Origin

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.

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.

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.

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.

A stone on a mountaintop splits open and a monkey climbs out. He dares the waterfall no one else will, wins a crown for it — then, at the height of his joy, the one thought he cannot fight comes for him: that even a king must die.

The monkey who could not bear to die crosses two oceans to find a teacher, and finds one who hides the whole secret of immortality inside a riddle and three taps on the skull. What he learns will make him a god — and get him thrown out for showing off.