A Bao, a boy from a riverside village, has a hidden mark of reincarnation between his brows. Beneath an ordinary fishing net lies a thousand-year-old scheme of an immortal sect. When the dormant Dragon-Subduing Stele rises once more from the heart of the river, the cause and effect linking the suppressed essence of the flood-dragon clan to the Black Sun Sect's secret art of raising flood dragons drags the young net-caster into the darkest whirlpool of the cultivation world. From the withered fields of black crystal rice in the Spirit Herb Hall to the dragon-locking altar deep in the Guixu, A Bao navigates deadly contests where fishing nets and flying swords intertwine. With a mortal's ingenuity, he unravels cultivators' murderous plots and uses everyday tricks to tear apart the immortal sects' false virtue. When the memories of a hundred reincarnations awaken, he takes up half a surviving scroll of the Record of Raising Flood Dragons. Between cooking smoke rising from the ferry crossing and the lightning and fire of heavenly tribulation, he rewrites the laws of cultivation with the methods a fisherman uses to weave nets. It turns out that truly defying fate has never been about the palaces in the ninth heaven, but about the cracks in the flagstones of the drying yard. This is an epic of blood and tears about a mortal using the wisdom of survival to question the Great Dao, and a reckoning of cause and effect spanning a thousand years.
