Cultivating Immortality Begins with Rejuvenation.

Chapter 1 Rejuvenation

"Master, are there really immortals in this world?"

Inside the Qingxin Hall of Zixiao Temple, eight-year-old Li Ji'an looked up with his clear eyes filled with a bit of innocence as he looked expectantly at the head of the hall, Liu Deshan.

quite a while.

"Similar! Too similar! Just like my junior fellow apprentice..." Li Ji'an didn't get an answer, but heard Liu Deshan muttering absentmindedly.

Li Ji'an couldn't help but let out a nostalgic smile, then he leaned forward slightly, not disturbing his former senior brother, who was now his master.

"May you be blessed with infinite happiness!" After a while, Liu Deshan came back to his senses and picked up the list again to look at it. His eyes, which had been a little cloudy, suddenly became clearer.

"Your common name is Li Ji'an?"

There was no need for Li Ji'an to answer. Liu Deshan looked at the information on the roster and his heart began to beat wildly.

Three days ago, while he was fasting and meditating, he heard that a child came with a token from his junior fellow disciple Chang'an Zhenren and wanted to become his disciple. Although he was in meditation and could not come out to meet him, he did not hesitate to order someone to admit the child into the Qingxin Palace as an exception.

As soon as I came out of the customs today, I called the little boy.

He was stunned at first sight...

And at this moment, he was almost certain that this must be the child of my junior brother!

"Hmph, you talked nonsense to me, telling me not to get married and have children, talking about red-faced skeletons, water moon and mirror flowers, and living a solitude and a carefree life. In the end... Fortunately, I didn't fall for your trick." He felt inexplicably refreshed. He didn't know whether it was because he knew that his junior brother had a successor or because he could finally expose his junior brother's shortcomings. Master Houde Liu Deshan seemed to be thirty years younger at this moment.

"Qingyun, come in." Master Houde, in a good mood, shouted outside the hall.

"Disciple greets Master." A fat Taoist boy of the same age as Li Ji'an walked into the hall like a meatball, trembling and sitting cross-legged on a cushion next to Li Ji'an.

"From now on, this is your junior brother. You must take good care of him and never bully him. You must treat him as a brother and a beloved friend." Liu Deshan warned seriously.

"Ah?" The chubby Taoist boy had obviously never seen Liu Deshan with this attitude.

"Oh, by the way, I haven't given you a Taoist name yet. Why not just call you Chang'an?" Liu Deshan pondered for a moment, then smiled. He has always been known for his steadiness. As he is in charge of ideological education in the Taoist temple, a hint of cunning appeared on his face.

"Chang'an?" Senior Brother, this is such a bad taste...

"Thank you for the name, Master." Li Ji'an bowed deeply.

"Chang'an, this is your senior brother Qingyun. In the future, no matter how you and the other brothers in the temple behave, you must have a deep brotherly love with your senior brother Qingyun and share weal and woe." Liu Deshan reminded him again.

Li Ji'an lowered his head and tilted it slightly, just in time to see Qingyun Taoist Child looking at him in the same way.

Three days ago, he had some doubts when he saw the little fat man from a distance, but now he has no doubts anymore.

The ancestral rule of Zixiao Temple prohibits marriage, but for more than a hundred years, this rule has basically existed in name only. Zixiao Temple is a temple for descendants, where the master teaches the disciples from generation to generation, and does not accept outsiders. After more than a hundred years, it has almost become a tradition passed down from generation to generation.

From the abbot to the deacons and disciples, most of them have a home in the county town ten miles away.

However, the previous master of Qingxin Palace, their master, Shangshan Zhenren, was an exception. He was pure-hearted and had few desires, and he kept to himself, so he accepted them as his two disciples.

"Looking at this kid's age, I wonder if Senior Brother got married before I even returned to secular life? Ha."

"Okay, Qingyun, take your junior brother to familiarize himself with the temple and explain some rules." Liu Deshan seemed to have something urgent to do. He did not answer the first question that must be asked to new disciples entering the temple. After hurriedly sending his two disciples away, he left Qingxin Hall with a happy face.

Although the little fat boy Qingyun looked fat, he was not slow in his movements. He pulled Li Ji'an and they reached the corner of the wall outside the hall in just two or three steps.

"Tell me the truth, are you also the master's son?" At this moment, Xiao Qingyun's face was a little red, and he seemed a little aggrieved, and it felt like he might burst into tears at the next moment.

“…” He looks just like my senior brother when he was a child, not very smart.

Li Ji'an shook his head decisively.

"Really? Phew~ I'm so scared. That's good. It seems my mom lied to me. How could dad have other women?"

Li Ji'an raised his eyebrows slightly, senior brother has also become bad.

"Okay, then you will follow me from now on. I will protect you from being bullied. Let me tell you a secret, but don't tell anyone else. It's my dad, this one!" The little fat boy smiled heartily and raised his thumbs up boastfully. He was very proud to have Liu Deshan as his father.

Ok.

Seeing the little fat boy proud of his father, Li Ji'an was happy for Liu Deshan from the bottom of his heart.

As a father, I should be content to be the pride of my son.

"Junior brother, this is the Jade Emperor Temple, the temple master's territory. The temple master is very fierce and stingy, so don't come here if you have nothing to do.

This is the Hongfa Hall. Every time they come down the mountain to perform rituals, they have lots of delicious food..."

The Zixiao Temple is not big, and it does not have the strict hierarchy of "three cities, five masters and eighteen heads" of those big temples. There is only one temple master, five hall masters, and the disciples and Taoist children in each hall together are no more than a hundred people.

Revisiting the old place seems like it was just yesterday.

"It's been fifty-four years without me noticing!"

Fifty-four years ago, Li Ji'an awakened his innate wisdom. At that time, he had been traveling through this world for eight years. He was born from his mother's womb and was eight years old!

The Immortal Dynasty, an unheard-of world of feudal emperors.

There is no need to elaborate on the sufferings of the people in feudal society.

However, when his innate wisdom was awakened, Li Ji'an was not self-pitying at all. Instead, he was full of confidence. He didn't even panic when he didn't have a system. With his twenty years of experience as a genuine reader of Qidian, he was very familiar with this kind of ancient imperial system script.

He initially decided to speedrun.

As a result, he was forced to drink a mouthful of incense ash and talisman water, as well as weasel blood...

It was not until he knew about the existence of warriors that he suddenly realized that it was a script of low-level warrior upgrade.

It is necessary to endure hardships, forbearance and even humiliation at the beginning.

He endured until his parents died and his fiancée broke off the engagement. He knew that his BUFFs were fully stacked and it was time for him to come out.

The son did not feel sorry for selling his grandfather's land. He sold all the acres of fertile land that the Li family had accumulated for generations, and went to the martial arts gym in the town with high spirits.

As a result... I still couldn't get started after a whole year.

Son of a rural peasant family, he had struggled to make ends meet since childhood, his body frail and unable to afford high-quality medicinal baths or tonics. Furthermore, the martial arts schools in town were of limited quality. Even with his money nearly gone and no entrance fee, he fiercely practiced martial arts, only to injure his lungs, leaving him coughing and wheezing like a sickly ghost.

Unable to survive in the town, he had no choice but to return to the mountain village in disgrace.

Fortunately, no one wants the mud house, so I still have a place to stay.

Eventually, he became a tenant farmer, with no food to eat and his hope fading day by day.

He lived in a daze, depressed, waiting for hope that he was not sure he would ever get… Until he was thirty years old, when he was about to give up, he woke up one day and unexpectedly found that all his illnesses had disappeared. All the negative states of his body that had been unable to bear the burden and suffered from overwork disappeared, and his body actually returned to the age of eight when he first awakened his wisdom!
The timeline hasn't changed.

Fearing that he would be treated as a demon, he fled the village in a hurry without even having time to surprise the late Golden Finger.

In ancient times, transportation was inconvenient and population movement was difficult, so people had to run back to town to look for opportunities.

However... before he could figure out the purpose of the golden finger, he was caught by human traffickers and dismembered alive!

Recalling this, Li Ji'an's heart suddenly twitched and his face turned pale.

Even though it had been twenty-seven years, and he had been rejuvenated once, and all the trauma in his body had been healed, the experience of those five years still haunted him with nightmares.

Fortunately, when he was thirteen years old, in Shangyi County, ten miles away from Zixiao Temple, Li Ji'an, who had a deformed arm and a wound on his back that would never heal and continued to fester, met Shangshan Zhenren, the former master of Qingxin Hall in Zixiao Temple.

Xiao Qingyun suddenly turned around and happened to see the fear on Li Ji'an's face.

"Don't be afraid, Junior Brother. I'm here." Clumsily protecting Li Ji'an behind him, Xiao Qingyun pointed at the statues in the hall and said hurriedly, "They're fake. They're all fake. They're all clay sculptures."

Coming back to his senses from his memories, Li Ji'an looked at Xiao Qingyun standing in front of him with a kind smile on his face.

After this incident, Xiao Qingyun no longer took Li Ji'an on sightseeing trips and decisively returned to Qingxin Palace.

However, just as he reached the side of the Qingxin Hall, Xiao Qingyun suddenly stopped and saw a group of fellow brothers from the temple waiting at the door, including a fellow brother from the Jieli Hall.

"Oh no! Was it discovered that I spit in the food of the Master of the Internal Affairs Hall?" Xiao Qingyun shuddered instantly and subconsciously hid behind Li Ji'an.

Wow~
Seeing the two figures, a group of people rushed over, each of their faces was full of anxious expressions, no longer the usual calm and indifferent Taoist demeanor.

"I was wrong, I was wrong. I won't dare to do it again." Xiao Qingyun was almost scared to tears. He took a few steps back, fell to the ground, and begged for mercy.

"you……"

However, after waiting for a while, he received no scolding and no one came to pull him away. Xiao Qingyun looked through the gaps between his fingers in panic.

But I saw that the group of people were actually surrounding Li Ji'an.

"You're not looking for me?" He breathed a sigh of relief.

"They want to bully me!" The next moment he was furious again.

"I'll go find my father." But he didn't dare to rush up to face these vicious people in the Discipline Hall.

"Huh?" Before he could tiptoe away, he saw that the group of people were half-kneeling beside Li Ji'an.

The anxious look on everyone's face was gone, and instead was filled with kindness and gentleness.

He even clearly saw the hideous-looking senior brother from the Discipline Hall squatting in front of Li Ji'an, gently stroking his head, tears welling in his eyes...

"Like...really too similar..."

"Junior brother...is your name Li Ji'an?"

"Li Jichang, no no, I mean, Uncle Changan is you..."

"Don't ask what you shouldn't ask!"

"Master uncle, is he... okay?"

……

Li Ji'an looked at these grown-up children and smiled with satisfaction.

Because he had been caught in the rain and his master had given him an umbrella, he was more willing to hold an umbrella for people who were caught in the rain.

Twenty-seven years ago, after experiencing five years of suffering in purgatory, he was brought back here by the True Man Shangshan. He was thirteen years old that year.

The five-year experience made him feel that this place was a real paradise, so he lived there peacefully and actively made suggestions for the development of Zixiao Temple. The original time traveler's mind was also immersed in the master's kindness.

During this period, relying on the knowledge from his previous life, he improved the phosphorus fire and smoke effects for the Hongfa Hall, and added tricks such as catching ghosts from an oil pan with bare hands, taking objects from the void, and holding real fire in the mouth. Through methods such as "brocade book hidden in the belly of a fish", "auspicious sign appearing in Zixiao", and "white jade turtle", he made the originally unknown Zixiao Temple become a hot spot among the dignitaries in Shangyi County, greatly increasing its revenue.

Based on this, the temple master agreed to set up a charity hall in the temple to shelter children who were born in misery but were unable to resist.

By the time Li Ji'an was thirty years old, he had personally rescued all eighteen children in the charity hall.

Ten years after separation...

Now the eldest child is in his twenties and has become the steward of the Discipline Hall.

A moment later, a group of Taoist priests kowtowed three times respectfully in the direction Li Ji'an pointed.

"Junior brother, you can come to us if you have any problems in the future."

"No one can bully you in the temple."

"We will all be brothers from now on..."

……

"Junior brother... he's so awesome? Why?"

Xiao Qingyun stared at the scene in amazement, not realizing that Master Houde had been standing beside him without him noticing.

"Because his father is, this!" Master Houde gave a thumbs up.

"Ah, Dad... Oh no, Master, you said... His dad is even better than you... in this?" Xiao Qingyun looked at Li Ji'an in awe, his eyes full of envy.

　Water does not compete for the lead, but for the continuous flow!

　　
　
(End of this chapter)