Immortals

Tongtian Jiaozhu raises the Immortal-Slaying Formation, four swords at four gates built to kill gods. Laozi rides in on a green ox, laughs, and pushes back his crown — and from one breath rise three immortals, the Three Pure Ones. One old man becomes four, and the founder of a school can only parry.

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.

Ten immortals of Jin'ao Island raise the Ten Absolute Formations before the Zhou camp — ten lethal magic arrays. The immortals of Kunlun break them one by one, but each array is opened at the cost of a life: a disciple sent in first to die, his name carried off to the roster in the Investiture of the Gods.

After the Zhuxian Formation falls, the master of the losing school of immortals makes his last stand — the Ten Thousand Immortals Formation, the Wanxian Zhen, into which he pours his entire host. Laozi, Yuanshi Tianzun, and the Western saint Zhunti come to break it, a war of the immortals that will all but empty a lineage of heaven.

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.

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.

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.

Zhao Gongming, an immortal of the Jie school, rides a black tiger into the war for the Shang and cannot be beaten — until the Zhou side stops fighting him and starts a curse: a straw effigy, his name, and arrows through its eyes. How the God of Wealth, Caishen, came to die.