Fall

When King Zhou of Shang demands a provincial marquis's beautiful daughter for his harem, the proud father Su Hu writes his defiance on the palace wall and goes to war. The girl's name is Daji — and her journey to the capital at Zhaoge will decide the fate of a dynasty.

As Daji tightens her hold on King Zhou, the loyal ministers of the Shang die one by one — burned on a bronze pillar, broken against the palace steps, and at last the king's own uncle Bi Gan, ordered to cut the heart from his living body.

Huang Feihu is the Shang dynasty's greatest general, loyal through seven generations — until a New Year's visit to the palace ends with his wife dead on the ground and his sister thrown from a tower. This is the story of what it takes to break a loyal man, and the long road west it sends him down.

On the goddess Nüwa's sacred birthday, King Zhou of Shang enters her temple, sees her lifelike image, and scrawls a lustful poem on the wall. The insulted goddess cannot strike a king whose dynasty still holds heaven's mandate — so she summons a thousand-year fox spirit and two others. This is how the Investiture of the Gods begins.

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.

The war is won, and Jiang Ziya climbs the Feng Shen Tower to unroll the Investiture of the Gods — the Fengshen Bang. One by one he reads out the war's 365 dead and hands each a title and a post in heaven's bureaucracy. Enemies become colleagues; the reward for dying is a government job in the sky.

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.