Record of the Four Mystic Firmaments

Mo Chen, a beggar from the Northern Desert, is forced to become the vessel of the primordial treasure known as the Four Extremes Profound Seal after a massacre lays waste to a city. The techniques of Daoism, demonic cultivation, Confucianism, and Buddhism tear wildly at one another within his dantian. To break through each realm, he must devour the essence of a powerful practitioner from the corresponding school, at the cost of his emotions, his sanity, his lifespan, and his memories. To suppress the seal’s rampage, Mo Chen drifts between the forces of good and evil, yet his uncontrollable power makes him a harbinger of disaster. The Daoist Holy Maiden’s devotion, the Confucian prodigy’s life-for-love sacrifice, and the Buddhist Holy Maiden’s fall into demonic ways all become bargaining chips in his struggle against the fate ordained by Heaven. When the truth behind the apocalypse is revealed, he learns that the four cultivation arts are incarnations of Heaven’s destructive instinct. Mo Chen has only one choice: slay the strongest, wield love as his blade, and make himself the crucible to defy fate. Will he become a puppet of the apocalypse, or reshape the heavens? It all rests on a single thought. Worldbuilding: Nine Domains and Three Realms: The Nine Domains of the mortal world (the Daoist Tiangang Alliance, the demonic Netherworld Abyss, the Confucian White Deer Academy, and the Buddhist Mount Sumeru), and the Three Realms beyond the heavens (the Guixu Sea, the Illusory Moon Grotto, and the Hongmeng Rift). Core conflict: The four cultivation arts are actually the destructive instinct split off from Heaven. Whoever bears the Profound Seal is destined to become a puppet of the apocalypse.