Journey to the North

At sixteen, the boy Lin Fei on the streets of Luoyang is told to his face by the master prophet Jiaye: you have only sixteen years of life left. Soon after, strangers carry him off to another world—the Nine Heavens of the Northern Realm. He quickly learns that he is the reincarnation of the great demon Dragon Butterfly, and that another consciousness not his own dwells within him; he may be devoured by his "past life," and must seize the chance to devour the Dragon Butterfly in turn if he is to keep being "Lin Fei." In the Northern Realm, Lin Fei meets three women of very different temperaments—Hai Ji, Jiudan Mei, and Gan Ningzhen—and is drawn into contests over soul artifacts, rifts in time and space, and the schemes of rival powers, from challenging the Ten Great Clans at Qingxu Heaven to the rescue at the Burial Flower Abyss, the curse of the Abyss of Resentment, and the Tomb Spirit Festival, climbing in cultivation amid life and death. The author takes this streetwise, sly, petty-benefit-loving yet hot-blooded and clever small man and, within a worldview where "all things in the universe arise from qi, and the Dao is everywhere," has him advance step by step toward true insight, set against his teacher-and-rival Chudu and his own fate. Written in first person with an ethereal style, the novel's throughline is the struggle against and defiance of destiny. The print edition is a selected version of the complete web text.