At Least the Home Is Still There

When Chen Xuan opened his eyes, he heard a woman speaking in a low voice beside him.

“Today is your twenty-eighth birthday. Mom bought you a little cake. Since you can’t eat it, I’ll have a bite for you.”

“You used to love sweet things when you were little. I wonder if your tastes have changed after lying here all these years.”

The woman kept muttering as she worked. A warm towel moved over Chen Xuan’s arm, then along his wrist, slowly wiping between his fingers.

She was very practiced at it.

She had repeated these motions for ten years.

Chen Xuan did not speak right away.

Above him was a slightly yellowed ceiling. The air was filled with the mingled smells of disinfectant and medicine. An IV bag hung to his right, clear liquid dripping steadily through the tube.

He tried to turn his head, but his neck felt as though it had rusted solid. Even the slightest movement tugged at every muscle in his body, bringing with it a fine, persistent pain.

This body was unimaginably weak.

Chen Xuan closed his eyes and tried to sense his dantian.

Empty.

The Golden Core, Nascent Soul, and primordial spirit he had cultivated over decades—all the spiritual power he had amassed, along with the divine sense that had once covered dozens of miles of mountains and rivers—had vanished without a trace.

He remembered falling into the Sea of Gui Xu. One protective treasure after another had shattered, while his physical body was slowly torn apart by the astral winds of the void. At the final moment, he had finally seized the Immortal King’s inheritance, but he himself had also reached his limit.

His last memory was of the Immortal King’s remnant soul transforming into countless golden characters. They had wrapped around his primordial spirit and fused into his body.

When he awoke again, he was here.

His cultivation was gone.

Fortunately, his memories remained.

Sixty years of life-and-death battles, along with his knowledge of alchemy, formations, medicine, talismans, and artifact refinement—all of it remained crystal clear in Chen Xuan’s mind. So too did the entire legacy mastered by the fallen Immortal King throughout his long life, which had been passed on to him by the remnant soul.

Chen Xuan slowly shifted his eyes toward the woman beside the bed.

She wore a gray jacket that had been washed until it had faded white. Her thin body was slightly stooped. Her hair was simply tied behind her head, and most of the hair near her ears had already turned white.

She was looking down as she wiped his hand, unaware of the change in him.

Chen Xuan stared at her for a long time before finally recognizing the familiar outline beneath her aged features.

The mother in his memories was not yet forty.

Every morning, when he and his younger sister left for school, she would always chase them out from the family shop and press warm milk into their hands. Whenever the temperature dropped, she would stand at the door and urge them to zip up their coats.

But the woman before him looked nearly sixty.

Chen Xuan’s throat moved.

A simple syllable emerged as little more than a faint breath.

“Mom…”

Zhou Lan’s wiping hand stopped.

She lifted her head and looked around the hospital room, thinking she must have heard wrong.

Chen Xuan looked at her and called out again.

“Mom.”

His voice was still hoarse, but it was much clearer than before.

Zhou Lan froze. The towel slipped from her hand and landed on the floor with a soft slap.

She stared at Chen Xuan’s open eyes. Her lips trembled, and the hand she reached toward him stopped in midair. She did not dare touch him.

“Little Xuan?”

Chen Xuan wanted to nod, but his feeble body would not allow even that. He could only blink.

“It’s me.”

Tears suddenly welled up in Zhou Lan’s eyes.

She grabbed Chen Xuan’s hand as though trying to confirm that this was real, yet she did not dare squeeze too tightly.

“Little Xuan, you’re awake. You’re really awake? Tell me quickly—is this not a dream?”

Chen Xuan’s fingers struggled to bend. He brushed them against her palm, covered in cracks, and forced out a weak smile.

“You’re not dreaming.”

Unable to contain her emotions, Zhou Lan covered her mouth. Tears streamed down her cheeks.

She wanted to call for the doctor, but when she stood up, she was so overwhelmed that she slammed hard into the solid bed rail with a bang and nearly fell.

Ignoring the pain and the bruise already forming, Zhou Lan ran out of the room and rushed toward the doctor on duty.

“Doctor!”

“My son is awake!”

Footsteps quickly echoed through the corridor.

The doctor on duty hurried into the room with two nurses. They first checked Chen Xuan’s pupils and physical responses, then took out a penlight and asked him to move his eyes according to their instructions.

“What’s your name?”

“Chen Xuan.”

“How old are you this year?”

Chen Xuan fell silent for a moment.

According to his memories, his life in this world had stopped on the day he finished the college entrance examination at eighteen. A car had lost control and mounted the sidewalk. His fifteen-year-old younger sister had been standing in front of it, too frightened to move.

He had shoved his sister out of the way, and then lost consciousness himself.

In the cultivation world, he had spent sixty years.

He had no idea how much time had passed in the original body that belonged to him.

Zhou Lan stood to one side, her hands clenched tightly together.

“Eighteen.”

Chen Xuan did not give the answer he had just heard.

The doctor glanced at him and continued questioning him.

“Do you know where you are?”

“In a hospital.”

“Do you remember why you were hospitalized?”

“There was a car accident.”

The doctor asked several more questions, and Chen Xuan answered every one accurately.

After the examination, the doctor still looked unable to believe what he was seeing.

“The patient’s consciousness has recovered. At present, there are no obvious problems with his thinking or memory. He had no awareness or memories during the coma, so psychologically, he is now only eighteen years old. You should keep that in mind when interacting with him. As for the rest, we’ll have to wait for the results of the brain scans before arranging a neurological assessment.”

Zhou Lan nodded repeatedly.

“Doctor, will he be able to stand again?”

“He’s been bedridden for too long, so the muscle atrophy is severe. His joint function will also need to be examined further. Recovering consciousness is already an excellent result. Rehabilitation will have to proceed gradually. Don’t rush it.”

The doctor glanced at Chen Xuan on the bed before adding, “His body managed to hold up without developing severe bedsores or joint deformities. That shows how well you’ve cared for him all these years. It hasn’t been easy for the family.”

The doctor’s words of affirmation instantly soothed the bitterness Zhou Lan had endured for the past decade.

She wiped the tears from her face, and her expression finally relaxed.

“Little Xuan, don’t worry. As long as you’re awake, it doesn’t matter whether you can walk again. Mom is willing to support you for the rest of your life.”

Chen Xuan looked at his mother without saying anything.

He noticed that Zhou Lan’s face was pale, dark circles lay beneath her eyes, and her lips lacked color. Whenever she gripped the edge of the bed, her right hand trembled faintly and uncontrollably.

Her qi and blood were severely depleted. Her heart meridians were damaged, and her liver and kidneys were showing signs of weakness as well.

All these years had already worn her body down.

After the doctor and nurses left, Zhou Lan took out her phone. Her hands trembled so badly that she mistyped the number several times.

When the call finally connected, she began crying before she could even speak.

“Old Chen, come to the hospital quickly.”

The person on the other end said something, and she hurried to explain.

“It’s not that something happened to Little Xuan. He’s awake.”

“Our son is awake!”

The hospital room was very quiet. Chen Xuan could clearly hear the heavy breathing from the other end of the phone.

Only after a long while did a trembling male voice come through.

“Keep an eye on him. I’ll be right there.”

Zhou Lan hung up and sat back down beside the bed. She seemed to have a lot to say, but now that she was truly facing her son—who had only just awakened—she no longer knew where to begin.

In the end, she bent down, picked up the towel from the floor, and washed it again in the basin.

“Are you hungry? The doctor said you still can’t eat just anything. Once the tests are done, Mom will make you some porridge.”

Chen Xuan asked, “I’ve been lying here for ten years?”

The movements of Zhou Lan’s hands slowed.

“Ten years and three months.”

“What is this place?”

“The rehabilitation building of Jiangzhou First Hospital. You had a lung infection last winter and spent more than ten days in the intensive care unit. Once your condition stabilized, they transferred you here.”

Afraid that Chen Xuan would worry, she deliberately made it sound less serious than it had been.

But Chen Xuan could hear the danger hidden in her words.

“Were I always at home before this?”

“Mm. It was more convenient for you to stay at home. Your mother turned you over and massaged you every day, while your father washed you and changed your clothes. Later, we moved here. The room is a little smaller, but it gets plenty of sunlight.”

Chen Xuan didn’t dare look into his mother’s eyes. Instead, he gazed out the window and asked, “What happened to the old house?”

Zhou Lan lowered her head and wrung out the towel without answering.

“And the shop? You sold that too?”

This time, even her hands went still.

Chen Xuan already knew the answer.

The hardware store his father had run for more than a decade, along with their family home, had both failed to survive these ten years.

Zhou Lan forced a smile.

“We can always earn back a house once it’s gone. What matters most is that people are still alive. Your father kept saying that as long as you still had breath in you, we couldn’t give up.”

She folded the towel and set it aside.

“But things are better now. Heaven has blessed you and you’ve woken up. That proves all our efforts weren’t wasted. From now on, our lives will surely get better little by little.”

Chen Xuan looked at the white in her temples, and it felt as though a stone had been placed on his chest.

Sixty years ago, when a mine foreman had broken his ribs, he hadn’t cried. Later, when he had been hunted for seven straight days over a Foundation Establishment spirit medicine, he had dragged himself into the Mass Burial Valley with half his life hanging by a thread. Even then, he hadn’t found it particularly difficult to endure.

In the cultivation world, no one had ever shielded him from anything.

When he was injured, he had to survive on his own. When he was hungry, he had to fight others for food. The weak were lucky if they could leave behind a complete corpse.

But when he thought of how, in this world, his parents had guarded a completely unresponsive body for ten whole years—losing everything they owned, watching their hair turn gray, and exhausting themselves both physically and mentally…

Two lines of tears slipped unconsciously from the corners of Chen Xuan’s eyes.

“What is Dad doing now?”

“He’s helping someone watch over a warehouse. It isn’t too tiring.”

“And my sister?”

At the mention of his daughter, Zhou Lan instinctively looked away.

“Yanyan is twenty-five now. She’s been working for years. She works the night shift, so she should still be asleep. I’ll tell her once she wakes up.”

Chen Xuan remembered that Chen Yan had been only fifteen the year of the accident.

The little girl had just started her third year of junior high. Every time she argued with him, she would deliberately set her bowl down heavily in front of him at mealtime. On the day the car hit her, she had still been bickering with him.

Now she was twenty-five.

Ten years were enough to turn a child into someone entirely different.

As the two of them spoke, the hospital room door was suddenly shoved open with great force.

Chen Jianguo stood in the doorway, still wearing the dark-blue work clothes of the logistics park, with dust clinging to his trouser cuffs. He was much thinner than Chen Xuan remembered, his back no longer straight. His right leg also moved awkwardly as he walked.

Supporting himself against the doorframe, he first glanced at Zhou Lan, then turned his gaze toward the bed.

Chen Xuan called out, “Dad.”

Chen Jianguo’s Adam’s apple bobbed. He hurried to the bedside. His right leg could not bear much weight, and he staggered as he walked, but he never stopped.

When he reached the bed, he reached out with trembling hands and touched Chen Xuan’s forehead, then his cheek, just as he had when Chen Xuan was a child and he had wanted to check whether his son had a fever.

“You’re awake. That’s all that matters.”

Chen Jianguo said only that before his eyes reddened.

He quickly turned away and wiped his eyes under the pretense of taking off his jacket.

“What did the doctor say?”

Zhou Lan explained the results of the examinations. When Chen Jianguo heard that Chen Xuan might eventually recover the ability to walk, he nodded repeatedly, murmuring, “Good… good…”

After his joy subsided, he took out his phone and glanced at the time.

“I’ll go pay what we owe and ask about the schedule for the examinations.”

“Do you still have any money on you?” Zhou Lan asked in a lowered voice.

“I borrowed five thousand from Old Zhao. I’ll pay him back when I get my wages tomorrow.”

“Yanyan just transferred twenty thousand yuan today. I haven’t touched it yet,” Zhou Lan said hesitantly.

They had continued sacrificing their daughter’s happiness and dragging her down for the sake of their son, and that was something neither of them wanted.

Chen Jianguo frowned.

“Send it back to her.”

“We still owe the hospital money, and the examinations require payment too.” Zhou Lan had no idea what else they could do.

She knew that they couldn’t allow their daughter to feel indebted forever simply because her brother had saved her life back then.

Every cent their daughter had earned over the years had gone toward paying for her brother’s medical treatment.

But if this continued, the rest of her life would be trapped in a dead end.

“Even so, we can’t take any more of her money.” Chen Jianguo glanced at the hospital bed and lowered his voice even further. “She already gave the family fifteen thousand last month. She’s only a waitress—where could she get so much money? I heard the place where she works isn’t exactly clean. I’m worried that girl…”

He couldn’t continue. His heart was filled with concern for his daughter.

Yet he didn’t dare ask her directly.

Zhou Lan fell silent as well.

Chen Xuan heard every word clearly.

Realizing that he was awake, Chen Jianguo turned around and smiled.

“Don’t worry about these things. We have enough money at home. Just focus on getting better.”

Chen Xuan didn’t ask any further questions.

This body was far too weak. Even speaking a few sentences left him pausing to catch his breath. Now that he knew the truth, there was nothing he could do about it. He had to recover as quickly as possible before he could take action.

After Chen Jianguo left to pay the fees, Zhou Lan’s phone rang.

The screen displayed the name “Yanyan.”

Zhou Lan answered the video call. The image shook several times before a young woman’s face appeared.

Her features still bore some resemblance to the little girl Chen Xuan remembered, but her hair had been dyed chestnut brown, and her face was covered in delicate makeup. The lights around her were dim. Golden decorations lined both sides of the corridor, and music and laughter could be heard in the distance.

“Mom, did you pay the hospital bill?” Chen Yan asked. She still sounded somewhat sleepy and languid, as though she had only just woken up, washed, and done her makeup.

“Yes.” Zhou Lan turned the camera toward the hospital bed. “Yanyan, look who this is.”

Silence fell on the other end of the call.

Chen Yan stared at Chen Xuan, who had opened his eyes, and froze as though someone had turned her to stone.

After a long while, she finally called out hesitantly,

“Brother?”

“Yanyan, you… you’ve grown… so big. Bro… Brother can hardly… recognize you anymore.”

After forcing out those words with difficulty, Chen Xuan smiled and lay back down.

Tears spilled from Chen Yan’s eyes without warning. She hurriedly lowered her head and wiped them away with the back of her hand, smearing her makeup.

“Brother, you’re awake?”

“Mm.”

Chen Xuan looked at her and managed to squeeze out a smile. He even reached up and pinched his own cheek, clearly gesturing for Chen Yan to pinch herself as well—to prove that she wasn’t dreaming.

Chen Yan was stunned for a moment. Then she began laughing through her tears.

“It’s been ten years, and you’re still just as irritating as ever.”

She slipped around the corner of the hallway, doing her best to keep her voice calm.

“Bro, wait for me. I’ll ask my supervisor for the night off and head to the hospital right now.”

As soon as she finished speaking, someone offscreen called out, “Yanyan, you just got up and already have a customer. Boss Zhou’s private room wants you to deliver some drinks. What are you hiding over there for?”

Chen Yan turned and answered, then hurriedly said into the phone, “Mom, I have to get back to work. I’ll come by later.”

“Take your time,” Zhou Lan said quickly. “Your brother just woke up and needs to rest.”

Chen Yan nodded.

She was about to end the video call when the man offscreen urged her again, his tone already growing impatient.

Chen Yan’s expression stiffened noticeably. She quickly ended the call.

The hospital room fell silent once more.

Zhou Lan set the phone face down on the bedside table and got up to put away the basin.

Chen Xuan asked, “Where does my sister work now?”

“At a hotel.”

“What hotel?”

Zhou Lan did not turn around.

“The Royal Court. She serves tea and drinks there and promotes the liquor. The pay is pretty good. She’s clever, so she won’t let anyone take advantage of her.”

Chen Xuan committed the name to memory.

He asked no more questions and slowly closed his eyes.

Night pressed in through the hospital window, and the city lights fell across his pale face. No one knew that his consciousness was inspecting this sleeping body along a complicated route.

His meridians were blocked, his qi and blood had withered, and even the functions of his internal organs were far weaker than those of an ordinary person.

There was almost no spiritual energy to be sensed in the outside world.

With a body like this, even possessing the Immortal King’s inheritance, he could not conjure magical power out of thin air.

Chen Xuan was not in a hurry.

Among the Immortal King’s memories was a most basic cultivation method called the Primordial Nourishment Scripture. It had originally been used to temper the bodies of sect disciples who had yet to begin drawing in spiritual energy. It required no spiritual energy, relying only on breathing and food to gently nourish the qi and blood.

Although it was far less efficient than absorbing spiritual energy, it was perfectly suited to his current condition.

Chen Xuan adjusted his breathing.

At first, every breath caused a dull ache in his chest. As his breathing gradually slowed, he finally sensed a faint warmth spreading from his heart. It flowed slowly along his dry, obstructed meridians and toward his limbs.

On the cardiac monitor beside the bed, his previously weak heartbeat began to stabilize bit by bit.

A dozen minutes later, Chen Xuan opened his eyes again.

He raised his relatively feeble left hand.

For some reason, this hand was even thinner than his right. As he slowly exerted himself, his palm gradually lifted away from the bedsheet. Though it rose only a short distance, it did not fall back down.

With her back to the bed, Zhou Lan was still organizing the items he would need for tomorrow’s examinations and did not see any of this.

Chen Xuan stared at his hand and slowly clenched it into a fist.

This body needed food, medicinal herbs, nourishment, and enough time to recover. His parents’ illnesses had to be treated, his debts had to be repaid, and his little sister had to be brought back from that place.

As for his cultivation, he could start over.

Sixty years ago, he had possessed nothing in the cultivation world, yet he had still managed to survive step by step after beginning as a slave in a mine.

Now, at least, he still had a home.