"Lai! Stop looking for the meteorite!"
"The spirit root test this year has been moved up, and you don't even have to go to the county—now you can get tested right here in town!"
A boy from the village called out the reminder as he watched Lin Donglai limp down the mountain path.
Lin Donglai rubbed the back of his injured head, lost in thought. "Really?"
"Of course it's real. Would the village head ever lie?"
Listening to the drums and gongs blaring from the village not far away, Lin Donglai hurried along step by step, squeezing into the ever-growing crowd.
There he heard the village head, belly thrust out proudly, standing on the grain-drying ground before the ancestral hall: "This meteor shower is truly a stroke of fortune for our Lin Family Town!"
"The immortal masters of the Green Wood Sect plan to stay two extra days and will test our spirit roots while they're here!"
"Three years ago, Hong Family Town found someone with a spirit root! They held banquets for three days and three nights—showing off terribly!"
"If our Lin Family Town finds one this time, I'll pay out of my own pocket for a banquet too!"
"Immortal cultivation, you know—when one attains the Dao, even the chickens and dogs ascend to heaven. In just three years, Hong Family Town has built bridges, paved roads, and even had a few boys pass the imperial examinations as scholars!"
"If your son tests positive for a spirit root, the government will exempt your family from corvée labor and all miscellaneous taxes—and beyond that, there'll be riches and glory without end!"
Hearing the news from the village head, Lin Donglai was overjoyed. What young boy had never dreamed of becoming an immortal who could soar through the skies and burrow through the earth?
Besides, the spirit root test had been delivered right to his doorstep. It would be a waste not to go!
Opportunities like this knock only once!
He immediately ran home to tell his parents the good news.
Lin Donglai's father, Lin Meng, was one of the few hunters in Lin Family Town, capable of hunting wild boar. His mother, Meng Qing, was the daughter of the town's butcher.
In his youth, Lin Meng had apprenticed under an old hunter, and every time he returned from the hunt, he sold his game at Butcher Meng's shop—that was how he met Lin Donglai's mother.
At that moment, Lin Meng was processing an animal hide in the courtyard. Seeing Lin Donglai covered in dirt and grime, with a dried grass root still stuck in his hair, he couldn't help frowning. "You're injured?"
"I took a fall by accident." Lin Donglai didn't consider it a big deal.
His mother was cooking when she heard her son was hurt. She rushed out at once, fussing over him. "Yangyang, you're hurt? Let Mother see—did you bump yourself anywhere?"
Yangyang was Lin Donglai's childhood name. "Donglai" meant the rising sun—a name given by Teacher Liu of the village school, who said it was full of vigor and vitality.
Though Lin Donglai insisted he was fine, he was still thoroughly examined from head to toe.
"Father, Mother, the village head says the immortal masters from the Green Wood Sect will test spirit roots in town tomorrow. I want to go!"
"Go, then, if you want!"
"But once you've been tested and find out you have no spirit root, give up on that dream and come with me to look at prospective brides like an obedient son. You're not young anymore, you know. At your age, your eldest brother had already found a girl himself and asked me to send a matchmaker to arrange the betrothal!"
Lin Donglai was only fourteen or fifteen. Being talked at about marriage made him flush with embarrassment and annoyance. "I definitely have a spirit root—I'm going to cultivate as an immortal! And when I do, I'll marry a fairy maiden for a wife!"
After dinner—whether because he'd knocked the back of his head, or because he'd exhausted himself searching the mountains for so long—Lin Donglai fell asleep early.
That night, he dreamed. In the dream, he was first toiling like an ox in a place full of towering buildings and iron-box carriages. Then, in an instant, he became an immortal who soared through the skies and burrowed through the earth, having obtained an extraordinarily precious fortune:
A seed.
A seed known as the Dao Seed.
With this Dao Seed, he cultivated at astonishing speed, free and unfettered.
But it was also because of this seed that he was lured into a trap and ambushed, perishing on the spot!
"I refuse to accept this!"
He jolted awake from the nightmare, drenched in cold sweat.
At the moment of waking, the old wound on the back of his head suddenly burned with pain, as if a tender sprout were pushing through his skull. He reached up trembling to feel the spot, but found nothing.
The wound had healed.
Ordinary dreams grow hazier and hazier after waking, but this one, far from fading, grew more vivid and detailed by the moment.
After a long while, Lin Donglai finally collected himself. The dream had been so splendid, so mystical, and so utterly real—like something he had personally lived through—that it left him shaken as if he were still trapped in a nightmare, savoring its remnants long after waking.
Especially the final scene of the dream, where he was killed—it was wrapped in a despair that still hung over him.
"So it was all just a dream!"
Lin Donglai felt a hollow sense of loss—relieved that it had only been a dream, yet disappointed that it had only been a dream.
But when he closed his eyes again, what appeared before them startled him!
A seed roughly the size of a lotus seed, its shell a deep emerald green, was floating there in the darkness!
It was none other than the Dao Seed with its boundless mystical powers from his dream!
"Mother of mercy!"
Lin Donglai opened his eyes—the seed vanished.
He closed them again—there it was, floating before him.
"Don't tell me... this thing is inside my head?"
Lin Donglai found it simply unbelievable.
"If the seed is real, then that dream must have been something that actually happened!"
"But how did this thing get into my head?"
Lin Donglai sat there in a daze, recalling the strange events of the past two days.
Two days earlier, thunderous qi had shaken the sky above the small town. Wind and clouds churned as immortals battled for a treasure. Then the treasure shattered, splitting into meteors that scattered in all directions.
That very day, countless cultivators set out to search the meteorite crash sites.
One of the meteorites had landed on the back mountain behind Lin Family Village.
That very night, the authorities drove the villagers up the mountain to hunt for treasure, and Lin Donglai was among them.
Because he knew the back mountain so well, he quickly found the spot where the meteorite had fallen—but two immortals had arrived even before him.
Those two immortals fought fiercely over the treasure. Lin Donglai had only watched from a distance for a few moments before the shockwave knocked him unconscious, the back of his head striking a stone.
By the time he came to, the immortals were gone, and the crash site was a scene of utter devastation.
Lin Donglai thought for a long time, but could only remember the two immortals fighting, being caught by the shockwave, striking his head on a stone, and blacking out—something here was rather suspicious.
Could it have been at that moment that this thing burrowed into his brain?
Lin Donglai closed his eyes again.
The emerald-green seed appeared once more before him.
He could see it, sense it, but not touch it.
Even when he tried to move it with his mind, the thing didn't budge in the slightest.
He recalled a particularly vivid episode from his dream: the protagonist, after obtaining the Dao Seed, had refined it by bathing it in seven times seven, forty-nine drops of his own heart's blood. Only after this sacrificial refinement could he wield it at will and begin his meteoric rise.
Lin Donglai guessed, "It probably needs to be refined before it can be used."
"Could this be the treasure those immortals were fighting over?" The thought suddenly struck him, and his heart clenched, cold sweat breaking out.
"I must tell no one about this! As long as I keep my mouth shut, no one will ever know."
He combed through the dream, gathering what information he could, and learned that this mysterious seed possessed an extraordinarily exalted status—it could conceal the workings of fate itself. Unless he revealed it of his own accord, even a true immortal descending to the mortal world would never be able to detect it.
"In the dream, that man obtained the treasure but was far too reckless—he actually told his dao companion, and that was what brought about his death."
Only after working all this out did Lin Donglai's tightly wound nerves finally relax.
Yet the carefree, immortal bearing of the man in the dream remained branded upon his mind.
This seed called "Cultivation" took root and sprouted within mere breaths, occupying Lin Donglai's every thought.
Having witnessed immortals battle with his own eyes, he now yearned desperately for that mystical power to soar through the skies and traverse the earth!
Dawn gradually broke; the rooster crowed three times.
Lin Donglai's mother rose to start the fire and cook, only to find Lin Donglai sitting there in a daze. "This boy never gets up this early. Don't tell me he was too excited to sleep all night? He's gone mad with it!"
She stepped over and patted his shoulder—only to see the boy turn his head, a pair of large eyes bright and piercing, his whole person radiating a spirit she had never seen in him before.