The Feng Shui Master

The Feng Shui Master is a long urban supernatural fantasy novel by the web novelist Zhu, serialized on Qidian from February 2014 and completed in 2015, totaling about three million Chinese characters. The "zhai" in the title does not mean "homebody"; "zhai master" refers to the way of dwellings and feng shui: yin dwellings and yang dwellings, the arts of kan-yu, observing the heavens above, examining the earth below, and consulting human harmony in between, thereby grasping the principles of change in heaven and earth and foreseeing fortune and misfortune. The protagonist, Fang Yuan, is a home designer in his twenties working with his friend Bao Longtu at a small design firm. On a business trip, he is grazed on the forehead by a falling fragment of a geomantic compass; afterward, knowledge of feng shui and kan-yu surfaces in his mind, and his eyes gain the strange ability to see the "energy fields" of objects. With this gift, he begins by finding bargains at antique markets and adjusting layouts for clients, then surveys yang dwellings and sites yin graves, meets merchants, peers, and elders of various circles, and gradually makes a name for himself in feng shui circles. The novel links its main line through episodic stories, involving various feng shui configurations and ritual objects such as the Five Emperor Coins, the Money Formation, the Azure Dragon Drawing Water, and the Nine Fish Picture, and also depicts rivalry among peers, malicious formations, and even feng shui hazards left by foreign forces. Fang Yuan is mild-mannered and upright, always leaving room in his dealings, and through trials amid the many facets of worldly life he ultimately becomes a feng shui master in the eyes of the world. The book contains considerable specialist description and is regarded as one of the representative works of the urban feng shui genre.