The Land of Bitter Trials: Purple Qi Comes from the East

Cultivation + possession + pill snatching + one female lead + A Record of a Mortal's Journey to Immortality + feel-good power fantasy

“Handsome, want your fortune told? Want to buy a talisman?” The girl behind the counter smiled like a spring day in March, though her fingertips rested on yellow paper marked with cinnabar.

Zhou Zizhi gripped his watch and took half a step back. “I’m a materialist. I only fix watches.”

The tipsy watchmaker suddenly sprang up from his armchair. “Mr. Zhou Zizhi, this watch of yours...”

He staggered closer, bottle in hand. “Why not let my junior sister tell your fortune? It’s free!”

When three copper coins were tossed in response to the question of how to defy fate and change one’s destiny, one plunged into the floor tiles like a blade, and the incense smoke reversed course, pouring upward like a waterfall.

“Zhang Lingdie! You’ve meddled with the secrets of Heaven!”

The drunken senior brother’s palm, wrapped in lightning, slammed toward the young man’s chest. But the instant it made contact, his flesh charred black. “This book... take it as compensation!”

“You’re just an ordinary person. How could you have such a huge karmic debt?!”

Before the girl’s scream had faded, Zhou Zizhi had vanished in a violet thunderstorm, the ancient book in his arms burning hot as a brand.

Amid the wreckage, the copper coin embedded in the floor seeped a dark red rust, while a bloodcurdling roar came from behind the counter: “I’m quitting drinking! Right now!”

When a materialist young man stumbles upon the life-and-death register of the mystical arts, and fortune-telling coins stand sharper than skyscrapers in the CBD, is this urban ghost story, worth “one watch and one arm,” a ticket to defying fate, or a... death warrant hurled down to the mortal world by a god?