Qin Yan, a hopeless simp at Shapo Institute of Technology who had failed advanced mathematics for two years and had just 327 yuan left in his Huabei account, spent 1,800 yuan to join a matchmaking trip to transmigrate across Zhongnan Mountain, all to pursue his dream girl. But of the eight campus beauties, he was the only man, and the fee covered everything.
He thought he was just being taken for a ride. Then he woke up on Baxian Terrace, atop the Qinling Mountains, and the whole world had changed. Suddenly, advanced mathematics, once as incomprehensible as a heavenly text, made perfect sense. A lottery ticket he bought on a whim won 50,000 yuan, and all eight women started looking at him differently.
But every time he used his “abilities,” he paid with his life.
Prostatitis, hospitalization with COVID, his whole body breaking down. A Taoist of unknown origin tossed him a tattered book. “You think you’re using qi? You’re paying for it with your life.”
“...Can I return it?”
“Too late.”
More dangerously, each of the eight women had secrets of her own. An upperclasswoman in the physics department used instruments to measure his qi field, as if he were a lab rat. A Japanese exchange student sent shikigami to spy on him. A philosophy graduate student turned out to be an inner disciple of the Taoist sect, on a mission ever since they entered the mountains. Even his roommate, who did nothing but eat chicken legs, had begun glowing red.
That spring dream on Baxian Terrace, everyone clearly remembered it happening more than ten times, yet Tang Tang said nothing happened except for a kiss. Was the dream real, or had his qi caused it?
In the age of declining magic, all paths return to the Dao. Arts, talismans, formations, schemes: from casually using qi to setting world-shaking plans in motion. When the chessboard was finally revealed, Qin Yan realized he had never been a player. He was the piece everyone was fighting to claim.
But he didn’t want to be a chess piece.
