Jiang Yanzhi, an orphan from Guizhou, is fated to bear the Jiang family’s ancestral legacy: the Daoist arts of Jiang Ziya. But from the moment he is born, he is engulfed by the gloom of his dysfunctional family. His biological father, Jiang Shouyi, is a boastful, hard-drinking traditional Chinese medicine doctor with deeply ingrained patriarchal views. After his fortunes decline and he divorces his wife, he even tries to sell his young son. When the global economy slumps and no one will take the boy, he has no choice but to send him to his birth mother. She has a new lover, and after an ugly breakup, her former partner takes out his hatred on Jiang Yanzhi, abducting him and using him as a punching bag for twelve years. Beatings and abuse grind him into a silent, twisted prisoner of his own mind. Trying to fill the emptiness inside, he falls in with a gang of thieves and nearly lands in prison. His father comes looking for him late in middle age, bringing a brief spell of warmth, but it cannot overcome his obsession with making his son inherit the Daoist arts and become a monk. The warmth fades, leaving only scolding and orders. After his mother remarries, she coldly disowns him, pushing him into an endless life of wandering.
At an age when he should have been full of ambition, Jiang Yanzhi becomes a drifter. He sleeps on park benches and scavenges leftovers from trash cans, until a noodle-shop owner gives him shelter. Starting with serving dishes and washing bowls, he works his way up to cooking, finding a chance to survive. Later, he moves from shop to shop and learns to become a barber, building thick calluses on his fingertips. He also works in bar marketing to make ends meet, seeing the noise and the warmth and coldness of nightlife firsthand. He even joins a media company as a livestream host, but life is so painfully meager that he relies on the students of the popular idol group Misty Rain Jiangnan to send gifts and boost his numbers. When he has nowhere else to turn, he even uses a friend’s spare account to send himself gifts and keep up appearances. He saves money to travel through Yuehai, Hangcheng, Qizhou, and Xuyi. He sees all the bustle of the world, yet feels only its emptiness, and even one peaceful night’s sleep becomes a distant dream.
The Huishen app in the virtual world is his only chance to catch his breath...
