The End of the Immortal Path

The cow speaks first.

Jiang Man is ankle‑deep in river mud, clutching a bundle of stolen robes to her chest, when the placid brown cow chewing beside her lifts its head and tells her she’s doing it wrong.

Not the stealing. The destiny.

Moments ago, Jiang Man fell out of her own life and straight into someone else’s cultivation story—a world of spirit beasts, celestial sects, and fate written in glittering strokes across the sky. She’s read this all before, or something close to it: the bullied side character forced to survive by theft, the mild‑eyed fairy bartered away in a marriage contract, the talking animal that sees more clearly than any immortal.

Except now the thief is her.

As Jiang Man scrambles through courtyards in borrowed clothes that never quite fit, she keeps catching scenes like shards of a broken mirror: a fairy bride practicing her wedding smile until it doesn’t shake, disciples whispering in corridors, the cow’s warm breath on her wrist as it mutters prophecies no one asked to hear. Every path around her has already been walked in the story she half‑remembers—each choice leading toward someone else’s tragic ending.

The sect calls it ‘following the immortal path’. The cow calls it nonsense. Jiang Man calls it a trap.

To protect the fairy who never wanted this marriage and the stubborn beast who won’t stop talking, Jiang Man has to step off the neat line fate drew for her. And in a world built on cultivation toward eternity, there’s nothing more dangerous than someone who no longer believes in becoming immortal at all.