Tianxin

Tianxin is a full-length fantasy romance novel by Peng Liurong, published by New World Press in 2008. The story centers on time travel: the soul of the ancient shamaness Tianxin crosses into the twenty-first century and possesses a girl of the same name who is terminally ill. She wakes to a strange modern world—high-rises, a school campus, unfamiliar relatives and daily routines—and her only purpose is to find her lover Qing, who has long since been reborn and has forgotten their past. Amid modern campus and urban life, Tianxin struggles to adapt to the girl's identity and life while secretly searching for traces of her lover; meanwhile, long-slumbering demons awaken one after another for reasons unknown, triggering a series of inexplicable supernatural events that sweep her search for love into a larger vortex. When protecting love and sealing evil, saving all living things, are placed on the two ends of the same scale, she must choose. The work sets the identity of an ancient shamaness against a modern campus, creating narrative tension through the abnormal within the everyday; first-person and third-person narration alternate, the plot unfolds layer by layer through suspense, and a language flavor reminiscent of Han-dynasty texts and historical allusions add a texture woven of the classical and the fantastical to this young-adult romance. At more than 290 pages, it is one of the more distinctive works in the author's 2008 output.