The Heavenly Dao of Jiuzhou

People believe the Heavenly Dao is impartial, the gods are compassionate, reincarnation is our destination, and faith is our salvation. The land of the Nine Provinces is divided into nine domains, each ruled by its own powers. The gods are not creators. They are thieves who have usurped the laws of the Heavenly Dao. The Heavenly Dao is like the underlying data stream of the world: the more laws a god occupies, the greater its divine power. Faith, meanwhile, provides the computing power that allows the gods to analyze those laws. Anyone who wishes to become a god must meet two conditions: seize a portion of the Heavenly Dao's laws and build a power system unique to themselves. The price is that the laws slowly devour the self. In the end, a god becomes a cold puppet of the laws, stripped of their original will. On the other side of the world, multidimensional realms such as the Netherworld, the Demon Realm, and the Demon Beast Realm lie in wait. The Netherworld is a soul-recycling station: when people die, their souls return there, where their memories and emotions are squeezed out and refined, while the residue reenters the cycle of reincarnation. Hell is not a place of punishment, but a workshop for processing suffering on an industrial scale. Humanity has not remained trapped in an ancient age. Using the power of faith, it has developed technologies based on the laws of the world. Towering buildings fill the cities, and civilization flourishes. Yet no matter how advanced the technology, it cannot escape the harvest of invisible threads. A thread of law is connected to every living being's head. Their joys and sorrows, thoughts and prayers, stream upward without end, becoming the gods' sustenance. All living beings are sheep penned for slaughter: they toil their whole lives, then have their souls collected after death, only to repeat the cycle forever, with no true release. There is no true savior and no perfect ascension. Those who succeed in cultivating through tribulations join the gods who steal the Dao, only to be assimilated by the laws in the end. Those who fail have their souls scattered, losing even the right to be recycled.