That day, Lee Hyun returned to his cabin without selling his firewood.
He fetched water from a nearby stream, poured it into a basin, and peered down at the surface with growing unease.
The same face he had seen when he first awakened in this body twenty years ago stared back at him.
Aside from his sun-darkened skin and slightly longer hair, nothing had changed. There was not a single wrinkle around his eyes, and his hair was still pitch-black.
No matter how he thought about it, remaining completely unchanged after twenty years was not normal.
Had some glitch appeared in the laws of the world when he transmigrated? Or had the original owner of this body not been an ordinary human?
Lee Hyun rose to his feet and cautiously spoke into empty air.
"Status window."
Nothing happened.
"System."
A bird chirped outside the window.
"Open."
This time, the wind blew, making the cabin creak.
"What is this..."
Not aging was not a bad thing. But it frightened him.
If word spread that an ordinary person did not age, Lee Hyun would be as good as dead.
This was a xianxia world where cultivators existed. Why did they risk their lives cultivating? Was it not precisely to gain limitless lifespans and overwhelming power?
But what if a mere mortal who had not even entered Qi Refining already possessed a body that did not age? If that fact became known, the consequences would be beyond imagination.
'If word gets out, I'll suffer something worse than death... They'll steal my body, use me as an experimental subject, or refine me into a pill!'
Starting the next day, Lee Hyun grew out his beard and rubbed dirt and ash over his face. He even deliberately hunched his back whenever he walked.
But it was already too late.
Whatever Zhang San had said, word had gotten around. Whenever Lee Hyun came down to sell firewood, the villagers subtly studied his face. No one asked him outright, but their gazes held a mixture of fear and curiosity.
In the end, Lee Hyun decided to leave White Wood Village.
...
It was the cabin where he had lived for twenty years, but packing did not take long. An axe, a knife, a shovel, a hammer, a pot, and a few sets of clothes made up all his belongings. He wanted to take the wooden carvings he had spent so long whittling, but they were too heavy, so he left them behind.
Even after packing everything, Lee Hyun did not leave immediately.
He walked around the cabin and deliberately knocked down the fence. He carefully gouged scratches into the door so they resembled claw marks from a beast, then made a mess of the surroundings.
Next, he killed a mountain rabbit caught in a trap he had set several days earlier for food, then crudely splattered its blood across the cabin floor and threshold. He was making it look as though the place had been attacked by a ferocious beast such as a bear or tiger.
"Ugh... Sorry."
He was still not used to killing animals.
He looked back one last time at the cabin he had grown attached to.
He was reluctant to leave, but there was nothing else he could do.
Lee Hyun crossed the mountain before dawn.
***
The second place Lee Hyun settled was a remote mountain hamlet hundreds of li (1 li is about 400 m) from White Wood Village.
This time, he changed his name as well.
He introduced himself as Li Mo and claimed to be a wandering woodcutter who had fled from wild beasts. The villagers found him somewhat suspicious, but they showed little interest in a solitary wanderer.
Lee Hyun built a cabin near a cliff some distance from the village, then immediately began digging into the ground.
At first, he only intended to make a small cellar for storing food. There were many wild animals in the mountains, and if he kept food inside the cabin, they often followed the smell and came looking.
Once the cellar was finished, he carved out a space large enough for one person to hide.
Then it occurred to him that the entrance might become blocked, so he began digging a passage leading out the opposite side.
Digging through soil was manageable enough, but whenever he struck rock, he would struggle with it for days. He lit fires to heat the stone, splashed cold water over it to make it crack, then chipped it apart bit by bit with a small hammer.
As he dug the tunnel, Lee Hyun installed wooden support beams at intervals.
Lee Hyun did not hurry.
He had nothing in particular to do, and time was something he possessed in abundance. After twenty years as a woodcutter, he had grown skilled enough at the work to gain more free time, and he came to enjoy extending the tunnel little by little whenever he had a spare moment.
If he dug one ja (about 30 cm) today and got tired, he could simply continue tomorrow. After all, he had neither a deadline nor anyone waiting for him.
Several years passed like that, and the small cellar grew into a fairly long tunnel.
The end of the passage emerged beneath a thicket in the forest on the opposite side, and from outside, it was difficult to tell that an entrance existed at all.
To prevent animals from entering through the exit, he temporarily blocked it from the inside with piled stones and earth.
Lee Hyun stored food and firewood in the cellar, and on nights when the cries of mountain beasts sounded close, he simply slept inside the tunnel. It was damp and dark, but he felt safer there than in the cabin.
He also dug a small room deeper inside the tunnel, spread a thick layer of dry grass across the floor, and placed a water jar and dried grain there. It was preparation so that even if the entrance collapsed, he could survive for several days.
...
Time continued to pass as unfailingly as ever after Lee Hyun settled near the second village.
Another ten years passed.
Lee Hyun still had not aged.
He could no longer dismiss it as coincidence or imagination. His body was undeniably different from that of an ordinary human.
Then, one summer night, a tremendous boom rang out from the sky.
Lee Hyun woke from his sleep and initially thought it was thunder. But the next crash came from much closer than any thunderclap, and even the ground shook.
When he stepped outside the cabin, red and blue lights flashed across the night sky.
Two cultivators were fighting in the air far away.
One wore a long red robe, and enormous flames coiled around him like a dragon. Opposite him, a blue-robed man had dozens of blue flying swords arrayed in the air.
Every time the two gestured, streaks of light shot across the sky.
A blue beam grazed a mountain peak, and with a deafening roar, one side of the mountain collapsed.
The cultivator wielding the flames burst into laughter and hurled an enormous mass of fire.
Immediately afterward, part of the fireball was severed by the blue-robed man's flying swords and crashed into the mountainside. Dozens of trees erupted into flames at once, while earth and stone blasted upward as if exploding.
Lee Hyun stared at the scene with his mouth hanging open.
It looked more impossible than anything in the movies from his past life. Yet the scorching wind against his skin and the vibrations rumbling beneath his feet made it painfully clear that this was reality.
Then one of the fireballs came hurtling toward Lee Hyun.
"...!"
Lee Hyun dashed inside the cabin and yanked up the floorboards.
He threw himself straight into the cellar, shut the entrance behind him, and crawled deeper into the passage. His elbow scraped against a stone in the wall, but he had no attention to spare for the pain.
A moment later, the world turned upside down.
With a thunderous crash, the entire tunnel shook, and dust and fragments of stone rained from the ceiling. Lee Hyun flattened himself against the floor and covered his head.
Smoke and heat surged into the passage.
'I could die.'
Only then did Lee Hyun truly understand that agelessness was completely different from deathlessness.
Even with a body that did not age, there was no way he could survive an attack powerful enough to blast a mountain apart. If the tunnel collapsed, he would be crushed to death. If the flames reached him, he would burn to death.
He crawled all the way to the exit on the opposite side, moved enough stones aside to make a small air hole, then lay there catching his breath.
The battle continued until daybreak.
Lee Hyun lay near the exit, trembling without daring to move. He did not know who was fighting, why they were fighting, or who had won. The only thing that mattered to him was that while those two cultivators fought, a mountain that had nothing to do with their battle was collapsing and an equally unrelated forest was burning.
...
Only three days later did he make his way through the passage and return to the cabin side.
More than half the cabin had collapsed, and the surrounding forest was charred black. Black smoke was still rising from the direction of the village.
'Have I been thinking about this wrong all along...?'
Becoming a cultivator was dangerous. But staying a mortal was no guarantee of safety either.
Lee Hyun had no interest in power or fame. He had even less reason to cultivate for the sake of extending his lifespan. He already possessed an ageless body, after all.
Still, he found himself wanting to become a little stronger.
Strong enough not to be mauled to death by a mountain beast. Strong enough to escape if he encountered bandits. Strong enough to survive at least one stray blast if he were caught in a battle between cultivators.
That would be enough.
'Besides, I'm bored anyway... There's hardly anything fun to do in this world. Maybe cultivation would give me something to do?'
He still did not know whether he possessed a spiritual root, but Lee Hyun began to think that joining a cultivation sect might not be a bad idea.
Once inside, he could learn a cultivation method or two and, if possible, also learn how to grow spirit herbs or refine pills.
Then, when the time was right, he could secretly slip away from the sect, dig a tunnel somewhere deep in the mountains where no one would ever look, and hide there. Who would bother searching for an insignificant disciple like him?
Even if the sect branded him a traitor, he could simply remain hidden until everyone who remembered him grew old and died.
In the novels from his past life, spirit herbs became more potent the longer they were grown. Conveniently, time was one thing Lee Hyun had plenty of.
If it took ten years, he would wait ten years. If it took a hundred years, he would wait a hundred. There was no need for him to risk his life entering a secret realm in search of a thousand-year-old spirit herb like everyone else. He could simply plant seeds somewhere secluded and tend them at his leisure.
And so, partly to relieve his boredom, Lee Hyun decided to join a cultivation sect.
...
Even after deciding to join a sect, Lee Hyun saw no reason to rush. He repaired his collapsed cabin and continued his leisurely daily life. It was not until five whole years later that he finally chose which sect he would join.
During that time, he picked up stories from merchants at the marketplace and listened for rumors dropped by travelers at taverns.
After that long investigation, Lee Hyun chose a sect called Qinghe Valley.
Qinghe Valley was a fairly well-known sect in the southwestern region of the Great Yan Kingdom. It was not especially large, but it had a long history and a decent reputation among the surrounding people.
Most importantly, it specialized in growing spirit plants and spirit herbs.
Most of its disciples tended spirit fields and grew medicinal herbs, and it was said that there were also alchemists within the sect who refined pills. There were no rumors of conflict with other factions either.
It was the sect that came closest to what Lee Hyun wanted.
***
Two years later.
Hundreds of people had gathered below Qinghe Valley's Mountain Gate.
They ranged in age from children around ten years old to youths who looked nearly twenty. Some were family scions dressed in silk, while others were barefoot children in rags.
Including the applicants' families and servants, there were more than a thousand people present. The area below the Mountain Gate was as noisy as a marketplace, and throughout the crowd came the voices of parents holding onto their children and giving them final words of advice.
Lee Hyun mingled among them as he climbed the mountain path.
He had discarded the name Li Mo when he left the second village. At Qinghe Valley, he had decided to use his original name, Lee Hyun.
...
The first procedure was the spiritual root test.
An applicant placed a hand on a transparent orb, and the attribute and quality of their spiritual root were determined by the color and intensity of the light that appeared within it.
For most people, no light appeared at all. Anyone whose orb glowed even faintly was allowed through the Mountain Gate, while those whose orb remained dark descended the mountain with disappointed expressions.
Lee Hyun's turn approached.
Sweat beaded on his palm.
He carefully placed his hand on the orb.
A moment later, three colors of light blossomed inside it.
Blue, red, and yellow.
The Qinghe Valley disciple administering the test peered into the orb and said,
"Wood, Fire, and Earth. A triple spiritual root."
'I actually have a spiritual root?'
"Go through the Mountain Gate."
Following the instructions, Lee Hyun passed through the Mountain Gate.
Beyond the Mountain Gate, a curtain taller than a person screened off an enclosed area. The applicants who passed the spiritual root test entered behind it one at a time.
When his turn came, Lee Hyun stepped behind the curtain. Another Qinghe Valley disciple was waiting there with a bronze mirror in hand.
"I'll check your bone age."
Lee Hyun's expression stiffened.
"My bone age?"
"People occasionally lie about their age. Anyone over twenty-five is only accepted as a menial disciple unless they possess exceptional talent."
Light poured from the bronze mirror and swept over his body. A warm sensation seemed to flow along his bones, and then characters appeared across the mirror's surface.
The disciple administering the test read the result indifferently.
"Bone age, nineteen. Pass. Go out the other side."
'I really haven't aged!'
When Lee Hyun froze in surprise, the Qinghe Valley disciple waved a hand irritably.
"Didn't you hear me? The test is over. Move along."
Lee Hyun came back to his senses, stepped out through the other side of the curtain, and entered Qinghe Valley.