energy erupted from its body, sending it soaring into the sky.
The two birds let out a few reluctant cries before flapping their wings and continuing their battle as they flew toward the nearby mountains. They left behind nothing but ruins, shattered glass from the fat bird’s energy burst, and Luo Cheng—who had been caught in the blast and sent tumbling over a flower bed—flying straight toward a wall.
As the saying goes, disaster truly does fall from the sky. Luo Cheng had just been sleeping at home, only to have calamity drop down on him! (This is a humorous twist on the idiom "Disaster comes from the sky even if you're sitting at home" (人在家中坐，禍從天上來). The original version implies that misfortune can strike out of nowhere. The text modifies "sitting" (坐) to "sleeping" (睡) to emphasize Luo Cheng’s bad luck—he wasn't just sitting around; he was peacefully asleep when disaster quite literally fell from above.)
The entire residential area was in a state of uproar. Whether their homes had collapsed, their windows shattered, they were still rudely woken up by the fight between two monstrous beasts and the wailing of air raid alarms. Everyone had been forced out of bed. Some rushed outside to watch the spectacle, while others struggled in the rubble, calling for help.
Many people were already holding up their phones, recording the scene, and uploading the shocking footage to the internet.
Luo Cheng, his "zhuàng shuài" (帅绝人寰 roughly means “undeniably handsome, to an extraordinary degree”. It's exaggerated praise often used in Chinese web novels, especially in Xianxia and urban fantasy genres, to describe an absurdly good-looking protagonist.) face now covered in dust, stood dazed for a long moment before sighing inwardly. He must have lost his mind—when escaping just now, he had instinctively grabbed this phone, completely forgetting his own phone and his Qiankun bag. (乾坤袋 translate to "Heaven and Earth Bag" is a small bag with an immense storage capacity.)
The phone in his hand was his parents' relic, something that had gone missing over a decade ago and had only recently been returned to him by sheer chance.
Which meant… the phone that contained all his bank cards and personal contacts was likely crushed under the rubble along with his house.
In this post-spiritual-revival world, the city's emergency response teams had long perfected their protocols for dealing with beast attacks. Less than five minutes after the fat bird flew away, the elite cultivators of the Qingtian Squad (擎天大队 literally means "Sky-Supporting Squad" or "Heaven-Pillaring Team.") arrived, riding their flying swords and artifacts, swiftly beginning rescue operations.
After a long night of chaos, Luo Cheng woke up inside a temporary housing unit set up on a street near his neighborhood. These shelters were built using spatial expansion technology, allowing them to be compact on the outside while spacious inside—just like a mustard seed containing Mount Sumeru. (The phrase “芥子纳须弥” is a reference comes from Buddhist cosmology, where Mount Sumeru represents an immense, divine mountain. The phrase means “something vast contained within something tiny.” It conveys the idea that something vast can be contained within something extremely small, symbolizing the profound and boundless nature of existence, perception, and reality in Buddhist thought.)
After all, ever since the spiritual energy revival 500 years ago, when ancient fragmented realms merged back into this world, Earth’s landmass expanded twenty to thirty times over, its spherical shape forcibly stretched into a vast plane. Incidents like what happened to Luo Cheng were now an everyday occurrence.
Rubbing his face, Luo Cheng took deep breaths, forcing himself to accept the reality—his house was gone, flattened under a giant bird’s ass, and who knew when it could be rebuilt?
He still remembered his younger self, once fascinated by the idea of cultivation, dreaming of one day becoming like those legendary cultivators who could soar through the skies.
Back then, he had even imagined getting a bird-type spirit pet. After all, even today, bird-type pets still ranked number one on the “Most Wanted Spiritual Pets” list, followed closely by cats. This trend was largely fueled by two celebrity-level spirit beasts whose owners—two of the strongest cultivators in the world—were absolute powerhouses.
As long as their masters remained at the peak of cultivation, their popularity would never fade.
Shaking off the image of the fat bird in his mind, Luo Cheng reached into his pocket, pulling out the antique-looking phone. Slowly, he lit up the screen.
This phone had only arrived yesterday morning. Supposedly, it was a relic left behind by his parents, discovered by one of their former expedition companions three years ago and sent back to him.
To be honest, Luo Cheng found this hard to believe. His parents had already been confirmed dead over a decade ago, perishing in a secret realm.
As if checking off a duty on a list, they gave birth to Luo Cheng and left. In pursuit of forming their Golden Cores, his parents had handed him over to his elderly grandmother, and year after year, he never saw them again.
Once Luo Cheng was old enough to understand, aside from vaguely missing his parents—whose faces he could no longer even recall—he couldn’t help but question: Did cultivating immortality—pursuing the Golden Core—truly require abandoning elderly parents? Did it demand leaving behind children too young to even remember their faces?
Before the revival of spiritual energy, textbooks and the internet referred to children like this as “left-behind children”—kids whose parents left their hometowns for work and couldn’t return. Their parents were either too busy or lacked a stable home, so these children stayed behind in the countryside, raised by elderly grandparents. Some were lucky if they saw their parents for a few days during the New Year. For the rest of the year, there was no discipline, no supervision—let alone companionship or care.
After the revival of spiritual energy and the restructuring of the world, a new type of “left-behind children” emerged—those abandoned by parents chasing the Dao. These cultivators roamed in search of opportunities, leaving their children to be raised by the elderly. Luo Cheng, unfortunately, was one of them.
With the resurgence of spiritual energy, the world entered a golden age where everyone could cultivate. But this also led to problems—because the entry threshold for cultivation became so low, spiritual energy in cities grew thin, low-grade cultivation resources became scarce, and prices skyrocketed. In this era where anyone could fight for the path to immortality, only a rare few would ever succeed.
Cultivators with mediocre talent—without an extraordinary stroke of luck, deep pockets, or an iron will—would ultimately end up cultivating only loneliness. (修個寂寞 means "end up cultivating only loneliness" which is an internet slang that originally means “all their effort amounted to nothing.”)Luo Cheng, once again, was one of them. No, it would be more accurate to say that his parents and grandparents were too.
So after barely grinding their way to the peak of the Spirit Concentration stage and treating Luo Cheng’s birth like a mission to complete, his parents decisively threw themselves into the endless pursuit of fortune. They competed with other cultivators for rare treasures, dove into one secret realm after another—only to fall at the final step before forming their Golden Cores.
After his grandmother confirmed their deaths through the shattering of their soul-bound jade tablets, grief took its toll on her, and she soon passed away as well. Luo Cheng, whose feelings toward his parents had always been complicated, found himself with more resentment than nostalgia. He forced himself to forget them.
After that, he simply gave up on becoming a cultivator. He didn’t put in any effort to enter a school with cultivation-related programs or join a sect. Instead, he chose to live as an ordinary person.
Ever since the revival of spiritual energy, almost everyone had started practicing body-strengthening techniques. As long as one wasn’t particularly unlucky, they could easily live to a hundred or so years without sickness or disasters. If they managed to save enough money to buy a life-extending pill, living to two hundred years wasn’t just a dream. As long as one had a stable job, the life of an ordinary person was far more comfortable and peaceful than that of the small-time cultivators who constantly risked their lives outside.
So, Luo Cheng studied an ordinary major at university, found a relatively stable job in his hometown after graduation, and lived a quiet, uneventful life until yesterday. Day after day, his life had passed without much excitement.
But now, as he stared at the phone in his hand, all the doubts surrounding his parents' deaths resurfaced.
Luo Cheng tightened his grip on the phone and took a deep breath before finally swiping across the screen. He was still full of suspicion about his parents’ deaths and about why those so-called teammates of his parents had waited over ten years after their passing, and even three whole years after they obtained the phone, to send it back to him.
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