The Ming Dynasty's Map of Mountains and Seas

In the third year of Yongle, the Imperial Guards kicked down the Shen family's door.

Shen Qiusheng was the last person who could read dragon veins. The fragmentary copy of the Classic of Mountains and Seas left by his grandfather told him that the spiritual energy of the Great Ming was running dry, and someone was refining the nation's fortune into pills. He was conscripted onto Zheng He's treasure ship as its surveyor, only to discover that the keel was carved with predatory royal spirit-gathering arrays. Every stroke was draining the waters of the four seas.

If the spiritual tides of the deep were roused, the entire fleet would be blown to pieces.

And the Yu ruler in his sleeve had just begun to glow in the hold.

This is no story about ascending to immortality. It follows a surveyor who uses a brush, a ruler, and a fragmentary scripture to restore, stroke by stroke, a grand map of the mountains and seas that had been altered for three thousand years, aboard a mighty ship in the Yongle era.

“A geomancer spends a lifetime drawing maps, only to discover at the end that he has been drawing himself.”

[Historical xianxia · intricate mysteries · the Classic of Mountains and Seas is not mythology, but a map]