At the end of the antique street stands an unremarkable old shop.
Yuan Qingya, an inheritor of the numerological branch of the I Ching, keeps watch over a room full of old coins, compasses, and dusty books. He makes a living reading feng shui and predicting fortune and misfortune. He thinks the biggest upheaval in his life will be having to hike a few extra miles while helping someone locate an auspicious burial site.
Until his apprentice, Zhao Tianming, crawls out from beneath Tiantai Mountain.
Deep in that barren mountain lies a bronze cauldron covered in talismanic inscriptions. Behind it is no rock wall, but a space that should not exist on Earth. There are mutated monsters, the remains of a grandmaster who vanished decades ago, and a secret that a businessman is willing to sacrifice more than a dozen lives to uncover.
Yuan Qingya casts a hexagram with copper coins. What he calculates isn’t fortune or misfortune, but a sequence of numbers that shouldn’t belong to any system of divination.
Zhao Tianming uses mathematics to decode the sequence and discovers that it perfectly matches the inscriptions on the bronze cauldron.
An old fortune-teller and a half-baked hoodlum delve ever deeper in pursuit of the truth. Mysticism, mathematics, qigong, ancient ruins… Every clue points in the same direction:
This universe did not come into being naturally.
It was designed.
And the being that designed it left traces behind.
The inscriptions on the bronze cauldron are one such trace. The hexagrams Yuan Qingya’s grandmaster spent his life calculating are another. And the heartbeat Zhao Tianming heard beneath Tiantai Mountain is yet another.
Though the myriad ways are different, they all lead to one end.
When every path converges into one, they finally stand before that door.
Beyond it lies neither a god nor a Buddha, nor the promised afterlife of any religion.
Beyond the door is the source code.
The Great Way is simplicity itself; all paths lead back to the source.
