The Immortal Realm has fallen, the laws of nature have collapsed, and the Calamity of Spirit Ashes has swept across the mortal world.
Shen Yan is a good-for-nothing scholar. With a rusty iron ruler in hand, he flees through the apocalypse with his frail younger sister. When the gaping maw of a demonized beast looms before him, his bloodstained ruler shudders and sheds its rust, transforming into half a broken sword. It is a fragment of the Heavenly Dao's remains.
It grants him no immortal power capable of destroying heaven and earth. Instead, it unfurls a panoramic view of human civilization in his mind.
From then on, while cultivators fly on their swords, he brings out blueprints for “steam airships.” While formation masters lay down deadly arrays, he solves them instantly with geometry and mathematics. When an ancient secret realm opens, he leads his team on a “scientific archaeological expedition.” While the survivors fight over scraps of cultivation manuals, Shen Yan has already started the first physics class in the newly founded “Beacon Keep.”
Yet just as he leads humanity back to its feet from the ruins with the light of technology and order, so-called “envoys from the Upper Realm” descend through the torn sky, smiling as they announce, “Your world has always been a crop grown by our lord. Today... it is time to harvest.”
Shen Yan raises the half-broken sword. Behind him stand roaring factories and rows of artillery, while the fire of civilization burns in the eyes of billions of people.
“To all you cultivators, the times have changed.”
“Now it's our turn to define what ‘heaven’ means.”
