Mountains and Seas: The Primal Reboot

On a September afternoon, during math class at Mingde High School, purple clouds swallowed the sky. The Qingwen, a ferocious bird from the Classic of Mountains and Seas, smashed through the classroom windows. The homeroom teacher collapsed under the podium, and classmate Zhao Ming died right before Zhou Huang's eyes. At that instant, the jade pendant on Zhou Huang's chest exploded with golden light, awakening within him a primordial power from the dawn of the universe—the Divine Lineage of Di Jun, activated. He believed this was only the beginning of the apocalypse. What he did not know was that the words his parents had left a year earlier when they departed—"We left you more than just this jade"—held the truth behind the collapse of the Three Realms' sealing system. The Ten Great Grotto-Heavens, the Thirty-Six Lesser Grotto-Heavens, and the Seventy-Two Blessed Lands—every sacred mountain recorded in Taoist texts for millennia was a lock. They imprisoned the fallen gods who had tumbled from the Heavenly Court, the malevolent spirits and vengeful ghosts crawling out of the Underworld, and the nameless existences erased from history after the ancient Investiture of the Gods. Now, the locks are rusting. Rising from the ruins of his school, Zhou Huang wields a javelin etched with dark-gold array patterns. Alongside the cold-eyed Li Han, who bears the bloodline of the Qin Yuan; the gluttonous fat youth Wang Kaixuan, carrier of the Taotie bloodline; the fiery girl Lu Qingcheng, inheritor of Zhurong's remnant flames; and the composed ice-shield specialist Xu Fang, he fights to reclaim lost territory inch by inch in a human exclusion zone overrun by ferocious beasts. They reseal the grotto-heavens and blessed lands, annihilate the fallen gods of the Heavenly Stems and Earthly Branches, close the Southern Heavenly Gate, seal the Ghost Gate, and re-lock every link in the Three Realms' sealing system. Yet the closer they get to the truth, the more they brush against a primordial entity sleeping deep in the fissure of the Eastern Sea—and a stele inscription left by Di Jun billions of years ago: "The Primal Covenant stands. Three Realms divide, Kunlun is the lock. The day the lock breaks, the Primal begins anew."