Before the separation of Heaven and Earth, Chaos churned like boiling water.
Qin Xuan's consciousness awakens in an endless sea of gray mist, with no body and no memories. Only a ball of pure light surrounds half a fragment of Chaos: a shattered piece of the laws of the universe, broken apart when Heaven and Earth were created, containing the Dao's original resonance from the moment the universe first took shape. By instinct, he senses that beyond Chaos, the pure and turbid forces are separating, Qianyuan manifests in the heavens, and Kuntu bears all things. A cycle known as a “calamity” is about to crush this world, only to forge it anew.
This is an epic of the Primordial World, and a journey of cultivation toward “attaining the Dao.”
The story takes “calamities” as its framework and “the universe” as its soul, unfolding across five great calamities of the Primordial World: the beasts' slaughter of the world, the First Calamity of Longhan, the coexistence of the Witch and Demon Tribes, the bloody Investiture of the Gods Calamity, and the trials of the Journey to the West. From a fragment of Chaos, Qin Xuan comprehends the workings of yin and yang; within the calamities, he awakens to the path of attaining the Dao. Gradually, he comes to understand that “attaining the Dao” does not mean rising above all living things. It means learning to read the world, this “book of calamities,” and finding the “path through the universe” that leads beyond the cycle of reincarnation amid destruction and rebirth.
