The Martial Venerable of a Turbid Age

In the third year of the Great New Republic, the nation lies fractured. The Southern Government has barely taken root, while northern warlords carve the land into endless battlefields. Western ironclads threaten the coasts, and lingering spirits of the fallen dynasty refuse to fade. This is an age where muskets clash with tempered sinews, and revolutionary conspiracies intertwine with rampant cults—a world of martial artists, demonic beasts, alien monstrosities, and mechanized iron bodies. On a torrential night in the Shanghai International Settlement, Fu Juemin stands amid the rubble of a collapsed giant edifice. Slowly, he withdraws his hands from the chest of a five-meter-tall, white-headed, barefoot ape-like creature before him. Blood and rain drip from his fingertips. "A remnant of the Mountains and Seas, an abomination left to plague the living," he murmurs. "Devouring this beast soul, which carries a faint trace of the Zhu Yan's bloodline... the final stance of my Mythical Five-Animal Qigong should at last be complete."