She is the only beloved daughter of the Heavenly Emperor and Empress, the most honored little princess in the celestial realm. But she is naturally unruly and mischievous, and for three hundred years she has turned the heavens upside down: sneaking wine from the Peach Banquet and passing out at the Southern Gate, feeding the Supreme Lord Lao’s elixirs to the immortal cranes like candy, and tangling the Matchmaker’s red threads into an impossible knot of eighty-one twists.
The Heavenly Emperor finally loses patience and, in a fit of rage, sends her down to the mortal world to undergo trials. “You can’t return until you’ve earned enough merit!”
Thus the little princess is reborn as Shen Zhaoning, the legitimate daughter of the prominent Shen family of the Great Jing dynasty. As soon as she is born, her jealous stepmother abandons her in the wilderness. Fortunately, the elderly abbot of Qingyun Temple happens to pass by while traveling and takes her back to the mountain to raise her.
The abbot discovers that the little girl was born with a spiritual constitution and supernatural yin-yang sight, so he teaches her everything he knows: alchemy, talismans, divination, geomancy, exorcism, and ghost-catching. At three years old, she has mastered them all, but she has one flaw: an enormous appetite. She can eat half a month’s worth of the temple’s provisions in a single meal.
Even stranger, anyone who intends to harm her runs into all kinds of bad luck before they can act. At best, they trip and sprain an ankle; at worst, misfortune dogs them, as if the heavens themselves are protecting her.
When she is three, a great famine strikes the region below the mountain. The abbot stuffs the temple’s last scraps of food into her little bundle and, with a heavy heart, sends her down the mountain. “Child, go. Your ties to the mortal world are not yet finished.”
He secretly protects her along the way. Only after she meets the Shen family’s old friends, the Lin family of the Northern Frontier General’s Mansion, and is adopted by the Lins does the abbot quietly leave.
Five years later, the Shen family finds the legitimate daughter they had believed dead. Shen Zhaoning reunites with her birth parents.
