Spiritual Qi Revival: Starting as a City Inspector

Spiritual energy vanished three hundred years ago, and so did the rules. Now, in the fourth year since its return, humans, demons, and machines all have to learn the rules anew. Cultivators need approval before opening a cave abode. Demonic cultivators who set up stalls in the road have their goods confiscated. A Golden Core elder shows off his cultivation level in the street and gets detained for half a day. A sword immortal gets pulled over for speeding and tries to cash in a powerful connection: “My master is a Nascent Soul cultivator.” The officer hands over a ticket: “Nascent Soul cultivators still have to wait in line.” Demonic cultivators need permits, but the regulations are already on their third edition, and the “Demonic Cultivator Identity Registration” section is still blank. The same goes for the awakened metal behemoths in the eastern district: want to enter the central district? Have you got your law-enforcement certification? Otherwise, it’s illegal entry. Wen Xu is an officer with the West City Law Enforcement Bureau, badge number 037. He has zero spiritual roots and can’t cultivate, so he gets by on regulations he’s read until they’re worn out. There’s something eerie about the tickets he hands out: his fingertips go numb, and the paper grows heavier. If someone refuses to sign, the regulations turn to the relevant page by themselves. An elder gets hit with a ticket and his cultivation gets tangled up. He sits down to meditate, only to get another ticket for blocking the road with his cultivation. The whole bureau says that little Wen’s tickets aren’t regulations, they’re his natal magical treasure. His partner, Yuan Wan, is the new hire in the regulations department. She spends entire nights in the archives, always clutching the old case files from the first year. No respectable person reads files like that. What nobody tells Wen Xu is that something is turning beneath the city. The last line of the first-year report has been crossed out. The lights in an old house south of the city switch on by themselves in the middle of the night. Why did spiritual energy vanish for three hundred years, and why has it returned now of all times? The world is like an onion: the land beneath their feet is only the outermost layer. Below it lies the ocean, above it the sky, deep down is the underworld, and at the end is the sea of stars. With every layer peeled back, everything they once believed has to start over, including who he is. Human cases, demon cases, machine cases, old cases and new, the city inspector with zero spiritual roots handles them all. Issue the ticket first. Follow procedure.