Save the Falling Sky

Tilting the Sky is a xianxia web novel by Shengzhe Chenlei, serialized on Qidian from September 2009 and now complete at roughly 1.05 million Chinese characters. The story opens with a train crisis that plants the seeds of what is to come: the Daoist Lu Se burns up his lifespan to prevent a collision between two trains, reducing his body to ash, then is reborn with the memories of his past life into a world after the catastrophic event known as the Great Sky Tilt, as a youth from a collateral branch of the Lu clan in Jiangzhou. His constitution is deemed deficient in all five elemental spirits, and he is judged forever incapable of cultivation, yet he draws on the cultivation of his past life and the peculiar traits of his merit body to forge another path. In the earth-fire refining prison of the Yuyin Sect, he is tempered by the old madman Zhuang Bohan, receives the Tongtian Seal branded on his chest, and learns of the life-giving jade marrow; thereafter he outwits powerful enemies, recovers his ancestral estate and fields, and promotes terraced fields and irrigation, channeling waterwheels to water barren slopes, practicing as a mortal the creed of establishing oneself through farming and study and proving the Dao through talisman arrays. As the gate of cultivation opens, Lu Se enters the Jinding Sect to study the arts of dan and arrays, builds Sanggu to cultivate talent and refine talisman arrays for the common people, travels far to the frigid plains of the North Pole in search of the soil of respiration, ventures deep into primordial star clusters and the graveyard of ancient gods, and gradually closes in on the truth of the Sky Tilt: the first-generation ancient gods sealed the rift in space with their divine bodies, and only thus was the world's survival purchased. The book takes as its spiritual undercurrent the lines A man's heart is iron until death; watch him try his hand at mending the crack in heaven, binding individual cultivation to the survival of civilization, and lands on the theme that only those who save themselves can be saved. It is a work of imaginative cultivation fiction that emphasizes rigorously researched settings and a system of talisman arrays.