In a battered little mountain village, a bunch of men and women stood packed into one family’s yard. Right in the middle sat a coffin. Out in the countryside, if a house had an old person in it, they usually prepared one early. That was common.

Before long, grieving sobs rose from inside the house. The moment the sound came out, everyone knew it.

Ms. Thurley was gone.

Just then, an old man in his fifties came out from the room. He looked like the man the family had invited to take charge of things. He waved a few people over and called them inside to help dress Ms. Thurley in burial clothes.

In the village, whether it was a wedding or a funeral, folks all pitched in. So it didn’t take long. They got the old woman cleaned up, dressed proper, and laid her into the coffin. Everyone gathered round and cried for a while, speaking of things from Ms. Thurley’s life. After that, with horns and drums making noise all the way, they carried her off and buried her in the back hill.

Only, the coffin lid had already been nailed down tight.

So no one saw that Ms. Thurley, who had stopped breathing in broad daylight, was now lying inside that coffin with a faint rise and fall in her chest and belly.

Truth be told, her life had been hard enough. The family had only just started to live a little better, and then she lost her footing, cracked her head in a fall, and dropped straight into a vegetative state. Even the doctor had said there was no saving her. So they tidied her up and carried her home.

She had only lain there for two days. Then one breath failed to come up, and into the coffin she went.

Now that breath had smoothed out again.

But her mind still had not woken.

Night fell. All was still. Only now and then came the thin cry of insects.

Then, from the coffin of Ms. Thurley, buried that very day, came bursts of sound.

Bang. Thump. Rattle.

Mixed into it was what sounded like cursing.

“To hell with this damned thing! Why are these coffin nails driven so bloody tight? I can’t even kick it open! Ah—damn it, I’m worn out!”

Good thing this was a tiny village. Most people watched at most two episodes of some show and then went to sleep. There wasn’t much in the way of nightlife. Otherwise, if somebody had heard noises coming out of a coffin in the dead of night, they’d have been scared out of their wits and thought Ms. Thurley had risen from the grave.

So then—was the one in that coffin still Ms. Thurley?

The body? Sure, that part was.

But the thing inside had changed.

It was none other than Iris Holden.

The one from Eight Immortals Crossing the Sea?

No, no. Not that one.

This Iris Holden was a junior disciple under Daoist Master He, a cultivator of the mystic arts. It just so happened that her generation name landed on xian, and since she was a girl, Master He casually named her Xiangu—Immortal Maiden. Because of that, her senior brothers and sisters laughed at her plenty.

Though, to be fair, they weren’t much better off.

What names did they have?

Xianfeng. Xianshan. Xianhua...

A whole nest of the same nonsense.

Now then, this Daoist Master He was the seventy-fifth sect master of Xiushan Sect. The founding ancestor of Xiushan Sect had been a famous battle-mad lunatic, the kind who loved throwing down with people everywhere he went. And petty—petty to the bone.

There was one time he went looking for a fight. The other man couldn’t beat him, but also didn’t want to lose face, so he hid in the mountains and used a long-distance shouting technique to curse out every last ancestor in the founding master’s line.

That did not sit well with the old forefather.

So he used a spell to shrink the mountain, cast a barrier over it, stuffed it into his sleeve, and carried it around. Like a man walking a pet, he’d take it out every day and stand there hurling abuse back and forth with that fellow until his anger cooled. That was how Xiushan Sect got its name.

Stuffing a whole mountain into a sleeve—what kind of terrifying art was that?

Even the arts of true immortals might not pull off something like that, let alone ordinary cultivators.

Whenever Iris Holden heard the sect masters pass that “glorious deed” down from one generation to the next, she always felt they must have watered the tale down and padded it up somewhere along the line, just to fool fresh recruits who knew no better.

Still, one thing was true enough.

For seventy-five generations, every sect master of Xiushan Sect had been cut from the same cloth—battle-crazed to the core.

As for what standard the previous sect master used when choosing a successor, Iris Holden had no clue.

Privately, though, she had her own guess.

They probably ranked candidates by who was best at picking fights and stirring trouble.

Otherwise, with her master’s miserable little bit of talent for naming people, how in the world could he ever have clawed his way into the seat of sect master?

That day, Daoist Holden brought her disciples out again, marching to another sect’s door to stir trouble—no, to “spar.”

Her master was in high spirits, and the disciples did not disgrace themselves either. A few spells thrown out clean and sharp, and the match was already settled. They were used to fighting outside. Compared with other sect brats, their hands were steadier, their timing crueler, their spells more practiced.

They were just about to pull back when a stone the size of a palm came tearing down from the sky.

It came fast. Too fast.

Its light was sharp as a blade, and it slammed straight toward the crowd.

Daoist Holden’s face changed at once. She roared, “Move!”

So everyone moved.

Everyone except Iris Holden.

She stood there like a fool, dazed stiff, not even knowing what had happened. Before she could react, the stone crashed into her with a heavy thud.

The instant it touched her, its fierce radiance burst into a flash of gold.

Then the impossible happened.

A living, breathing person shrank in an instant, folded down into a small mass of light, and with a sharp whoosh, was sucked straight into the stone.

But the stone did not stop.

It kept plunging down with a force fit to smash heaven and split earth. The hard ground below gave way under the impact, earth and rock peeling back to both sides as if bullied into retreat.

At last, the stone punched through a transparent barrier.

Then it fell.

And fell.

No one knew how long.

In the end, it smashed into black soil and lay there without another stir.

In her muddled haze, Iris Holden remembered something her master had once said.

Above this world were thirty-six heavens. Below it, thirty-six earths. Spaces overlapped. Lives differed from realm to realm. The people, the land, the rules of survival—none of it was ever truly the same.

Had that stone dragged her into another overlapping space?

From then on, Iris Holden existed as nothing more than a ball of energy, drifting through chaos for who knew how many years.

No sun. No moon. No sound.

No hunger, no sleep, no way to count time.

Then one day, words suddenly appeared inside the stone.

Follow me and train!

Iris Holden was dumbstruck.

Train with who?

Train what?

Before she could make sense of it, the chaotic space seemed to wake up. Day after day, new things appeared in the air.

At first, they were simple body techniques.

Later came talismans, obscure and hard to grasp.

After that, there were diagrams of the human body—meridians, acupoints, methods of applying needles, and even ways to prepare medicinal formulas.

Back when she first entered the sect, she had only chosen divination to study.

But deep in that buried place, where the years passed without a trace, she learned bit by bit without even noticing. Mountain, medicine, fate, physiognomy, divination—she had touched all five paths in fragments.

What was recorded inside that stone was deeper than anything her master had taught.

As for whether it was useful or not, she truly had no idea.

After all, there was no one there to test it on.

So she remained in that deep pit under the earth, year after year, age after age.

Until today.

Today, all of a sudden, she felt a strange summons.

A pull.

A call.

Yes—a summons.

And then, for the first time in endless years, she saw the outside world again.

Someone was digging.

That shocked her more than anything else.

There was clearly living breath inside the coffin.

Why bury it?

The summons grew stronger and stronger, tugging at her spirit until her mind blurred. Then her vision swam. Everything before her eyes went white for a heartbeat.

When she opened them again, what was in front of her?

A coffin lid.

Because of publishing requirements, some changes were made to the text, but nothing major. Readers can rest easy and keep reading.