During the Yongle period of the Ming Dynasty, Zhu Di ordered the dredging of the Grand Canal, but strange phenomena frequently occurred during the project - the river course changed direction inexplicably and the craftsmen sleepwalked every night. Shen Du, a junior official from the Ministry of Industry, was born with the ability to see "the color of earth veins". He discovered that an ancient "vein beast" slept under the canal, and its breath was tearing apart the texture of the earth. The court regarded it as an evil spirit, and the eunuchs tried to suppress it, but they almost diverted water into three cities. Shen Du found a glimmer of hope in the broken "Book of Mountains and Seas": Only by retrieving the five mortal objects used by Dayu to seal the Pulse Beast - a pottery bowl, a wooden ruler, a copper needle, a length of fiber rope, and a broken tile, and playing the lost folk song of water control, can this ancient spirit that once helped Dayu regulate the rivers be appeased. He, the stubborn boat girl and the down-and-out Jin Yiwei embarked on a journey of searching for objects along the canal. In the cracks between the Cao Gang, the White Lotus Sect and the party, they solved the mysteries related to the flood legend again and again. When the last weapon was about to be gathered, a conspiracy led the beast to go berserk and the canal turned into a waterspout. Shen Du did not choose to suppress, but turned the three years of sweat of the river workers, the broken ropes of the trackers, and the lost hometown of the immigrants into a song of request - asking the pulse beast to remember that the people on this land have never given up on reconciliation with the water.
