Tianyan Domain, Anshun Prefecture, Lingyun Sect.
Lingyun Farmstead.
On the endless stretch of spiritual farmland, cultivators were busy tending to their spirit rice with great care.
This was their income for the whole year.
Among the hardworking cultivators, one young man looked completely out of place, he was lying lazily under the shade of a tree.
His name was Cheng Qian. He was eighteen this year, and a transmigrator.
The original owner of this body had lost both parents. After that, he was bullied and driven out of his family's spiritual farmland by some residents of the farmstead. In a moment of desperation, he bought a cheap breakthrough pill, hoping to reach the mid-stage of Qi Refining.
The result was predictable, he died on the spot.
That's how Cheng Qian came to this world.
He had farmed for three years. Now, he had given up. He just wanted to make peace with himself. The Lingyun Sect didn't treat people like human beings at all.
In his past life, Cheng Qian had been a master at cooking the books. During a major anti-corruption crackdown, he got caught. To reduce his sentence, the authorities recruited him to work for them, specializing in audits and financial investigations.
He built a notorious reputation in the industry. But fame attracts trouble. He knew too much, and he wasn't exactly discreet about it. Eventually, some people banded together and got rid of him.
When he woke up in this new world, he thought he was finally free. He wanted to pursue immortality. But after three years of farming, the dream was shattered.
'These cultivators are vicious,' he thought. 'Even worse than those capitalist sharks I dealt with before.'
Those of them with poor spiritual roots were called "seedlings of immortality." The sect claimed they could farm for free, using the land to slowly build up resources and climb the ranks. But it was all smoke and mirrors.
Everyone knew nothing was truly free.
You needed spirit fertilizer to tend the land. You paid rent for the house. You had to cover daily expenses. Even cultivation itself cost money. Then there was the shady difference between the price of buying goods and what they got paid for selling spiritual rice.
And guess what?
His total expenses and income were dead even.
By the end of the year, he had nothing left. Not even a single spirit stone.
In the first year, Cheng Qian didn't care too much. He had just arrived. He wanted to lay low and get familiar with the place.
In the second year, he thought maybe it was his farming skills that were lacking. So he started learning planting techniques and practicing spells every day.
In the third year, after asking around and doing careful calculations, he came to a conclusion: Lingyun Farmstead and the Lingyun Sect were bloodsuckers.
The area around the farmstead looked calm and peaceful. But if you tried to go further out, there were evil cultivators everywhere. Strangely enough, getting into the farmstead was easy. Getting out? Nearly impossible.
He even started to suspect that those so-called "evil cultivators" were actually just Lingyun Sect disciples in disguise, meant to scare the farmers into staying put and quietly growing rice.
It wasn't just a wild guess. When the original owner's parents died, it was the farmstead's patrol team that brought back their bodies.
They had gone out in a group that morning. By noon, all of them were dead. Not a single one survived.
The official story was that they were killed by robbers outside the town. The patrol team made a big deal about how dangerous it was to explore secret realms.
Their storage bags, magic tools—everything of value—was gone.
The part that sent chills down Cheng Qian's spine was when they let the original owner take one last look at the corpses, then took them away.
They called it "returning to dust," saying the corpses would be cremated in a special furnace and mixed with monster dung to make spiritual fertilizer, sold at one spirit stone per pound.
They really had the system nailed down. They squeezed the loose cultivators and poor farmers dry. Nothing left to spare.
All those tactics back on Earth, personalized pricing based on data, exploiting every new market trend, none of that compared.
At least in his old world, they didn't kill the customer. Even when they harvested you like a crop, they left the roots intact.
So, farming? Not even a dog would do it.
Lately, Cheng Qian had been racking his brain for a way out. It was only yesterday that he finally saw a glimmer of hope.
He had a golden finger, a kind of cheat ability. But it only activated this year. That gave him a little room to be reckless.
The power let him use half of his own essence to create a duplicate of himself. This clone would be fully independent. He could control both bodies at once, doing different things without delay or interference.
But the clone had a strange feature. He couldn't tell whether it was a strength or a flaw. It could only grow stronger by swallowing and burning spirit stones. That was the only way. And no matter what, it could only reach the peak of his current realm, no higher.
Right now, Cheng Qian was at the second layer of the Qi Refining stage. So any clone he made could only reach the peak of the Qi Refining realm. It would never reach Foundation Establishment. And eventually, it would either die accidentally or reach the end of its lifespan.
When the clone disappeared, part of its cultivation would return to the main body, but the original essence used to make it would be gone forever.
The upside was that, as long as it was fed enough spirit stones, it would level up incredibly fast and quickly become battle-ready.
But Cheng Qian hesitated. This was his origin essence.
Any cultivator knew the value of that.
Origin essence was unimaginably precious. Giving up half of it—wasn't that basically giving up half his life?
Even if it could be replenished later, who knew how many spirit stones it would take? And even with enough spirit stones, there was no guarantee he could buy the rare herbs and spiritual pills required.
He had a gut feeling that, in the future, he'd be willing to do anything, no matter how ruthless, just to gather enough treasures to restore his origin.
So then, what was the point of creating a clone?
That was the real question.
He sure wasn't going to use it for farming.
Until yesterday, he had no answer. Then he overheard something—a piece of news that finally gave him a direction.
The nearby market town was about to host its once-every-five-years Ascension Ceremony.
It was a big deal. During the event, they tested all the children between the ages of 8 and 14 for their spiritual roots. Those with outstanding talent would be selected to enter the Lingyun Sect, formally stepping onto the path of immortality.
Cheng Qian saw opportunity.
He could use his golden finger to craft a clone and sneak it into the sect, using the system from the inside to milk it for all it was worth.
The only problem was he had no idea what kind of talent the clone would have.
If the clone turned out just as mediocre as he was, it would probably get shoved into the spiritual farming program again, trapped forever as a glorified beast of burden.
"Screw this flesh-eating marketplace," he muttered. "One day I will burn it to the ground."
He slung his farming hoe, a basic spiritual tool, over his shoulder and started slowly heading home.
Off to the side, two old farmers tending their fields watched him walk away, whispering among themselves.
"Poor kid," one of them sighed. "Used to be so honest and hardworking. Got pushed too far by the folks heret."
"Now he's just daydreaming about shortcuts. Gave up on himself. He'll never amount to anything like this. Only people like us—diligent, generation after generation—have any chance of getting into a real sect and changing the family's fate."
"Yeah, who doesn't want to make it big? But there's no such thing as overnight success. Every family that's made it had to go through several generations before they finally produced a sect disciple."
"Eyes bigger than his skills. He's bound to fall hard. Anyway, I've got two more furrows to plow. Talk later."
Cheng Qian didn't hear what they said. Even if he had, he wouldn't have cared.
Who doesn't get talked about behind their back? And who hasn't talked about someone else behind theirs?
Those two... their edges had long been worn down. They were just average people living average lives, nobodies in the grand scheme of things.
Had they never dreamed of soaring through the skies on a flying sword, watching the sun rise over distant mountains and set beyond seas?
Had they never imagined plucking stars from the sky with a wave, reshaping rivers with a thought?
No. They had let the Lingyun Sect, their mediocre talent, and their own cowardice trap them within a few acres of land. Their bodies were shackled, and their spirits locked in place. Nothing but grounded sparrows, heads down in the dirt.
But Cheng Qian was different, he'd been given a second life. And if he had to die, then so be it, but he'd go out in a blaze of glory. He refused to live like livestock, caged and worked to death.
He'd transmigrated, for heaven's sake! If he was just going to quietly farm for the rest of his life, then what was the point?
He returned to his broken little shack and dug under the stove. There, he pulled out everything he owned: a hundred and twenty spirit stones.
This was what his parents had left him before their last trip. It was also what he'd saved over the years by living frugally.
Now, these stones were finally going to be put to use.
It hurt. A lot.
"To hell with it. Let's treat it like an investment. If it works out, I'll live like a king. If it fails, well… I'll just keep farming!"
He slammed the door shut and marched toward the marketplace at the foot of the mountain.
That was where he would create the clone.
And he'd have to come up with a believable identity for it, too.
The cultivation world, especially for people at the bottom, was full of rules. Everything had to be accounted for.