Lord of Puluo

Li Banfeng's name uses the "feng" of "mountain peak," not the "feng" of "going mad"; the doctor also said he is not mad. An orphan, he worked his way through university hauling bricks, carrying sacks, and running a street stall. He has nothing to lose except one friend who truly cares for him, He Jiaqing. To save He Jiaqing's life, he rushes to Platform 96 and boards the No. 1160 steam train, arriving in a strange place frozen in the steam age: Puluo Prefecture. Here electricity is scarce and fuel oil hard to store, and the steam engine is pushed to its limit: gramophones, clocks, and calendars are all steam-driven, travel requires a road permit, and the underworld trades in jargon and contract deeds. In Puluo Prefecture, "a hundred schools in the world, ten thousand cultivators under heaven"; cultivation is not retreating to a cave to sit in meditation but rests on the myriad walks of daily life: food cultivators who grow fiercer the more they eat, smoke cultivators who grow stronger the more they smoke, martial cultivators who grow crueler the more they kill, wine cultivators who grow wilder the more they drink, plus travel cultivators who want to go everywhere, homebody cultivators who want to go nowhere, even mourning cultivators who specialize in cursing others, drama cultivators born for the stage, and farming cultivators who treat orange trees as their children. Li Banfeng happens to be bound at once to two mutually opposed paths, "homebody cultivation" and "travel cultivation": one forbids leaving the residence, the other demands constant running. Only when he obtains a residence he can carry with him does he barely resolve this dilemma, and thereby is drawn into layered struggles over land, contract deeds, Daoist sects, and various factions. Wearing a suit, a bowler hat, and carrying a feather duster, he does chivalrous deeds beneath a mad exterior, rising from a mere "speck of dust" to the eye of the storm among Puluo's ten thousand cultivators.