The Emperor of Music

The Emperor of Music is a long fantasy novel by Tang Jia San Shao, serialized on Qidian from January 2008 and completed in December of the same year, totaling about 3.1 million characters. The story is set on the magic continent of Longqinus. The youth Ye Yinzhu is born into a lineage of Eastern Dragon survivors and spends sixteen years studying the guqin with his teacher, cultivating the "Pure-Hearted Qin Spirit" and becoming a Divine Sound Master. Divine Sound Masters are a branch of spiritual mages, highly esteemed yet considered useless on the continent of Longqinus—how can the sound of a qin stand against blades and forbidden spells? To further his studies, his teacher sends him to the continent's foremost academy, the Milan Magic Martial Academy. Yet along the way he not only loses the guqin he uses as a staff, but also the introduction letter from his teacher, and thus begins a comically ill-fated journey of study. At the academy, Ye Yinzhu befriends his cross-dressing roommate Sura, his contracted partner the amethyst behemoth "Zi," and other companions; through sonic blades, bamboo battle aura, and the Proud Bamboo Sword Technique, he rises to prominence in one duel and battle after another, and is gradually drawn into the vortex of the Seven Towers of Falan, imperial strife, and the struggle for racial survival. The work uses the rainbow ranks of red, orange, yellow, green, cyan, blue, and purple as the standard for measuring martial skill and magic, integrating Eastern cultural elements such as the Five Great Qins and the Three Great Divine Songs into a Western fantasy framework, pioneering a music-centered combat system. This book is an important work in which Tang Jia San Shao's early writing matured, and its worldbuilding and combat design accumulated experience for later works such as Douluo Dalu.