Can humans cultivate immortality?

Definition1607 words

Two answers, and they do not contradict

Ask this question and you get two answers that never meet. One is a promise, the other is a record, and the two are usually argued as if a reader had to pick one.

The genre answer is yes. Immortality is the premise, and the books are named after it. A character with a usable body and a right method is expected to climb until he is above death. The plot is the climb, and the reason these books run past a thousand chapters — 1,648 for Battle Through the Heavens, 2,014 in the long count of Perfect World — is that nobody arrives quickly.

The real-world answer is no. No method has produced a person whose body stopped aging. No practice has produced a spirit that came back with a message. The long-lived masters in the stories are hagiography, not records, and most are remembered by people who never met them. Two of the biggest entries in that hagiography — Zhang Sanfeng, said to have reached 218, and Li Qingyun, 256 — were recorded by disciples who outlived the paperwork, not by doctors who examined the body.

The two are not actually in conflict until a reader tries to make one pay for the other.

The ladder, seen from the outside

The genre spreads the impossible part over many rungs so that it looks earned. Nine of them, in the standard ladder, and the lower ones get named in every book. A practitioner starts in Qi Refining, which is itself split into nine layers, where he learns to hold energy at all, then moves to Foundation Establishment, where the body is rebuilt to keep it rather than leak it. In the books, maybe three candidates in ten clear that second step. Nobody quotes a figure for the third.

Above that the names turn grander, and the rungs stop being about the body. The qi that was loose in the lower stages is pressed until it takes a shape, and a practitioner in the Golden Core stage can feel the thing sitting in his lower belly like a second heart, a pellet the size of a bean that took thirty to a hundred years of preparation to form. Each stage costs more than the last, and the payment is almost always the same currency: time alone, and enemies who now know where you sit. Cultivators who reach it go quiet in public and stop explaining themselves.

The upper rungs do the genre's best work. There the physical problem turns philosophical: a character who can leave his body has to decide what a body was for. Anyone who has spent decades behind a closed door has already learned what a body is worth, which makes the choice sharper. The internal-alchemy manuals put the same arithmetic in plain numbers — a hundred days to build the foundation, ten months to carry it, three years to nurse it, nine years facing a wall — and the novels borrowed the schedule without the wall.

The three bills

Here is where the fiction gets honest, usually without admitting it. An old cultivator who has outlived four generations of disciples treats immortality as a debt with instalments.

The bill in time. The first bill is time. Everyone the character knew dies while he does not, so the rare return home becomes a horror scene. The second is attention, because a long-lived person with power is worth more to a house than a short-lived one.

He goes back after a century and finds a memorial stone with his own name on it. In the novels the stone usually has the wrong date carved on it, and the error is the scene. Handled badly, he shrugs. Handled well, he sits in the courtyard until the chapter ends.

The second bill arrives from the living. Houses want him recruited or dead, his own elders want him studied, rivals want him surpassed. Many books turn this into literal hunting. The best ones ask what that turns a person into, and the answer is rarely noble.

The bill in the sky. The last one lands when he tries to leave. Immortality is a wager his body keeps having to win, and every so often the world sends an invoice, which the genre calls a Heavenly Tribulation. It is a tariff charged in lightning, and the amount is set by what you have already taken. The last tribulation is usually written as nine bolts, and the ninth is the one nobody describes in detail because the description is a corpse.

Immortality that is not Ascension

The genre has a distinction that gets lost. Living a very long time is one thing. Ascension, the act of leaving the world entirely, is another. Books that blur the two lose a good question.

A character who lives a thousand years in the same world still owes taxes, still has neighbours, still has to explain why he has not aged. That version produces the best scenes, because the immortal keeps meeting people who will not outlive the week, and a reputation is the one thing he cannot refurbish. A neighbour who knew him as a boy will treat him as a boy for the next sixty years. Four generations of grandchildren, one face.

A character who ascends is gone. The chapter before it is usually the best one in the book. He stays a few more nights, and the reason is always the same: someone he met in a valley town will be dead before the climb finishes, and he wants one more meal first. That meal is the true cost. Power is what you keep. Company is what you spend. An ending costs readers, and the ladder is cheaper to extend than to finish. After the climb, a cultivator in the Nascent Soul stage can walk the same market a century later and find the stalls exactly where they were, with nobody behind them who remembers his face.

Why the dream curdles on the page

Immortality as a wish is simple. As a story it is hard, because a story needs change and a character who cannot die changes little. So the change must come from elsewhere.

Authors solve this in three moves. Make death come back anyway — betrayal, errant qi, something worse. The immortal can die; it is just rarer. Make the stakes social — if the hero cannot lose his life, he can lose his sect, his name, his standing, and many books quietly relocate the tension there. Make the climb endless — there is always a higher world, the most common move and the least satisfying, because it converts an ending into a sequel.

The first two produce good books. The third produces long ones.

The bill nobody puts in the title

The cost readers argue about most is the ending.

A wish granted in chapter one has to be paid off, and the payment is rarely the character's death. Lightning barely marks him now. So the price moves outward, onto the people he was climbing for. He ascends and the story continues where his old life means nothing. He stays and the world below becomes scenery, because a man who has seen the top stops hearing the market. Either way the book needs a new problem for a person who no longer has the old ones.

The novels that run long tend to solve it the cheap way. Give him a new world halfway through the serial, another one four hundred chapters later, and the old companions come back as cultivators a couple of realms stronger than they should be. The reader notices. The reader keeps reading anyway, which is the other thing these numbers are about.

What a good ending has to solve

An ending has to answer what the plot has been avoiding: what is he still doing here. Not why he exists, which the setting settled, but why he bothers. A character who has outlived everyone who ever wanted anything from him has to want something for himself, and most series are written by people who never had to face that, so they hand him a bigger map instead: a higher realm, a new sect, a war among gods.

The books that get this right tend to end on a small scene: a gate, a meal, a name spoken by someone who does not know what it is worth. That is why the best of these stories stop before the top, and the worst never stop at all. Mo Dao Zu Shi finishes in five volumes, and the last one is quieter than the first.

Sources & References

• Campany, Robert Ford, Making Transcendents: Ascetics and Social Memory in Early Medieval China (University of Hawai'i Press, 2009) — hagiographies of the long-lived, and what their communities needed from them.
• Robinet, Isabelle, Taoist Meditation: The Mao-shan Tradition of Great Purity (SUNY Press, 1993) — the internal practices the ladder borrows for its lower rungs.
• Cultivation Glossary — the stage names used above, including Qi Refining and Foundation Establishment. https://cultivationnovel.com/glossary/realms/