Neon from the future metropolis and bronze trigrams weave together into a net. Talismans fly alongside code, and copper coins match chips in color.
Su Ye, a descendant of the Celestial Masters’ Mansion who roams the spirit realm of data, forms thunder seals with his left hand and taps out quantum code with his right. When the Vermilion Bird Corporation’s “immortality pods” refine a hundred thousand souls into digital currency, and the Azure Dragon military contractor’s bioengineered shikigami tear through the cyber sky, he discovers that his genes bear the original code of King Wen of Zhou’s divination.
He joins forces with Qing Mingzi, an AI Taoist, to brave the grand array of the Twenty-Eight Mansions, deliver electronic ghosts in the blockchain underworld, and seize the spark of civilization from the hands of a mechanical Buddha.
Here, 5G base stations are electronic funeral halls, a Shang dynasty quantum computer lies buried beneath the lunar soil, and humanity is nothing more than a “work in progress” observed by higher dimensions.
When the bronze armillary sphere turns once more, Su Ye faces his ultimate choice: use the code of the Tao Te Ching to reboot the universe, or set the final cyber incense alight with his own flesh and blood?
An epic battle between technology and divinity erupts between the cyber court of heaven and the quantum underworld.
