The group had parted ways with Kafka in front of the library after they had thanked him profusely.

  Once they got back to their cultivation tombs, they felt exhausted after their long day, and said goodbye to each other and each went into their abode.

  Seph immediately went to his bed and fell face first on it; the mattress was really nice and soft, and he felt relaxed instantly.

  He then repositioned himself to sleep but found that his mind was a whirlwind of thoughts, about everything they saw today, there were a lot of things that he wanted to get and even more that he wanted to do, and this was just the start of his cultivation journey; he couldn’t even think of how many things he would need in higher cultivation realms.

  He felt more confident about his friendship with Lilith; she wanted to be with him as much as he wanted to be with her. He wasn’t sure though what to make of her flirtatious jokes, and he wasn’t sure if he had feelings for her, but they had all the time in the world to figure out their feelings.

  He got up off the bed and checked his father’s library and found an interesting book he could read to clear his mind so that he could fall asleep.

  The title was: Contemporary Guide to the Traveling Cultivator.

  The book was written by Xu Zhang.

  He opened the first chapter, which looked to be an introduction of the writer.

  My name is Xu Zhang. Periodicals around the world call me the most traveled person in the world, but I don’t care for such titles, and I don’t think I have traveled enough yet.

  There is so much more of this world that I would like to see, there are a lot of historical locations around the world that I would like to visit, and there is a lot of unique ethnicities, tribes, cities, and villages that I would be honored to get to know.

  I have dedicated my life to exploring as much as I can of this world, but the limitations of my mortal prison will probably deprive me of ever visiting Shen Zhou: the land of the gods.

  If you read a book by me before this one, then you know that I always start my book with a revised chapter introducing our world, I learn new things that I add and sometimes I find out I was mistaken about some things that I remove from my newest book.

  I am sorry for that, but I hope that doesn’t dissuade you from our journey of seeking more knowledge about both our mortal world, and the world of Jianghu: the secret world of cultivators that goes side by side with ours even if most of the time we are not aware of its existence.

  Something that makes me sad about this introductory chapter each time I write it is that it’s not even the beginning of our history. There was a vast history before our modern history that we know nothing about.

  We found texts from older civilizations in languages that we know nothing about. We have seen insignias of countries or empires that no longer exist, most prominently the insignia of the golden scarab with the golden sun behind it, or the insignia of the multiple crossed weapons in a circle, a sword, a spear, a bow, a hammer, and a magic staff.

  I think both are from around the same time, but what story could the indecipherable text tell us?

  Regardless, I have no power over the unknown, but all I can do is tell you the latest tale of how our world came to be in the latest revision.

  Ten thousand years ago, we were one continent, with many people, even though Shen Zhou was always Shen Zhou; even back then it had its own unique status, and I’ll tell you why later.

  Excluding Shen Zhou, our land was called Hetu, or Harmonious Land.

  People in this land lived a good life for a long time, there was still strife between the different countries or the different feudal lords, but it wasn’t bad, as the Qi energy in the land was equal for most parts, there wasn’t a lot of chances for people to become much stronger than the rest to create a despot country or ruler.

  So, mostly, politics ruled, and the public was better for it.

  But suddenly, a calamity befell the land and changed the face of our world forever.

  A huge earthquake hit the western half of Hetu, and its reverberations literally changed our map.

  The western most part which got hit the worst fell three thousand meters under where it used to be, luckily for its inhabitants — those of them who hadn’t died from falling debris or fissured ground or the various other catastrophes that happened because of this calamity — the fall of the western part of Hetu was slow, not an instantaneous thing or all the inhabitants would have died making the calamity even worse than it already was.

  The survivors rebuilt after the calamity, and this new fallen land came to be known as Luo Gu, which means the Fallen Valley.

  Their conditions became much worse than what they were used to, though; their fall, which drove them further away from the heavens, made the Qi energy very low in their midst.

  And this literally affected all living beings, cultivators couldn’t get above core creation anymore, animals didn’t grow big and strong and full of resources for the mortals anymore, and the trees and plants stopped being as fruitful as they used to be in Hetu.

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  But as usual, humanity overcame its new circumstances, and they learned to thrive with what they had.

  The mortals prospered but formed either feudal lands or tiny countries.

  The cultivators prospered and formed new sects that lived in secrecy away from the mortals.

  A smart reader will ask me at this point: didn’t any high-level cultivator get stuck on Luo Gu, which would put them in a position to become the strongest man in Luo Gu?

  Well, dear reader, let me ask you, why should they stay in Luo Gu?

  A high-level cultivator leveling in an area that’s low in Qi saturation is like suffocation for us mortals when we reach extreme heights...

  So, even those who got stuck on this side immediately left and went back to Hetu, but it wasn’t known by that name for much longer after the accident.

  Before the calamity Shen Zhou was above Hetu with 5000 meters, after the calamity Shen Zhou got completely separated from Hetu, but instead of going down or at least remaining at the same level as before, the land of Shen Zhou literally flew in the air: 2000 more meters, the saturation of Qi energy allowed it to float, and made it an even more impossible dream for most cultivators.

  The cultivators in the last three levels of cultivation didn’t remain in Hetu, most of them immediately flew to Shen Zhou never to be seen again, since even Hetu lost some of its Qi saturation to Shen Zhou which was even more of a heaven to the highest cultivators in Jianghu at that point.

  I said most of them because one remained. Rumor had it he tried like the rest, but heavenly lightning kept hitting him, sending him to crash down to Hetu each time he tried to go back to Shen Zhou.

  After so many desperate attempts, the mysterious cultivator gave up.

  Unfortunately for the inhabitants of Hetu, he didn’t give up on life; he just gave up on that task and thought of a new task.

  I am sure he was thinking something along these lines: “If I can’t go back to Shen Zhou anyway, and I am the strongest man in Hetu now, then I should conquer Hetu.”

  And that’s how the name of Hetu changed to Zongguo, which means middle kingdom.

  The cultivator subdued the entirety of Zongguo and changed its name.

  Rumor has it he used to go by the name of The Scarlet General, but after he conquered middle kingdom, he became known to the public by the name of The Scarlet King, nobody knows his story, nobody knows what he looks like, and he is a pretty hands-off ruler, he never shows up or interferes in the affairs of the land.

  Seph freaked out when he read the name of the scarlet general; he thought, could it be him? Of course it must be him; who else could it be? Should I tell Lilith? Nah, I think that’s a horrible idea. She would be obsessed with him, and we are obviously nowhere close to his level; we must be living in Luo Gu. We have a long way to go to reach middle kingdom. I’ll tell her when we are about to go there; it wouldn’t be useful if I messed up her life with this information right now. I feel this book made me stay up than fall asleep, which is the opposite of why I opened it initially. But I have to at least read this next part before I sleep.

  He then continued reading the rest of the introductory chapter.

  If the king has orders, his army carries them out, and he has a few powerful cultivators serving under him who must have thought it better to be with him than against him.

  So, the land runs smoothly by the system he created, and he stays away from the public eye.

  If there was a way to save Fallen Valley from its new position, it was lost forever after the radical changes that The Scarlet King had made.

  He didn’t care about the wellbeing or prosperity of Fallen Valley. Honestly, except for people who had lost their relatives and entire branches of their family to that calamity, nobody really cared what happened to Fallen Valley anymore.

  It became an exciting, scary tale to tell your grandchildren, nothing more.

  After sufficient time had passed, the Qi saturation of the middle kingdom returned to its past levels and even higher, which made the entire region prosper, probably it was Fallen Valley’s lost energy, found its way to middle kingdom and the change was welcome by everyone.

  The last part of the world that the inhabitants of Fallen Valley and Middle Kingdom never saw is Shen Zhou, the land of the gods.

  Let me just set the record straight here; it’s not the literal land of the gods. The gods live on a plane much higher than even Shen Zhou.

  As we have said before, it’s seven thousand meters above the middle kingdom; only the last three levels of cultivation could reach it, and when they do, they never look back.

  I have never been there, so all I am telling you is secondhand information from various sources. My dream is to go there, but I am just a mortal. I won’t even survive the lack of breathable air at that height.

  There is a lot of fantastical tales of Shen Zhou that we will get into in the last section of this book — We will get into the new fantastical tales I learned anyway, if you want older tales check my past books, if you can’t find them, you can send me a letter and I’ll order one made especially for you.

  But Shen Zhou isn’t all rainbows and sunshine; there are regions with extreme heat or extreme cold, extreme wind or lightning storms that will scorch a mortal in a single minute.

  All visitable only by cultivators and after much preparation.

  But there are places where mortals could live safely, just nobody could ever afford to find a method of transportation there.

  The most important hallmark of Shen Zhou is the Spire of Ascendance.

  A tall natural tower in the middle of Shen Zhou that you could use to climb straight to the heavens; only those in the last stage of cultivation could survive the journey.

  But in order to limit the mortals from ascending, the heavens allow only one to ascend every one hundred years.

  Another condition is to climb the tower on foot, which is a long journey that takes years, but at that stage those immortals have nothing more than time in their hands.

  The issue is that if more than one attempt to climb the spire, the heavens won’t let the ascender in until he knocks anybody attempting to climb the tower completely off of it.

  And since cultivators are known for their incredible tenacity, the only way to make sure this cultivator doesn’t climb again, you would have to kill him or her.

  There are many strategies for how to climb the tower, though there are even theories for how two could climb the tower together and enter the heavens together, nothing more than rumors and hypotheses though.

  We will never know where the truth lies, but I’ll keep searching because I am a seeker of knowledge, and maybe one day I’ll be rewarded by entering Shen Zhou.

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