Plucking the Stars

Plucking the Stars is an Eastern fantasy web novel by Liu Zhengyang, first published on Qidian on December 18, 2014, and completed on July 31, 2015, totaling about 1.038 million characters in 398 chapters. The work builds a Star Continent where cultivation is founded on "star essence": here there is no familiar battle aura or magic; cultivators temper themselves with the power of the stars, and the forces of the sects, the Mountain of Books, the demon races and the Realm of Otherworldly Demons are intricately intertwined. Chu Ge, an astronomy enthusiast on Earth, is carried to the Star Continent by a meteor; when he wakes, the body he inhabits is a corpse that has been run through the throat with a sword and left outside Yuzhou City. Reborn into this body, he arrives in time for the Star Cloud Sect's recruitment trials in Yuzhou City, wins first place in the literary examination with a top-grade paper, and then makes his mark in events such as the lighting of the star lamps, the sect assembly and the exploration of the Demon-Suppressing Tower. The world has long been bound by rigid dogma and religious thinking such as "the sun star has never moved in ten thousand years," but Chu Ge discovers that his seemingly useless astronomical knowledge touches the very source of cultivation: he proposes the "Theory of Restoring Starlight," performs the "Turning of the Stars," and challenges the existing star essence system with the scientific thinking of observing changes in the stars. After leaving the Star Cloud Sect, he travels to the Island of the Heavenly Book, where he experiences the debates on the Mountain of Books and the Laurel Gathering, and is drawn into the Contest of a Hundred Scholars, uncovering many old secrets when the Sacred Mountain opens. When the crisis of the otherworldly demon invasion erupts, the Star Cloud Sect, the Mountain of Books and the demon races join forces to respond, and in the final battle Chu Ge breaks through to the fifth realm and uncovers the secret of the "Ancient Realm of Plucking the Stars" and of a new world. The work grafts astronomical knowledge onto fantasy power progression, with a protagonist who grows through intellect rather than brute force alone; it is the author's second full-length novel after Records of the Thunder Soul.