Eternal Ascent
He died defending a world that wasn't ready.
He woke up seven centuries earlier—in his sixteen-year-old body.
Asuta Kirigaya has lived and died across 700 years of war. As the immortal kingdoms descended upon Earth, he became its last, desperate defender—and failed. His final memory is of a mountain peak stained with his blood, surrounded by the cultivators who hunted him across lifetimes.
He opens his eyes in a high school classroom, to the sound of a teacher scolding him for falling asleep. The date is February 13, 2020. He has four years before history repeats itself. Four years before a wounded immortal from the Xi Kingdom crash-lands on Earth, bringing with him the dawn of cultivation—and an apocalypse that will drown the modern world in blood and spiritual fire.
Armed with memories of techniques lost to time and a soul tempered in centuries of battle, Asuta holds one advantage: the Divine God Body Sutra, a forbidden scripture that builds a foundation capable of challenging gods. But in a world devoid of Qi, power must be clawed back from nothing—one purified muscle, one painstakingly crafted pill, one whispered secret at a time.
As he navigates the fragile joys of a life he thought lost—his sharp-witted sister Ruri, his loyal friend Ken—shadowy organizations already sense the coming convergence. They hunt artifacts, hoard knowledge, and see Asuta not as a savior, but as a threat to be controlled or eliminated.
Four years to rebuild a god's body.
Four years to forge alliances in a world that doesn't believe.
Four years to prevent the future he already lived.
Time is the one enemy even an immortal can't outrun.
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OPTION 2: QUERY LETTER / LONGER SYNOPSIS
(More detail, shows the full arc and emotional stakes)
ETERNAL ASCENT is a 100,000-word progression fantasy / xianxia novel that blends the emotional weight and second-chance narrative of The Beginning After the End with the modern-day cultivation struggle of Cradle and the tactical preparation of All the Skills.
Asuta Kirigaya died at the end of the world. After 700 years of cultivation and warfare, he fell as Earth’s last guardian against the invading immortal empires. He wakes up not in an afterlife, but in his sixteen-year-old body, seven centuries in the past—on a mundane Tuesday in 2020.
He remembers everything: the cataclysm, the fall of nations, the death of his sister Ruri—the one loss that hollowed him across lifetimes. This time, he has four years to prepare for the arrival of the wounded Immortal from the Xi Kingdom, whose discovery of Earth will trigger both a spiritual awakening and an extinction-level event.
But Asuta is no longer the powerful cultivator of his former life. In a world still barren of Qi, he must rebuild from absolute zero using the only advantage he has: the memory of the Divine God Body Sutra, a brutal, foundational path that forges a mortal body into a divine vessel through agony and discipline. His journey is one of grueling physical tempering, clandestine alchemy using trace energies in herbs, and navigating the delicate ecosystem of high school and family he’d mourned for centuries.
Yet the past is not as silent as he hoped. Secret societies like the Elysian Foundation already scour the globe for emerging anomalies, and they take a keen interest in the suddenly insightful teenager with knowledge of “energetic cycles.” Asuta must balance saving his sister’s present while preparing for a war only he knows is coming, all as the cracks between worlds begin to show earlier than he remembered.
ETERNAL ASCENT is the first book in a planned series that explores the cost of foreknowledge, the weight of a second chance, and what it truly means to protect a world when you are the only one who…