At the foot of the low-lying Little Qing Mountain lay a paddy field. The rice plants shimmered like green jade, clearly no ordinary crop.
Unlike ordinary rice paddies, each plant here was given its own pit, with not a single weed in sight, and the stalks were planted sparsely.
It was early afternoon, and the heat was scorching.
A young man in a green shirt, not quite an adult, struggled to carry a bucket of water with both hands. He approached a rice stalk and carefully poured the Spirit Water from the bucket into the dedicated pit beside it.
The sweltering heat had soaked most of his green shirt, and his forehead was covered in a dense sheen of sweat. The beads rolled down his cheeks, merging into larger drops before falling to the ground.
As he bent to pour the water, beads of sweat from his forehead and the bridge of his nose trickled down to the tip and dripped into the pit.
The standard requirement was one bucket of Spirit Water per pit each day. More was acceptable, but any less and the Spirit Rice would suffer all sorts of problems from a lack of Spiritual Qi.
The Spirit Well wasn't what you would call far, but it wasn't close, either. A round trip took about six minutes on average.
In an hour, he could only tend to ten stalks, and that was if he worked without stopping.
The plot of Spirit Rice he was responsible for contained exactly one hundred stalks.
Working nonstop, it took nine to ten hours to complete the task.
Factoring in breaks, meals, and weather delays, he had to labor for nearly twelve hours—a full half of the day—just to complete his duties.
After emptying another bucket, Zhang Deming found the heat unbearable. He set the bucket down and sat under the shade of a nearby tree.
He had already lived this way for ten years. It had been eighteen years since he'd arrived in this world.
His first few years in this world hadn't been so bad.
At the age of eight, he was tested and discovered to possess a Spirit Root, but his aptitude was poor—a mere twenty-one points.
Spirit Root aptitude was capped at one hundred points, and the minimum standard for acceptance into the Celestial Spirit Sect was twenty-five.
Those with twenty to twenty-five points could only start as servant disciples, and recruitment was restricted to the immediate vicinity of the Celestial Spirit Sect's main gates.
Shuanghe Town, where Zhang Deming lived, was outside this range.
By all rights, he should have had no hope of joining the Sect, not even as a servant disciple.
However, in a rather cliché twist, the girl he had been betrothed to since childhood, the little tyke he was raising to be his wife, Pan Juan'er, possessed a Spirit Root of fifty-nine points.
Such aptitude was considered genius-level, even within the Celestial Spirit Sect.
Therefore, at Pan Juan'er's tearful insistence, an exception was made, and he was accepted as a servant disciple.
Thinking about it now, Zhang Deming couldn't help but feel a bit wistful.
As a programmer in his past life, he'd been rather clueless when it came to romance.
By the time he was twenty-eight, he was still single and had only ever been in one relationship.
Having learned his lesson, when he found out in this life that he had a child fiancée, he began a conscious effort to 'cultivate' his little wife-to-be, hoping to execute a successful 'relationship-raising plan'.
He thought this life would be the whole package: childhood sweethearts, a lifelong partner, and a happily-ever-after.
Who would have thought that after raising her to the tender age of eight—still jailbait, he mused—his prospective wife would just up and fly away...
After that, there were no more cliché dramas between him and Pan Juan'er. For ten years, it was as if they had simply vanished from each other's lives.
The Elder who accepted Pan Juan'er as his disciple had made it crystal clear to Zhang Deming back then: the engagement was off.
With his adult mindset, Zhang Deming understood the power dynamics at play. It was a shame, sure—the little girl he'd been 'raising' had flown the coop before she'd even matured—but that was all there was to it.
After his previous life's materialistic rat race, where prospective dates demanded a car, a house, and a healthy bank account, this dose of reality was small potatoes.
Ten years passed in a flash, and he had no further contact with the girl.
To prevent any future complications, Pan Juan'er's master had dispatched him to a remote corner of the sect—Little Qing Mountain—to cultivate Spirit Rice.
With the higher-ups setting the tone, he was subjected to a period of harsh discipline during his first few years.
However, thanks to his adult mentality, he weathered that period without too much difficulty.
After the local Steward's attempts to curry favor with his superiors by hassling him led to nothing, Zhang Deming was mostly forgotten. While his treatment remained strict, it fell within the normal range, and no further trouble arose.
Time flowed on like a river; ten years went by in the blink of an eye.
In those ten years, he had grown into a young man. But as a Transmigrator, the 'golden finger' he had been waiting eighteen long years for had yet to make an appearance.
'Damn it, isn't every Transmigrator supposed to get a golden finger? Am I some kind of Fake Level version? Or did I just accidentally hitch a ride on the overcrowded transmigration bandwagon when I coded myself to death from overwork?'
Zhang Deming stared at the paddy field before him, his heart sinking with discouragement.
'My fate is my own, not for the heavens to decide'? 'I was born to be extraordinary'?
All those cliché, inspirational thoughts had been ground to dust over the past ten years by this single plot of land and its one hundred stalks of rice, smoothing away all his sharp edges.
Life was a butcher's knife. If it couldn't cut you down in one swift stroke, it would just slowly grind you down, wearing away all your edges.
Forget anything else; he couldn't even treat this world like a historical setting and kickstart some industrial development.
He'd discovered over the past ten years that the Sect could have easily automated much of this grueling labor with Arrays and other means, yet they used none.
Many of these tasks, he realized, were meticulously designed to be this way. It was all intentional.
He rested for a moment longer, then glanced at the last ten stalks of Spirit Rice.