Investiture of the Gods

A general's wife carries her child for three and a half years, and what she delivers is a ball of fire. The boy inside grows up reckless and divine, kills a dragon prince for sport, and when the price comes due, pays it with his own body — flesh to his mother, bone to his father.

An eighty-year-old man sits by a stream with a fishing line that ends in a straight needle, held above the water, baited with nothing. He is not fishing for fish. A king has dreamed of a winged tiger, and the diviners say it means a sage waits somewhere in the wild.

He was the one general the dying Shang dynasty did not deserve — upright where the court was rotten, brilliant where it was blind. So heaven sent three hundred thousand men west with him, and a road that ended at a ridge named for the dying of dragons.

Tongtian has hung four heaven-forged swords at the four gates of a killing array no single immortal can survive. The only counter is three sages of equal rank entering together — so the old Daoist masters send west, to the doorstep of the Buddha, and ask him to step into the dust of the world.

The Shang has fallen. The fox who wore a woman's face for thirty years is dragged to the executioner's block — and the soldiers cannot lift their swords, because even now, bound and condemned, she is the most beautiful thing any of them has ever seen. And on a high tower, the king she ruined waits for the fire.