Questioning Heaven, Desiring the Way

“Cultivation to become an immortal, cultivation to become an immortal.
Immortals are heavenly beings in the first place, so who came up with the idea of being able to cultivate Immortality?”

“It turns out that mankind, the so-called superior race, is nothing but an experiment to them.
What a joke.”

“Suihan, did you know? The Way…is alive.”

“Ahh!” The young man woke up with a start.

He panted and licked his chapped lips, then downed the cup of tea next to him.
His body shuddered as he felt the cold tea go down his throat.

“Young Master, did you have a nightmare again?” The maid sleeping soundly in the adjacent room had been woken up by the young man’s shout, so she had gotten up and walked into his room with a lantern to check on him.
When she saw his pale face covered in perspiration, she quickly grabbed a handkerchief to wipe his face.

“I’m fine.
It’s an old problem.” The young man pushed the maid aside gently and got up.
Color slowly returned to his face.
He asked softly, “What time is it now?”

The maid carefully wiped away his perspiration, took a look at the sky, and replied, “It’s somewhere between 3 and 5 am1, so you can still sleep for a while more.”

The young man took the handkerchief from the maid and gave his face a few quick wipes.
Then he said calmly, “Never mind, I’m going to get changed and sit in the pavilion for a while.
It’s still early, so you can go back to sleep.”

A short while later, the young man strolled towards the pavilion with a bottle of wine in his hand.

The young man’s surname was Gu, and his full name was Gu Suihan.
He was seven years away from becoming an adult2.
His family had a monopoly over the entire city’s rice supply, so even though they weren’t super-rich and powerful, they were undoubtedly a well-to-do family.

The Gu family had three sons and two daughters.
Gu Suihan was number four in the family.
The eldest had become a court official three years ago and was now the Executive Secretary of this state.
The second son was waiting to take over the family business, while the third sister had already gotten married the year before.
The youngest daughter was only seven years old this year, so she was at the height of both innocence and playfulness.

Compared to all of them, Gu Suihan was more accomplished.
He could walk at six months, could read at one, and apparently, he was the one who named himself Gu Suihan at two, which earned him a beating from his parents.
Several other incidents would have made others deem him a genius.
Still, nobody knew that Gu Suihan had merely inadvertently revealed some of his abilities in his quest to understand this world more quickly.

To the people of this world, the name ‘Suihan’ was synonymous with a prodigy.
But to the people on Earth, this name was synonymous with a notoriously vicious and coldblooded wicked man.

As for why he was in this world…it wasn’t because of some ridiculous transmigration process or because he had been reborn.
It had happened because he was conducting an experiment on Earth.

Suihan had spent 300 years collecting treasures from around the world and was even willing to wipe out families and massacre cities to do so.
After that, he spent another hundred-odd year arranging all these things into a formation that covered the entire continent.

He did all this only because he wanted to know if immortals truly existed.
The billions of souls that once belonged to a living thing were the energy source for this formation, but all he could see were a few blurry snippets in the long river of history.

Yet, this thing that had no beginning or end turned out to be the thing that quietly awakened the young man’s understanding of the Way of Heaven.
But when it came to a mere mortal like Suihan, someone who had barely any power but desired to understand the truth behind history, the Way of Heaven decided to get rid of him without any hesitation.

The result was obvious.
The things that Suihan had relied on – those precious treasures and ritual tools that he had taken away by force and the magic weapon3 he had spent close to a thousand years refining – were turned into dust in an instant from the fury of the Way of Heaven.

The fact that he was close to becoming an immortal meant nothing in the face of the Way of Heaven.
Suihan had no choice but to use his trump card.
He self-imploded, abandoning all his years of cultivation, and even endured a searing pain that was a million times more painful than being skinned alive4 or being tied to a burning pole5 as he forcibly tore his soul into eighty-one parts, hoping that it would be enough to fend off the attack from the Way of Heaven for even just a while.

After that, the remaining consciousness of his soul, which was barely the size of a palm, was wrapped in a strange piece of animal hide as it rushed into a space-dimension teleporting formation.

But that attack that seemed able to pierce through the space dimension was only blocked for a moment before it smashed hard onto the formation plate of the teleporting formation, which destabilized the spatial passageway.
Suihan could only hope for the best as he squeezed into the nearest crack in the space dimension.

Thanks to that piece of animal hide, Suihan successfully got through that crack and came to this world.
It took him a lot of effort to finally find the newborn baby of the Gu family.
And just before his consciousness disappeared completely, he took over the baby’s body.
As for the animal hide that had gone through so much danger and disaster to protect Suihan’s remaining consciousness, it had slowly disappeared into nothingness when Suihan passed through the crack.

Gu Suihan put the bottle of wine down on the stone table, wiped a finger against the lip of the bottle to wet it, then drew a few strange symbols.
These symbols seemed meaningful yet nonsensical simultaneously as if they contained a strange concept within.

These symbols were none other than those on that animal hide that had already disappeared.
They were also the reason behind Suihan’s madness.

That piece of animal hide had a few thousand symbols on it, and despite Suihan’s best efforts, he only managed to find out the meaning of a few dozen of them.
None of them seemed connected to one another, and he didn’t know what any of them really meant.
But when his Master was struggling to survive the heavenly tribulation when he ascended to immortality6, he had clearly seen in his Master’s eyes endless despair and…great sorrow.

In the end, his Master had died.
While he was supposedly receiving the aura that only immortals had7, his Master had imploded his own soul to barely make a crack in this aura and threw a jade slip8 at Suihan before being completely destroyed.

Only one sentence was carved onto the jade slip – Heaven is alive!

These three simple words struck terror in Suihan’s heart then, and one might wonder why.
Anyone who cultivated knew that one needed to go through many disasters in life and survive tribulations to attain longevity.
Only then would