Li Fan could not remember the last time he had truly looked at himself.

The image that came to him instinctively was the frail, scholarly youth of twenty.

It made sense. No matter how his appearance changed over the course of a given life, activating Return to Truth would bring him back to that anchor point, and with it, that same face. For Li Fan, aging was essentially a false proposition. Old age, sickness, death—those things all living beings dreaded were temporary states he could shed at any moment.

He regarded the changes occurring within his own body with a certain indifference. How much more indifferent, then, was he toward the teeming masses of the Xuanhuang World?

Kou...