Immortal Travel of Longevity

On the first day, he opened his eyes.

By nightfall, the world had already begun to slip away from him.

Cursed like a mayfly in reverse, he lives in fragments: one waking day, then three silent years drowned in sleep, then another brief return to a life that has kept going without him. Seasons turn while he dreams. Dynasties falter. The tea shop on the corner becomes a ruin, then a shrine, then dust. Each time he wakes, the air smells a little different, the language shifts, and the faces he remembers have grown old, or moved on, or vanished into incense smoke.

To the immortals who watch the river of time, this strange pattern looks like enlightenment. Only a great master, they whisper, would be so detached from the mortal world, surfacing for a single day as if to taste the Dao and then withdrawing again. They come to him with offerings and questions, bowing to a wisdom he does not possess.

He knows better. It is not transcendence that holds him; it is the Mayfly Curse, a petty, vicious knot in his fate.

By sheer chance he crosses paths with a true cultivator, and for the first time he sees a narrow road forward. Between sleep and waking, between being revered as a sage and knowing he is only a victim, he begins to cultivate in earnest, clawing for a way to break the cycle.

Every return costs him: friends turned into ancestors’ names, love stories reduced to half-remembered scents in the autumn wind. To chase longevity, he must walk through a life made of goodbyes.