He sees a sky full of stars. Each star is unique and gleams under its own pace, but one star in particular pulls Feng Xing's attention to it. It shines so brightly that it almost overshadows the stars around it.
Then, as if the bright star is shining too much, it moves and starts to fall. Like a forcibly plucked fruit from a tree, it falls from the sky and directly onto a mountain. It burst into a blanket of light that covered the mountain, but soon dims down until there is no more uniqueness on the mountain. The mountain remains standing, and the star is no longer shining so brightly that it overshadows the sky.
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Feng Xing wakes with a start and a gasp as if he's been dropped from a height and bracing for an impact with the ground. He spends a few seconds lying down while calming his frantic heartbeat, and then sits up. He scratches his head and looks around the cheap inn room he rented for twenty copper coins a night when he had nowhere else to go last night. The place is dinghy, rickety, and at the very edge of Green Peace town. Worthy of being only twenty coins a night.
The sun is already up and pretty high in the sky, the speck of its radiance had long barged into the room through the thin paper window, and it is enough to banish any desire to go back to sleep when it landed right on the bed.
No wonder it only cost twenty copper coins, the innkeeper had made sure to design the feng shui of this room to be as horrible as possible so the renter could wake up early and immediately leave.
Feng Xing gets up from the bed and takes off his robe. This is his clean robe, and he will only wear it to sleep, not for other things.
He changes his clothes and ties up his hair. He checks his money again, after yesterday's expense plus the inn, he's left with six hundred and thirty coins. About one-tenth of his savings is gone in just one day, but he can't find himself regretting it. He gained a lot yesterday from reading all those books about cultivation, although he didn't get the luck of finding a book that explained how to cultivate or even a cultivation manual, he still read a lot of exciting things.
He's off to a good start.
"Now." Feng Xing straightens up. "To look for a sect." And for that, he needs to hitch a ride.
He leaves the inn without any formality and buys a plain pancake from a peddler to fill his stomach before leaving the town. Although Greenpeace town is ten times bigger than his home village, it is still a very backwater place in the grand scheme of things. The person with the highest cultivation in the town is the town mayor's son-in-law, and even the,n he's only a Foundation Building guy.
After reading so many cultivation webnovels, Feng Xing knows just how small this is. So that means nothing worth learning more in Green Peace Town, and he leaves confidently.
Does Feng Xing know where his destination is? No. But this is more exciting for him. The fear of the unknown? That doesn't exist within Feng Xing. He doesn't know a lot of things, if he fears the unknown, he couldn't live at all. The lack of knowledge makes him eager to learn rather than be intimidated.
"Is a sect better or a solitary master better? Hm, whichever it is, as long as they get me," Feng mused, lost in thought.
"A man must have his own thought and path. But I don't like being too alone..." Feng Xing belatedly realizes just how much he loves interacting with people. In his previous life... sigh. He could only interact with medical personnel, so he filled his time with reading. In this life, there are almost no entertaining reading material,s and he always has his family and friends in the village to spend time with.
The two days he spent alone in the journey to Green Peace town were very excruciating. If he has to continue this kind of lifestyle of traveling in silence, he will probably forget how to speak. It will be ideal if his master is talkative so they could talk, but what if his future master is an aloof, silent type?
The more Feng Xing thinks about it, the more he favors entering a sect. At least he will not be so lonely, right? Although there are cons to being in a sect, such as his future master might have a lot of disciples and can't focus on cultivating him alone, unlike a wandering lonely master who can focus their entire attention on him as he's likely their only disciple, even the resources will be divided in the sect.
Both ideas have merit, and while Feng Xing is busy fantasizing which option is better without counting in the fact that he doesn't even know if he can cultivate or not, he steps on a rock and his ankle rolls.
"Wha—" Feng flails and tries to catch himself from falling face-first on the ground. He staggers back instead but accidentally steps on his bad leg again, causing him to lose his balance and stagger even further, creating a chain reaction of him trying to catch himself from falling and his foot repeatedly sabotaging him.
Crack...crack...
Feng Xing's eyes widen when he hears the ominous sound, and he turns his head to see a cliff covered by thin vines, awfully close to where he's standing. Green Peace town is situated near a mountain and has a pretty high altitude for a town, there are numerous cliffs to the north of the town, and one of them is right behind him.
His face blanches immediately, and his heart rate shoots through the roof.
He accidentally steps on his right foot again, and the pain that shoots up from his ankle makes him instinctively want to jump away from the edge of the cliff, but another crack resounds, and the ground under Feng gives up.
"AAAAHHHH!!" Feng yells out but his voice doesn't last long, swallowed by a gust of wind that rustles the leaves of numerous trees, suppressing his yell from traveling far.
Feng runs out of air from screaming before he can even reach the bottom of the cliff. 'I'm dead.' Feng Xing closes his eyes. His one regret is that he has yet to have the chance to be filial to his parents in this life, and he blames himself for being clumsy.
SPLASH!
Instead of the unforgiving ground, water cushions Feng Xing's fall.
Feng Xing spends a few seconds underwater before he breaks to the surface, gasping. "Hah! I'm... I'm alive!" Feng Xing spits out water and then realizes he's actually moving and not just floating still.
Unexpectedly, there's a river at the bottom of the cliff. The river's current is not weak and but it's not so strong that it will pull someone in. Feng Xing doesn't panic. There's a river in his own village and he was a naughty and playful kid who always played in it. He adjusts his breathing and floats with the river's current.
Feng Xing relaxes as he assesses his situation. In his opinion, this isn't so bad. He has no plan on which direction he should go anyway and he's determined to be adventurous. So far, he hasn't been suddenly attacked by an aquatic predator, he counts this as a win.
Feng Xing peacefully floats down the river, as still as a log, not even predators lurking in the coursing water realize the presence of a very much alive prey floating on the surface.
The Cliff of Desperate Demise claimed almost every single soul that fell down into it, but Feng Xing is not one of them. This fact will not be known by anyone, including Feng Xing himself.
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