Zhou Tian Liu He Lu Synopsis
The Zhou heavens split, the Nine Cauldrons toppled, and bronze became both flesh and blood, a prophecy in itself.
The “Rift in the Heavenly Fabric,” triggered by the collapse of the Fengshen Altar at the end of the Yin and Shang dynasties, festered over the Zhou dynasty’s eight hundred years into a civilizational cancer that spanned time and space. The Nine Cauldrons’ barrier crumbled, bronze vessels came alive and proliferated, Taotie patterns turned into fleshy tentacles, and oracle-bone script mutated into living insects that devoured memories. Six chosen ones bearing ancient bloodlines struggled to survive amid prophecies and conspiracies: a swordsman turned to sand from the Sword Grave of Loulan, an orphan of the Yue state whose blood-red eyes pierced time and space, and an illegitimate daughter of the Quanrong burdened with a shamanic curse... They wielded divine weapons inscribed with the texts Lianshan and Guizang, but as they pieced together fragments of ancient scrolls, they discovered that they themselves were the architects of a closed loop in history.
In this fateful contest, bronze was both the genetic code of civilization and a cancer that devoured all things. The Nine Cauldrons monitored by the Siding Bureau began to run wild one by one: the Yangzhou Cauldron gave birth to a liquid life-form called Yushi Qie, the Youzhou Cauldron spewed ice-crystal skeletons singing laments for a fallen nation, and the boiling bronze within the Yuzhou Cauldron was mixed with nuclear waste from the future. When Vietnam War helicopters descended upon the Battle of Muye and quantum tentacles crawled out of the Xuanniao zun wine vessel, the six finally understood that so-called destiny was nothing more than a set of recurring parameters in the laboratory of a higher civilization.
In the end, the Wangdao Sword shattered in the fissures of the Nine Netherworlds, and the blood pact of the Six Directions became a rain of bronze tears. Their bodies were frozen for eternity as statues of the Nine Provinces, bronze patina seeping from their eyes, bearing five thousand years of laughter and tears. In the depths of the starry sky, a new petri dish was being placed on the laboratory bench. A child’s nursery rhyme rang out once more, blood-red bronze flooded the history books, and the martial world was no more than a tragicomic pantomime of reincarnation.
