Taiyi's Embers

In 2025, the world struggles to catch its breath amid a prolonged economic winter. Lu Xian, a thirty-year-old man whose life could be summed up in one word, “failure,” stands at the edge of the abyss. He was an abandoned baby taken in as part of his family’s plan to carry on the bloodline, yet he grew up under moral coercion and cold stares, sensitive, insecure, and unable to fit in with the world around him. Unemployed, in debt, and understood by no one, he can barely breathe under the crushing pressure of a merciless society. As he scrolls through short videos about being reborn, strange encounters, and getting rich overnight, despair gives rise to one final, reckless idea: venture deep into the forbidden reaches of the Ailao Mountains in search of a slim chance to change his fate, even if it costs him his life.

Yet when he enters the depths of that primeval forest, shrouded in mist and plagued by magnetic disturbances, Lu Xian encounters not death but a “divine revelation” that overturns everything he knows. He is not reborn, but instead accidentally awakens and becomes a faint modern-day “anchor” or “vessel” for a long-lost power of Chu mythology: the Nine Songs pantheon, centered on Donghuang Taiyi. An ancient, majestic voice (Donghuang Taiyi? The Mountain Spirit? Great Fate?) whispers in his consciousness, guiding him to glimpse a truth buried beneath the dust of history: the land of Huaxia was never home to just one pantheon. The “unification” of Taoist mythology concealed the flourishing diversity of ancient beliefs. The romantic wildness of Chu, the strange wonders of the Classic of Mountains and Seas, the ethereal realms of Kunlun and Penglai… These pantheons never truly vanished. Amid shifting beliefs, some fell silent, some were twisted, and others turned against one another.