1934: The Dragon Falls, Nine Extremes of the Primordial Beginning

Yingkou, 1934. After a lunar eclipse, a dragon falls into the reed marshes of the Liao River. Some seize its bones, some seek immortality, and some hope to wrest an enormous boon from the dragon’s corpse. Only twelve-year-old Zeng Zhi bends down and hears the dying true dragon say one last thing to him: “Don’t let the Taiyin recognize you.” The next moment, The Nine Extremes of the Primordial Beginning enters his body. The Spirit Extreme reveals the uncanny. The Fate Extreme alters destiny. The Soul Extreme protects the self. The Earth Extreme borrows the power of mountains and rivers. The Nether Extreme crosses life and death. The Heaven Extreme questions the celestial signs. The Divine Extreme touches the authorities of creation. The World Extreme travels across worlds. From that day on, the world before Zeng Zhi’s eyes is turned completely upside down. Perhaps The Classic of Mountains and Seas is not a collection of strange tales, but a fragmentary map of a lost world. Perhaps the stories later generations took for myths, Nuwa Mending the Heavens, Yu the Great’s Nine Cauldrons, the westward journey to Kunlun, and Qin Shi Huang’s quest for immortality, all once pointed to an age that has been forgotten. But what truly sends a chill down Zeng Zhi’s spine is this: When Eastern classics, Mesopotamian clay tablets, Egyptian funerary texts, and Norse doomsday legends all reveal the same traces, he finally understands: What has been forgotten is not only the ancient past of China. And the Taiyin, hanging above humankind throughout the ages, seems to have been watching it all along. Some would seal off all worlds forever. Others would reopen the gate between the human world and all the other worlds. When everyone forces Zeng Zhi to choose between “keeping this gate shut forever” and “letting all the worlds descend upon the human realm again,” he says only: “I’ll take neither of your paths.” The ancients found a way through the first eight extremes. The ninth extreme, I’ll forge myself.