Copper Soul: Heavenly Arrival of Cured Pork

On Lunar New Year’s Eve in 2026, special forces soldier Lin Mu swallows the traditional black cured meat his grandfather left him on his deathbed, only to be dragged into a bronze mine in the ancient Shu Kingdom three thousand years ago and enslaved. The overseers wear masks with protruding eyes, and all the slaves suffer from “bronze sickness”: their flesh is slowly turning into cold metal. At the end of his rope, Lin Mu discovers that the cured meat is his only chance to survive. With every bite, he devours a memory of an ancestor’s battles and gains the power of Lihuo, which lets him control bronze, but his lifespan burns away as well. To make it home alive, he is forced to awaken a bronze mecha three zhang tall beneath the mine and fight his way out. On the run, Gui Ning, daughter of an ancient Shu priest, tells him the cruel truth: he did not transmigrate. He is the “Son of Lihuo,” sent three thousand years into the future by his father, Fan, the last prince of ancient Shu, to escape disaster. Now the Nine Purple Lihuo cycle has begun anew, and he has been summoned back. Before his life burns away, he must use five specially prepared pieces of cured meat to end this war between gods and demons that has raged for a thousand years. But after Lin Mu survives countless brushes with death and returns from the battlefield of bronze and flame, he finds his grandfather’s cured-meat workshop on the verge of closing and rapacious corporate giants circling. In his hands, the seven totems brought back from ancient Shu become seven hit products; the iron will he forged piloting a bronze mecha now drives him to conquer the business world. One piece of cured meat devours the gods. One workshop shakes an empire. From mine slave to cured-meat king, he devours his way to godhood.