[Eastern fantasy + Classic of Mountains and Seas beasts + rise from the bottom + martial arts progression + slaying gods and resisting oppression]
Zhao Heng has delivered tribute registers for three years, and only today has he learned that the “grain” listed in them can cry.
He is just a lowly courier at a border station in the Yu Dynasty, so poor he has to hide his salt to make it last. He had hoped to save enough bone coins to get a job that wouldn’t send him outside the city to die. But while escorting a shipment of “tribute grain,” he lifted the carriage curtain and saw that it held not millet and animal hides, but more than thirty bound children.
The escort party is slaughtered by a Gu Diao. Zhao Heng crawls out from beneath the pile of corpses and presses a fragment of bronze into his palm. It is a shard of the ancient Nine Cauldrons, capable of illuminating mountains and rivers, identifying strange beasts, seeing through the power of incense, and suppressing beastly nature.
From then on, he strengthens his body by eating demon flesh, improves his martial arts by studying strange beasts, tears up tribute registers, cuts off the power of incense, and slays mountain gods.
The dynasty says: “Sacrifice one village to save a city.”
Zhao Heng says: “If humanity has to eat its own people to survive, then those who remain are nothing but livestock.”
Starting out as a lowly courier in the borderlands, he rebuilds the Nine Cauldrons with blade and fist, and subdues the mountains and seas.
