Across the Nine Continents and Three Realms, undercurrents are stirring. Daoists refine qi and form golden cores, Buddhists cultivate meditative hearts and golden bodies, and Confucians nurture their qi and establish their teachings. The three schools contend, while incense offerings steal lives. Chen Shou, a village boy, chances upon a battered copy of the Dao De Jing and enters the Dao through the principle “The highest good is like water.” He joins the reclusive Tianji Pavilion, but because his spiritual roots are unremarkable, he is sent to guard the ghost-haunted borderlands. Facing a drought demon’s rampage, he sets up an array using the Eight Trigrams and the art of divination. The Four Symbols Demon-Subduing Disk reveals its might, and in the depths of desperation, he grasps the essence of the “cautious survival” path: use the Zhouyi to foresee danger and avoid it, and break through crises with a chivalrous heart.
As his quest for the Dao unfolds, Chen Shou travels throughout the Nine Continents. At the Jixia Academy, he debates the Confucian “Way of Benevolence and Righteousness”; in the Myriad Buddha Caves, he puts out the Buddhist “Hellfire of Karma”; and in the East Sea, he slays an evil serpent and obtains the Daoist scripture The Yellow Emperor’s Hidden Talisman. The Three Schools Alliance’s plot to steal the destinies of ordinary people through incense offerings gradually comes to light. Joining forces with outstanding Confucian, Buddhist, and Daoist figures, he exposes the shocking scam of “using incense offerings as bait to refine all living beings into pills.”
The Heavenly Palace arc begins, and after ascending, Chen Shou becomes entangled in the return of the “Conferment of the Gods Calamity,” as the order of the Three Realms collapses. Using the Hetu and Luoshu, he restores order to the universe and combines the three schools to establish a new tradition: “the mind itself is principle.” There is nothing beyond the mind, and all laws return to it. From the mortal world to the Heavenly Palace, from cautious survival to founding a school of his own, Chen Shou follows the boundless Great Dao with an ordinary body and ultimately becomes the ruler of all Three Realms.
