When civilization is forgotten, reality will vanish along with it. In a world made up of nine "Cultural Continents," a cataclysm known as the "Tide of Annihilation" is quietly descending. Cultural crafts and skills that are not remembered will be uprooted, disappearing completely from history, artifacts, and people's hearts. Paper-cutting, mortise-and-tenon joinery, ancient guqin scores, herbal classics... These crafts once sustained the Nine Continents for a thousand years, but now they have become its most vulnerable weakness.
Mo Xun is a storyteller from a small town on the edge of Ink Continent. He has spent ten years cultivating immortality, yet cannot sense even a trace of cultural essence. Dismissed as a useless "veinless body," he never imagined that when an old man listening to his tale of "The Illustrated Catalogue of the Hundred Crafts" dissolved into streaks of ink before his eyes, and the names of long-lost artisans appeared in his family's tattered old book, he would discover the truth: Though he cannot "bear the Way," he can "continue the Way," anchoring endangered cultural memories in the world once more through his stories.
From the Yongning Teahouse to every corner of the Nine Continents, Mo Xun embarks on an unprecedented path of cultivation. He seeks neither immortality nor higher realms; he only wants to record the names that are about to be forgotten. The muralist of Brahma Continent, the deaf and mute ceramic artist of Craft Continent, the nameless tomb keeper of Martial Continent... These "failures" cast aside by their times become the true pillars of resistance against annihilation. They use their own crafts as guides, awakening the slumbering power of cultural essence through sheer devotion to their art.
This is not a power fantasy in the traditional sense. There are no contests of spiritual roots or overwhelming opponents with superior cultivation. Instead, battles turn the "artistic conception" of culture into real power: a storyteller's tale can conjure mountains and rivers, while a single performance of "High Mountains and Flowing Water" by a guqin player can stir the forces of heaven and earth. Victory depends on the depth of one's understanding of culture and the purity with which its spirit is passed down.
