Dust-Calamity: A Journey in Reverse

In a mud-brick house in a frontier town, the orphan Chen Mo chewed on bitter wild roots and watched the streaks of light from cultivators cut across the horizon. His fingernails dug deep into his palms. This was a cultivation world strictly governed by the "rules of Heaven": spiritual roots determined one's aptitude, cultivation techniques were ranked by quality, and a chasm separated mortals from the path to immortality. All his parents had left him was a copy of Notes on the Hundred Crafts, missing pages and filled with rudimentary instructions for pottery and ironworking. No one could have guessed that this seemingly useless miscellany would let Chen Mo glimpse the secret of "Heaven and Earth as a furnace, all things as its materials." He grasped the flow of the Fire element in the blue smoke from a blacksmith's quenching vat, observed the paths of the earth's veins in the cracks of a pottery kiln, and contemplated the Way of Balance in the markings on merchants' scales. While cultivators from prestigious clans were trapped by their ancestral techniques and Heaven's rules treated all living beings as pawns, this youth who had crawled up from the mud forged immortal arts from the crafts of common folk and challenged the heavens with worldly wisdom: "If Heaven's Way is a set of rules, then I'll be the one to change them!"

This novel and its characters are entirely fictional. Any resemblance to real people or events is purely coincidental. Do not imitate.