A Side Story of Nuwa Mending the Heavens

Since Nuwa smelted the Five-Colored Stones to mend the heavens and cut off the legs of the giant turtle to prop up the four corners of the sky, the world believed that Heaven was round and Earth square, and that peace had finally been secured. Yet no one knew that the cataclysm that nearly destroyed the world had buried an even deeper secret between Heaven and Earth.

When the heavens were mended, the last Five-Colored Stone fell into the depths of the Eastern Sea. Its world-creating spiritual power had not faded, and it gave birth beneath the waves to the “essence of Xirang,” which took the form of a dark, spiritual fish capable of human speech. The fish guarded the stone's heart and slept for a thousand years. Meanwhile, the giant turtle whose legs Nuwa had severed had not truly perished. Its resentment coalesced into the “Netherworld Miasma,” lurking in the cracks between the Three Realms and secretly corroding the barrier around the Heaven-Mending Stone, determined to plunge the world back into chaos.

A thousand years later, a mortal girl named A Yao ventures into a secret realm in the Eastern Sea while searching for her missing grandfather, a descendant of the clan that guards the stone. She accidentally awakens the spiritual fish and alerts the giant turtle's remnant soul. The fish tells her that the barrier around the Heaven-Mending Stone has cracked. Unless she finds the “Stone-Soul Fragments” scattered across the mortal world, the miasma will devour the Three Realms.

A Yao sets out on her journey. Along the way, she meets a white-haired old man who is the transformed attendant of Nuwa and learns from him how to identify stones. She also clashes with Cang Jue, a young man with the blood of the turtle clan who nonetheless cares deeply for all living things. The two go from distrusting each other to fighting side by side. They cross an ancient battlefield in the remaining ranges of Kunlun, human towns corrupted by the miasma, and underground caverns connected to the Netherworld. They must not only face the monsters controlled by the giant turtle's remnant soul, but also uncover what Nuwa left unsaid when she mended the heavens: Why did she leave the final stone behind? And why did she turn a blind eye to the giant turtle's resentment?

When A Yao gathers all the fragments, she discovers that the secret of mending the heavens cannot be summed up as simply “saving the world,” and that her own bloodline is tied in countless ways to the ancient cataclysm.