As the first Demon Sovereign in the history of the demon beast world, he would go for the heavenly tribulation, and as long as he endured the ninth heavenly tribulation, he would ascend to the legendary Demon Ancestor. Unfortunately, standing on the flying platform, he had acted too arrogantly. His luck was poor when he encountered the talking Nine Layered Heavens, and he was chased for ninety-one days and eighty-one days before being chopped into an immortal demon essence. From then on, he was at odds with the Nine-Layered Heavens. He swore that he would find a suitable carrier and return to life. He would shatter this Nine-Layered Heavens and recover his lost face!

His father was killed, his family was annihilated, endless humiliation struck his soul, heaven and earth were unable to accept this hatred. The iron-blooded youth went against the will of the heavens, his status was poor, and he descended to the underworld, where he roamed the world of the undead, where he turned into the god of slaughter and massacred the heavens.

Traversing visible and invisible realms, A Time of Lost Gods attends to profound rereadings of politics, religion, and madness in the cosmic accounts of spirit mediumship. Drawing on research across a temple, a psychiatric unit, and the home altars of spirit mediums in a rural county of China’s Central Plain, it asks: What ghostly forms emerge after the death of Mao and the so-called end of history? The story of religion in China since the market reforms of the late 1970s is often told through its destruction under Mao and relative flourishing thereafter. Here, those who engage in mediumship offer a different history of the present. They approach Mao’s reign not simply as an earthly secular rule, but an exceptional interval of divine sovereignty, after which the cosmos collapsed into chaos. Caught between a fading era and an ever-receding horizon, those “left behind” by labor outmigration refigure the evacuated hometown as an ethical-spiritual center to come, amidst a proliferation of madness-inducing spirits. Following pronouncements of China’s rise, and in the wake of what Chinese intellectuals termed semicolonialism, the stories here tell of spirit mediums, patients, and psychiatrists caught in a shared dilemma, in a time when gods have lost their way.

He was a talented youth, but he had been schemed to lose all of his strength. In the God of Heaven Continent, where strength reigned supreme, just how could he ever step foot onto the peak again? How could he kill his enemy? Was he just drinking his hatred or rising up to fight? I used my blood to purify the righteous energy of the world; I used my anger and rage to burn away the evil winds of the Buddha! QQ Bookmates: 327629138 