Drawing the Sun Bow to Kill the Sky Dog, Battling Through Stars and Moon for Another Year

"Drawing the sun-bow to slay the pale hound, beneath stars and moon another year gone."

"Through a hundred trials of life and death, never once turning back; among the transcendent of this world stands an ultimate peak!"

—Chen Pu, "On the Seventh Day of September, Suddenly Learning of My Master's Death"

This little poem written years ago by Chen Pu, headmaster of Evening Drum Academy, perhaps described but a ten-thousandth part of the hardships of the Dao path.

With The Present World so vast, and the ages so immense, how many peerless talents had surged forward one after another? Yet in the end, how many could stand at the very end of the transcendent Dao path?

Those in this world who had attained Dao Derivation.

The so-called kings of True Persons, the so-called teachers of heaven and earth!

Their honor and nobility far surpassed those of ordinary sovereigns. Their might and grace could not even be described by the word "god."

The Imperial Observatory's Director of Great Qi was named Ruan Qiu.

"The world is like a Sea of Bitterness; one must swim across it oneself"—thus came his name.

He stood at the highest peak of The Present World's Star Divination Art, an unquestionable grandmaster of the path of destiny. If the Starry Sky were the board and the stars its pieces, then across all under heaven, there were only a scant few who could play against him.

And now, he left the formation!

With a single step, he crossed from east of the Lian River to west of the Lian River, from atop an Assault Engine tower to the skies above the battlefield of the Jiangyin Plain. His Daoist robes streamed in the high air like rolling nebulae.

He merely raised a hand—

The clear sky abruptly