Investiture of the Gods

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.