Tianshu

Tianshu is the sixth full-length novel by Xu Gongzi Shengzhi, following Shenyou, Guigu, Renyu, Lingshan, and Dishi. It runs to 360 chapters, roughly 1.7 million characters, and was serialized to completion on Qidian from 2011 to 2012. The story is set on the fictional continent of Tianshu, whose shape and geography clearly allude to ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, Greece, Rome, and Persia; the author reworks the myths and legends of these regions into a mythological epic spanning about two hundred years. The protagonist, Ammon, is of humble birth and a difficult past; in a world crowded with old gods, through chance and perseverance he gropes his way step by step along the path of cultivation, meets and befriends “defiers of heaven” such as Aesop and Pythagoras, and, from the dual perspective of traveler and god, repeatedly asks where the boundary lies between divinity and humanity. The novel offers fresh readings of ancient tales such as the Tower of Babel and the theft of fire, transplanting an Eastern cultivation system to serve as the underlying logic of Western myth, and finally converges on the question: if God created the human world, then who created God? The plot is coherent and tightly reasoned, written in a solemn style modeled on ancient hymns, and is regarded by readers as the most intellectually dense and most epic of Xu Gongzi's works.