Ren Guang was a native of Shangcai. He was good at making cinnabar pills and sold them in the city markets, accumulating this practice for 89 years. It was then that people realized he was the former Ren Guang of olden times. Everyone said his appearance looked as if he were in his dozens, but later the elders recognized him, and Zhao Jianzi invited him to return together. He often resided on Huanti Mountain; three generations did not know where he was located. The people of Jin often took his cinnabar pills.

Ren Guang’s cinnabar pills represent one of the oldest traditions in Taoist practice — the use of refined mineral substances to preserve life and slow aging. This art of refining numinous cinnabar was a cornerstone of early Taoist alchemy, later evolving into the inner cultivation practices explored in Taoist inner alchemy.

His 89 years of selling pills unrecognized in the marketplace places him alongside the great hidden immortals of the Lie Xian Zhuan. Like Anqi Xiansheng, who sold medicine along the Eastern Sea for a thousand years, and Gui Fu, whose cassia pills were still available in Jingzhou generations later, Ren Guang’s immortality was expressed not through dramatic miracles but through the quiet, sustained gift of healing.

Ren Guang of Shangcai was able to refine divine cinnabar pills. His age surpassed the qiyi milestone, yet his face remained radiant with youthful complexions. He soon went to Zhaozi and was freely allowed to settle wherever he wished. He ascended the track of Huanti, soaring high into the clouds.

The image of Ren Guang soaring into the clouds from Huanti Mountain connects him to the great ascending immortals of the Lie Xian Zhuan. Wang Ziqiao rode a white crane to the mountaintop before waving farewell to the world below — both figures completing the same arc: years of hidden cultivation in the world, followed by a final, luminous departure. In the Taoist vision, the sage does not escape the world; he graduates from it.