Immortal Among Witches

The story is set in an alternate world after the "Severance of Heaven and Earth": the shamanic tradition has declined while the Hundred Schools of Confucianism and Daoism have risen. The sages established a new order through sacrifices to heavenly deities, earth spirits, and ancestral ghosts, and through the doctrine of mutual resonance between Heaven and humanity. With the dismissal of the Hundred Schools and the elevation of Confucianism alone, this new order became the dominant state ideology. Shamanic arts, by contrast, were relegated to the countryside and dismissed as lowbrow trickery.

A modern young man, Tao Xiaowu, is transported bodily into this world. Lacking a household registration, he becomes a displaced person and can only survive by posing as a shaman using folk knowledge from his former life. While performing a funeral rite for a client, his greed for profit brings disaster upon him, and he is taken in as a disciple by a genuine old shaman. After his master's death, Tao Xiaowu must grope his way alone through the rules governing the spread of shamanic arts—arts that are fundamentally transactions with ghosts and spirits, and whose backlash is severe. With the aid of a jade pendant inscribed with divine script and fragments of Daoist methods gleaned from repeated soul-journeys through dreams, he gradually cultivates external Daoist techniques alongside local shamanic rituals. He embarks on a path that both inherits the shamanic lineage and draws on Daoist methods to establish himself, rising through dynastic strife, Confucian suppression, and the power struggles between the forces of the yin and yang realms to become a pivotal figure in the shamanic tradition.