The Nine Wastes Sink Beneath the Heavenly Dao

When the primordial world was first formed, four gods ruled together. Xuan Xi, the Water God of the North, fell into darkness after enduring ages of loneliness and injustice at the hands of Heaven. His fall sparked a divine war that lasted a hundred thousand years, and the Celestial Emperor of Cangyuan sealed him in the Nine Nether Demon Abyss. The Heavenly Way has been incomplete ever since, while an ancient doomsday calamity has lain hidden in the Nine Wastes. As ages passed, the Demon Lord Xuan Xi split off a wisp of his demonic soul and sent it into the human world to be reincarnated. It took shelter in an ordinary baby in a remote village in the Eastern Lands. A hunter found the child beside the Blackwater Pool and named him Hu Qingyuan. Sixteen years later, the boy Hu Qingyuan is still an ordinary village youth: quiet, aloof, and clear-eyed. Yet night after night, he falls into the same dream: boundless black waters churn beneath a submerged palace of white jade, while a cool, sorrowful woman’s voice whispers again and again, “Come find me... Don’t forget...” An ancient water-patterned manuscript, a shard of pottery engraved with “Guixu,” and a blue mark capable of sensing the world’s water veins: fragments of fate come together one by one. Qingyuan gradually realizes he is no ordinary water-sensitive cultivator. The blue mark on his palm was carved by the water veins of the world, a sign that they are crying out for help. He leaves his homeland and sets out on a long journey. Through countless meetings and partings, he witnesses human suffering and sees the cultivation world’s self-interest and hypocrisy, as well as its righteousness and sacrifice. At the abyss before the Nine Nether seal, he speaks across the void with the world-destroying Demon Lord from a million years ago and directly confronts the will of the Celestial Emperor, who has slept for countless ages. On the battlefield of the war between gods and demons, he accepts the origins of both life and death in his mortal body, laying the foundations of the “Qingyuan Middle Way.” At last, standing above the rift in the Heavenly Way, he fuses the principles of life, death, yin and yang, creation, destruction, reincarnation, and a billion