World of Fateful Beasts

When Qin Shi Huang’s black-and-red Ancestral Dragon tore through the firmament and proclaimed his ambition to “pass it down forever,” the red snake in a tavern in Pei County had already opened its eyes in Liu Bang’s sleeve, seeing the threads of fate.

When Zhang Liao’s North Wind Tiger forged the legend of “silencing children” at Xiaoyao Ford, the fated beasts of the Crouching Dragon and the Tomb Tiger were already quietly plotting the division of the realm in the shadows of Longzhong and Xudu, across the vast lands behind him.

When Li Shimin’s auspicious dragon and phoenix illuminated the palace lanterns of the myriad nations, the blood beneath the Xuanwu Gate had yet to dry. It became the twenty-four spirit-beast apparitions in the Pavilion of Lingyan, bound to the renowned ministers and guarding an age of prosperity.

When Genghis Khan’s storm-gray wolf swallowed the horizon, the warm breeze by West Lake in Lin’an stirred the words “Loyal to the Country” on Yue Wumu’s back. They became a golden-winged roc weeping blood, poised to shatter the cage of “baseless charges.”

And when the Chongzhen Emperor’s blood-weeping phoenix of the Ming vanished in a mournful cry atop Coal Hill, that ember of defiance did not die. It sank into the earth’s veins, crossed three centuries of decline,

and at last merged on the banks of the Xiang River with the grand ideals of a scholar who “dared to replace the old heavens with new ones,” giving birth to an enraged golden-eyed ape wielding a staff of immense weight to cleanse the world beneath the heavens...

Welcome to the World of Fated Beasts.