Shennong, Stop Messing Around

Shennong, Stop Messing Around is an urban-life web novel by Nanshan Yinshi, serialized on Qidian and completed at 800 chapters and roughly 1.74 million characters. The electronic edition is produced and distributed by Yuewen Group (no print edition has yet been published). The protagonist, Wang Ping'an, was originally a direct disciple of Shennong. Attacked by enemies during his reincarnation, his soul was left incomplete, and he lived for eighteen years in a daze as "Er Sha" ("the Second Fool") in Wangjing Village, Huaxi Town. In a recurring dream, his master Shennong appears and reveals that, bound by a pact with the will of Heaven, he has created a "Shennong Assistance System" to help him repair his damaged soul and return to the immortal realm as soon as possible. Once his senses return, Wang Ping'an wants only to tend his own patch of land and live the lazy life of a salted fish, but this highly unreliable master and a noisy, meddlesome system scheme against him in turn, forcing him back to his old trade: watering fields with medicine buckets, ripening watermelons with a spirit spring, opening a peach orchard, and building a Chinese herbal medicine base. The superb produce nourished by the spirit spring makes Wangjing Village famous and draws the covetous attention of city medicinal merchants, unscrupulous businessmen and thugs, and greedy cultivators. So the disciple who declares he would "rather starve than farm" stuffs himself with the immortal food his master rewards him with while grabbing his hoe to deal with intruders in the fields. Farming, business, food, wit, and cultivation growth intertwine; rustic warmth conceals immortal-cultivation foreshadowing, and the plot escalates layer by layer amid lighthearted daily life, up to the finale's double ascension and return to the immortal realm.