For three thousand years, snow has drifted over the summit of Kunlun. No one knows how the snow leopard who severed his own tail to pursue the Dao climbed the Stairway to Heaven.
He is Yuanshi Tianzun’s sharpest blade, the only demon among the candidates for the Twelve Golden Immortals. While Taiyi Zhenren sleeps drunkenly on his cloud bed, Shen Gongbao is carving open a dragon’s belly to take its spirit pearl. And when Nezha cries, “My fate is mine to decide, not Heaven’s,” Shen Gongbao has already torn open the Investiture of the Gods to win the demon clans of the Three Realms a sliver of hope.
“They say prejudice is a mountain that cannot be moved?” The dark-robed Daoist stands beyond the shattered Thirty-Third Heaven, the God-Slaying Spear lifting the bloodstained Investiture of the Gods. “Then I’ll cleave the mountain to make a road and burn the heavens to make a bridge!”
From a young leopard who severed his tail on the far northern snowfields to pursue the Dao, to a demon immortal who stained the Lingxiao Palace with the blood of a saint, Shen Gongbao spends seven thousand years laying out a defiant game against Heaven. The swapped spirit pearl is the key, the Dragon Clans of the Four Seas are his pieces, and Nezha’s demon pill is the fuse. What he means to blast through is the wall the entire Three Realms built, the one called “bloodline.”
When azure demon fire burns atop the throne of the foremost of the Twelve Golden Immortals, the immortals who mocked him for his beastly appearance finally see the truth:
Where the Heavenly Dao collapses, there stands a figure who refuses to bow.
