Preface to The Tea Ancestor of Myriad Worlds: Tea Ashes Across the Worlds
“Tea can be drunk, burned, or offered in sacrifice: it can connect all worlds.”
When Hongmeng first came into being, Shennong tasted a hundred herbs and encountered seventy-two poisons in a single day, until he found tu, or tea, and was cured.
People thought he had left behind the art of medicine, but they never knew...
What he had truly discovered was a law that connected all worlds.
Plants have spirits, and tea opens the way;
Mountains and seas have boundaries, and tea can carry you across them.
Some cultivate their swords with tea, their blades chilling fourteen provinces;
Some summon souls with tea, meeting old friends on the far shore of the Yellow Springs;
And some... use tea to seize control of fate and reverse the river of time.
It all began with an ordinary tea farmer at the foot of Qingyao Mountain.
His name was Lu Tu. He was but a speck of dust in the mortal world, until the night the demon race slaughtered his village, when blood stained his Chaos teapot and awakened his Shennong bloodline.
Within the pot was a scripture, and within the scripture, these words:
“The Tea Ancestor is awakening. All worlds shall return to chaos.”
From then on, he traveled through the myriad worlds recorded in The Classic of Mountains and Seas:
In the netherworld, he shared tea from the Far Shore with Xuan Ji, who was half-human and half-ghost, and glimpsed the boundary between life and death;
In the Celestial Ruins, he shattered the false Heavenly Dao of the Tea Immortal Venerable and rescued an innocent Qingluan;
Beneath the Dragon Abyss, he used tea to draw down heavenly thunder and smash Ao Tu’s ambitions for dominion...
But his greatest enemy was always the Tea Ancestor himself.
The supreme being who created the Way of Tea, and who would also destroy the world.
“You cultivate the Way of Tea, but have you ever wondered... if tea is cultivating you, too?”
Eight women, eight ways of tea.
Medicinal tea brings redemption, battle tea brings slaughter, nether tea is eerie, and immortal tea is pure...
Every path leads to the Tea Ancestor, and to the erasure of the self.
Now the tea is boiling, and all worlds are on the brink of collapse.
Do you dare drink this cup?
