Someone asked me about "Yan Shi's creation of a performer." This is a fable recorded in Liezi: Questions of Tang, and the opening of this book adapted a passage from the original.
Of course, to us, this is a flight of fancy. Whether tales of immortals and gods, eternal youth, or all manner of supernatural beings and strange phenomena, they all spring from such flights of fancy that soar beyond reality.
Imagination is something humanity has possessed without being taught since the age of ignorance. Through the changing myths and legends of the Spring and Autumn, pre-Qin, and Warring States eras, the development of philosophical Daoism and religious Daoism, yin-yang and the five phases, and medical theories, it gave rise to the immortal fantasies, cultivation stories, and martial arts tales of later ages. Though we often encounter cultivation legends of alchemists refining elixirs, Divine Abilities and magical arts, or flying swords sweeping across the skies, who is to say that, in another parallel world, the Puppeteer Dao Path could not be the orthodox path of cultivation?
The central premise of this book arose precisely from that hypothetical possibility.
While I am here, I would also like to discuss the issue of style that some readers may be worried about. Science fiction and immortal fantasy are, in fact, as unrelated as horses and cattle whose paths never cross, and blending the two does indeed create certain clashes in compatibility.
But please note one fact: two thousand years ago, people could already imagine things like Yan Shi's Creation, or wooden oxen and flowing horses. This was the romanticism of the ancients, born from the same source as those traditional schools of immortal cultivation. (They all originated in the Hundred Schools of Thought.)
The immortals and cultivation in Investiture of the Gods have one aesthetic; various folk legends and folktales have another; something like Journey to the West, which blends Buddhism and Daoism... has yet another. These are simply choices of setting, so asking questions is fine, but please do not start wars over the setting, much less challenge the style, because doing so is utterly meaningless.
And I would like to offer a defense here: many things that look very modern actually existed in ancient times. Reading more widely will make that clear.
Take the story of "Yan Shi's Creation," which speaks directly to the theme. If you had read it before, you would not find it strange. If you had not, you might make a fuss and ask things like, "Wait, how did ancient times have Mechanism Automatons and robots too? Is this a science-based cultivation story?" Explaining it is genuinely a nuisance, so I simply leave it unexplained in the main text.
In this work's setting, the way of the sages is no different from the everyday practices of ordinary people, and the way of heaven and earth is no different from the divine workings of creation. To seize the creative power of heaven and earth (to reshape nature) is a great Divine Ability! Thus, the Creation-Promotion Secret Art is a genuine Divine Ability of creation, regardless of its aesthetic.
In short, this book is not a science-based cultivation story, nor will it obsess over explaining cultivation through scientific principles and excessive modern terminology. (But the protagonist is a transmigrator, so some of this is unavoidable; that was also a deliberate choice to blend the styles.) Instead, it simply imagines an Eastern Victory Continent where the Puppeteer Dao Path holds sway, standing alongside the sword cultivators, sorcerers, martial artists, demons, and the like of other continents. That is why this book still falls under the cultivation civilization category.
While I am here, the reader group number is: 42355392