3 pieces from Investiture of the Gods — each retold in modern English and traced to its source.
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.
At seventy-two, Jiang Ziya is sent down from Mount Kunlun with a mandate to remake heaven and no gift for making a living. He fails at every trade his sworn brother sets him — until a fortune-telling stall makes him famous, and a demon in mourning white walks up to test the one man in Zhaoge who can see her.
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.