For those who just want the sauce first: Immortality Begins With Internal Breathing

Hey everyone! I'm the translator behind APTE, but today I want to give a shoutout to what I jokingly call APTE's clone novel: IBIB. And why I say that is because the novel is literally named the same in Chinese 长生从内练呼吸开始 (IBIB) / 长生从炼丹宗师开始 (APTE). Same naming pattern, just a different starting point. That's honestly what made me pick it up in the first place; I kinda want to see the difference myself, lol.

TL;DR IBIB follows Lin Zheyu, a transmigrator who wakes up in the body of a malnourished man in the Great Wei Dynasty. Technically, the original body owner's merchant family gets wiped out while fleeing bandits, leaving him stranded in Songyi City with barely a few coins to his name. So when Lin Zheyu transmigrates, he's basically dirt poor, and the only way he can survive is by working as a teahouse storyteller. And this is what I found particularly interesting because he uses knowledge from his previous life, retelling famous stories and legends to audiences who have never heard them before, earning tips just to scrape by. (Ngl, this part reminded me a bit of Jaskier from The Witcher. You know, the guy who's always singing songs and telling stories.) Lin Zheyu basically does the same thing at the start, except he's not doing it for fame. Dude is flat broke and just trying to earn enough money to eat. So he starts recycling stories from his previous life and telling them to the locals for tips, which I thought was pretty fun.

Much like Luo Chen, he also has a system called Heaven Rewards The Diligent, and instead of giving him free power-ups, it rewards him every time he pushes his body past its limits. Honestly, IBIB and APTE feel like siblings. Both are transmigrators with systems, start in disadvantaged bodies with no powerful clan backing them, and have to grind from the absolute bottom just to survive. To be fair, the writing style is pretty similar too. But the vibe and the cultivation path are different. APTE starts in a full-fledged xianxia world with heavy economics and the whole survival hustle. IBIB, on the other hand, leans more on wuxia. The MC spends a long time dealing with poverty, local politics, and martial arts before the immortal cultivation side gradually opens up. If you've ever wondered what it'd look like to swap out alchemy for something else, this is that.

Quick heads-up, though; if you're going in expecting APTE's power scaling, the MC in IBIB ends up noticeably more OP than Luo Chen down the line. He picks up something called Origin Force, which he can keep stacking and use to upgrade his martial skills directly, so the power curve gets steeper than APTE's once that kicks in. Doesn't ruin the slow burn at the start, just don't expect it to stay equally grounded. 

But like what I've said, early Lin Zheyu and early Luo Chen honestly aren't that different. One is calculating how many spirit stones he has left; the other is calculating whether he can afford his next meal. Neither of them starts strong; instead, the other way around.

I've always liked stories that don't rush from one power-up to the next. I enjoy it when authors slow down and let the world breathe. IBIB does that exceptionally well. It spends time on the small details: the smell of crowded streets, the strain in Lin Zheyu's throat after an entire day of storytelling, and the little hiding spots where he stashes his money because he's terrified of losing everything.

If you want to see what an "immortality starts from xxx" story looks like when alchemy is swapped out, IBIB is worth a read.

Anyway, enough yapping from me. Say less: https://www.wuxiaworld.com/novel/immortality-begins-with-internal-breathing