The Veritable Record of Yan Shuyue, First Beneath Heaven

THE VERITABLE RECORD OF YAN SHUYUE, FIRST BENEATH HEAVEN Compiled from the original records of the Grand Scribe, together with surviving correspondence, official memorials, military accounts, and later annotations. Commonly called The Shuyue Annals In the sixty-third year of the present reign, the heavens opened. From beyond the boundary of the realm came cultivators in their thousands, descending from a higher world whose spiritual veins had long since been exhausted and whose great powers now turned their gaze upon younger lands. Against them stood the armies of the empire, the great sects, ancient clans, wandering masters, forbidden schools, and enemies who had not fought beside one another in generations. At the forefront stood Yan Shuyue. They called her the Thousand-Armed Asura. Sovereign of Ten Thousand Weapons. First Beneath Heaven. Forty years earlier, she had possessed no title at all. She was nineteen years old, the daughter of common laborers in a modest quarter of the imperial capital, with little money, no lineage, no master, and no cultivation worth naming. For several months she pestered an aging martial artist in a neighborhood tavern until, in exhaustion, he taught her a third-rate breathing method. A young scholar happened to be watching. For reasons she could not then explain, the woman began to take notes. Thus began the records. What survives today is no simple biography. The life of Yan Shuyue has come down through private journals and battlefield accounts, imperial decrees and wanted notices, letters never meant for public eyes, testimony gathered decades after the fact, passages censored and restored, contradictory manuscripts, and the increasingly exasperated annotations of generations of scholars. At their center remains the voice of the Grand Scribe herself: witness to Shuyue's first breath of qi, her earliest defeats, her rise through the martial world, and the long succession of victories, quarrels, friendships, rivalries, mistakes, scandals, and impossible deeds by which an unknown commoner became the most formidable cultivator of her age. Yet the woman preserved by history is not always the woman preserved in ink. The monuments remember an Asura. The histories remember a sovereign. The Grand Scribe remembers Shuyue. The Veritable Record of Yan Shuyue, First Beneath Heaven is an archival xianxia chronicle of cultivation and conquest, ordinary lives beneath extraordinary heavens, the making of a legend, and the strange intimacy between the woman who changed the world and the woman who decided, long before anyone else thought her worth remembering, to write it all down.