Cultivating Immortality Through Five Thousand Years of Chinese History

A strange transformation on the night of the Ghost Festival leaves Jiang An in a coma in a hospital bed in the modern world. No one knows that his soul has been dragged into a bizarre realm shaped by five thousand years of humanity’s obsessions, beliefs, and imagination: a distorted world where history has been utterly deconstructed and reconstructed. Here, the First Emperor Ying Zheng uses the iron-fisted Qin system as his foundation, commanding the spirits of heroes from every dynasty as he forges an immortal empire and rules over all creation. Here, the Song are reviled as cowards who abandoned China’s destiny at Yashan, while the Cao Wei are mocked as lonely ghosts devoured by their own hunting dogs. The Tang and Wu Zhou coexist in a bizarre arrangement, and Cao Wei and the Sima clan serve in the same court. Here, any work that carries humanity’s deepest aspirations, be it a written piece, an antique, a famous painting, or even a film or television series, can transform into its own pocket world, each bizarre and governed by different laws. This realm is called the Underworld. Comatose people whose souls have left their bodies, like Jiang An, are honored as “Chosen Ones.” The mortal world, pocket worlds, and Underworld exist in parallel, each strange and treacherous in its own way. Jiang An is trapped among them, struggling to survive. He bears the “Mandate of Heaven,” yet in the eyes of high-level cultivators, he is merely a prized vessel for possession. He holds the Dao De Jing and the “Sword of Noncontention,” yet is burdened with a cultivation loan whose interest keeps compounding. He knows parts of the plots within the pocket worlds, but must still face the deadly whirlpool of dealings with Bone Harvesters and competition for the energy of prayers and thoughts. From a cautious disciple of the Taiqing Palace to an explorer taking one nerve-racking step after another through pocket worlds, Jiang An must: Keep his head down within the Underworld’s order, ruled by the First Emperor’s might and the crushing weight of historical heroes; Seize the “energy of prayers and thoughts” that sustains his cultivation and keeps him alive amid the countless pocket worlds, where danger lurks and the rules are treacherous.