Once upon a time, there was one who became an immortal by the will of heaven.

He was born of humble origins, the son of a courtesan, but his only older brother embraced him. As a child, he considered his brother the most precious person in the world. He laughed by his brother's side, walked in his footsteps, and believed they would grow old together.

But it was all a lie.

On the day his brother ascended to heaven, laughter vanished from his life. After waiting ten years, his brother showed him their mother's corpse and said:

"I hate you. Everything was ruined after you were born."

Those words were so deep they split the child's very soul.

He was the one holding the sword that day, but even years later, he could not say why he swung it. When he came to his senses, his brother lay collapsed in a pool of blood.

Heaven called him a sinner.

They stripped him of half his celestial power, dragged him from his seat as an immortal, and cast him down to the human realm.

He lived for two hundred years after that.

For the first ten years, he resented the world. For the next ten, he hated himself. And after that, he had no strength left to hate anything at all.

There were days he starved himself to die. There were days he collapsed in the mountains. But the immortality of a celestial being would not let him go until the very end.

Then, an old man picked him up and took him to a tavern.

"Why does a young man sit there looking like a dead person?"

The old man forced a spoon into his hand as he sat in silence. Then, until the night grew deep, the old man rambled on about his family.

He listened without a word.

It was the first time he had listened to someone's story until the end, and the first time someone had given him a meal.

Before leaving, the old man pointed to a dilapidated mountain shrine.

"If you have nowhere to go, try that place. There's no better place than a shrine to clear one's mind."

He headed there.

And there, he met a man.

The man clung to him, weeping, with a sick daughter in his arms.

"Master, please... please save my daughter."

"I am no Taoist master."

He brushed the man's hand away.

But the man's crying lingered in his ears. It sounded just like his own weeping on the day he was dragged from heaven two hundred years ago.

Ultimately, he placed his hand on the child.

With his remaining celestial power, he drew out the sickness.

The man bowed his head again and again.

"Thank you. Truly... thank you."

That night, he drew his sword alone.

The blade that had finally been pointed at himself was lowered to the floor.

He wept.

It was the first time in two hundred years.

Only then did he realize.

It wasn't death he had wanted.

It was simply family.

Someone to laugh with over trivial things, someone to worry when he was sick, and someone to cry for him.

And so, he remained on that mountain.

Time passed, and people began to call him a Taoist master.

He asked no questions, healing the people's illnesses, tending to lost children, and offering meals to travelers who sought shelter under his eaves on rainy days.

Then one day.

A newborn infant was found in the courtyard of the shrine.

He took the child into his arms.

Though the roar of a white tiger echoed from deep in the mountains, he did not hear it.

He did not know then that this child was the last family to come to him in his remaining life.