When civilization is forgotten, reality will be annihilated. In a world composed of nine "cultural continents", a catastrophe called the "tide of annihilation" is quietly coming - cultural skills that have not been remembered will be uprooted and completely disappear from history, artifacts and the depths of people's hearts. Paper-cutting, mortise and tenon joints, guqin music scores, herbal classics... These skills that once supported Jiuzhou for thousands of years have now become the most fragile weaknesses.
Mo Xun, a storyteller from a small town on the edge of Mozhou, has been practicing immortality for ten years but cannot sense a trace of the power of context, and is regarded as a waste with a "veinless body". However, when an old man who listened to him tell the story of "Hundred Works of Art" turned into ink marks and disappeared in front of him, and the names of the lost craftsmen appeared in the fragments of ancestral books, he was shocked to realize that he could not "carry the Tao", but he could "continue the Tao" - using stories to re-anchor endangered cultural memories in the world.
From the Yongning teahouse to the world of Jiuzhou, Mo Xun embarked on an unprecedented path of spiritual practice: he did not strive for immortality or realm, but only to record the names that were about to be forgotten. The muralists of Fanzhou, the deaf and mute potters of Gongzhou, the unknown gravekeepers of Wuzhou... These "losers" abandoned by the times have become the real backbone of resistance to annihilation. They use their respective skills as a guide and use pure ingenuity to awaken the dormant power of context.
This is not a cool novel in the traditional sense. There is no spiritual competition, no realm crushing. The way of fighting is to "interpret" cultural artistic conception into real power - the story told by a storyteller can transform mountains and rivers, and a luthier's song "Mountains and Flowing Waters" can trigger the general trend of the world. The key to victory or defeat lies in the depth of cultural understanding and the purity of spiritual inheritance.
