This book is a groundbreaking attempt to reconstruct ancient Eastern mythology, built around the struggle of free will against predetermined fate, and to compose a stirring, tragic elegy.
This is not the Investiture of the Gods you know. When Sijue, the fox clan’s divine shaman, uses her gift as a “Listener of the World” to glimpse Heaven’s plot to annihilate all “variables,” she chooses to ally herself with Di Xin, the Shang king bent on reform. Together with the dragon clan, which has endured in silence for ten thousand years while bearing the secret of the Five Elements’ primordial source, they embark on a path defying Heaven. They know that the Investiture of the Gods is no simple change of dynasties. It is Heaven’s final reckoning, meant to imprison all things and erase every trace of freedom.
In this unequal war, the alliance makes the most resolute response imaginable: the dragons willingly shoulder blame that will haunt them for eternity and reverse the Five Elements that sustain the world; the fox clan burns away its primordial wisdom, erasing its very existence from Heaven and Earth; and the human king Di Xin offers up his realm and his life, raising his sword to sever the Mandate of Heaven passed down through the human world. These earthshaking acts are not undertaken for victory. Instead, they wield the power of creation to bring about destruction, all to tear open a rift for freedom in the unshakable tracks laid down by Heaven. In the end, the three sacrifices cause the laws of reality to collapse completely. The alliance of humans and demons is defeated, but Heaven does not win either. The passage between Heaven and the human world closes, and the gods are forced into retreat.
The story ends at a dawn with no gods to guide the way. The Zhou dynasty is founded and rules through rites and music; the dragons lose their divine status, and the foxes scatter. All become legends.
This is a funeral song for the age of the old gods, and the prologue to an era of humanity’s awakening. Amid the ruins left behind by the departure of the divine, humanity can freely compose its own anthem.
