When Shen Ming, a doctor of traditional Chinese medicine, dies saving a child from a car accident, he opens his eyes to find himself floating in a sea of chaos above a market of blue-brick buildings. This is the City of Ten Thousand Realms, a place connected to countless worlds. The bronze door-ring birthmark on his wrist is the key to controlling trades in cause and effect. The System grants him the Divine Farmer's legacy, allowing him to refine the strange fires from Battle Through the Heavens and the Qilin blood from The Legend of the Condor Heroes, while the Book of Cause and Effect reveals “cracks in fate,” such as Li Yunlong's brain injury and Xiao Feng's true parentage.
As a lowly level-one city lord, Shen Ming's first visitor is Zhao Gang from the world of The Bright Sword. The political commissar, still covered in the smoke of battle, trades seven bloodstained Japanese gold bars for a Soul-Restoring Life-Sustaining Pill that can heal Li Yunlong's brain damage. As the Divine Farmer's Cauldron refines the herbs, the shadow of the Independent Regiment's cavalry charging appears inside it. It turns out every trade weaves a new thread of cause and effect. From Tong Xiangyu of My Own Swordsman exchanging a pardon medallion for a time-reversal talisman, to Wu Xie of The Grave Robbers' Chronicles trading a Warring States silk manuscript for insect repellent powder, the blue-brick houses conceal redemption across dimensions. Bai Zhantang's Sunflower Acupoint-Tapping Hand clashes with a special forces soldier's combat skills in the training arena, while Big Wolf's sheep-catching shovel unearths meteoric bronze in The Mystic Nine.
As his cause-and-effect points accumulate, the City of Ten Thousand Realms evolves from a blue-brick market into a fortress on the level of the Heavenly Dao, and its connections grow from low-martial urban worlds to primordial myths. Shen Ming gradually discovers that Earth, the main world where spiritual qi revival is underway, is actually a “Heavenly Dao laboratory,” and the city pattern on his palm is the fulcrum that can shift the gears of fate. When the lightsabers from Star Wars resonate with the particle cannons from Gundam at a civilization expo, and Lin Daiyu's poetry society opens in the metaverse, he must move between worlds as a “Half-Saint”
