On the night a bookshelf crushed him, Lin Yuan, a servant disciple of the Qingyun Sect, transmigrated.
When he awoke, an ancestral Qing-dynasty woodblock edition of Journey to the West had fused with him. Gray mist churned between its pages: Benboerba, Tiger Vanguard, the Bull Demon King, Sun Wukong, Tathagata Buddha... The gods and Buddhas above, the countless demons below, all awaited his summons.
But summoning them came at a price: without sufficient cultivation, trying to summon them by force meant certain death.
Starting out as a servant disciple at the third level of Profound Awakening, Lin Yuan chopped wood in the back mountains, fought bloody battles in the arena, and risked his life for a blade in the wolves' valley on the grasslands. A frail body drained of vital essence, an untrodden path of body cultivation, and an ancient book full of Journey to the West's gods and Buddhas: these were all he had.
Then, one day, he summoned the Wind Earl and the Thunder Duke together on Wind and Thunder Cliff. His staff rose, wind and thunder surged, and the Qingyun Sect's eight-hundred-year-old ancestral vault burst open. The patriarch's final instruction contained only eight words: “The way of wind and thunder lies not in Qingyun.”
From there, a servant disciple's footsteps would carry him across the Canglan Sea, the ten great sects of Dayan, and the Myriad Demon Mountains, then through the three continents of the Spirit Realm and the nine heavens of the Immortal Realm. At the end of the road, a secret about the ancient book Journey to the West, the reincarnation of the Mysterious Lady of the Nine Heavens, and the origin of the myriad worlds had been waiting for him far too long.
“I'm no genius. My vital essence is depleted by thirty percent, and I cultivate half as fast as other people. But I have one thing going for me: I refuse to give up.”
Body cultivation breaks through realms; Journey to the West summons the gods. One iron staff, one body of wind and thunder. From the Qingyun Sect's back mountain to the Myriad Worlds, this is the story of a servant disciple who straightened his spine.
