Shen Yi is the universally acknowledged good-for-nothing of Black Sword City: he has a useless metal spirit root, and cultivates at less than a fifth the speed of an ordinary person. Every cultivator in the city tells him to give up while he still can and spend his life mining ore.
But he refuses to believe fate has the final say.
An accident in a forbidden zone leads him to save a thousand-year-old fox immortal, who rewards him with the ancient forbidden cultivation art, the Spirit-Devouring Origin-Returning Art. It doesn’t absorb the spiritual energy of heaven and earth. Instead, it devours every kind of “unusual energy” in existence. The toxic fires deep within the earth, the baleful energy of the Nine Hells, radiation from meteors beyond the heavens: forbidden substances that even Foundation Establishment cultivators wouldn’t dare touch are all food to him.
While devouring flames in a toxic fire cavern and breaking through to a new realm, he meets Su Li, a brilliant but eccentric young artifact-forger with weak spiritual power, whose family is forcing her into marriage. She can sense the abnormal energy within Shen Yi and quickly notices his secret.
“You need a source of energy. I need test subjects. Deal?”
A “heretical cultivator” who devours everything and a “tech geek” obsessed with inventions: this unlikely pair, written off by everyone, begins to rise quietly in the cracks between the righteous and demonic paths.
Then the Blood Moon Cult sets its sights on the unusual energy in Shen Yi’s body, and the orthodox sects issue a kill order, hunting down this “heretical cultivator of unusual energy.” With the whole world against him, Shen Yi must choose: hide his cultivation art and eke out a life, or forge a path no one has ever taken?
The distinction between righteous and demonic has never been about power itself, but about the human heart.
