Prologue
By the original order of the world, it was simply taken as given that men bore yang and women bore yin.
The novel I couldn't stop reading, though, was a little different. There, the balance of yin and yang had been turned on its head, so that women carried yang and men were left with yin.
You might think, What's the problem with that? But it was a problem—because the author, on no greater grounds than that reversed harmony, had rebuilt the murim into a world where men and women had traded places.
A setting that braided martial arts together with gender reversal. Fresh in a way I'd never seen, and I couldn't help being taken with it.
And yet, wasn't something strange about it?
The murim has always been a meritocracy. I won't pretend there's no distinction drawn between men and women, but there isn't much of one. Prove your ability, and you receive a sobriquet stamped with words like Phoenix or Flower.
So I thought, Isn't this just going to end up as a murim with more women in it?
But it wasn't....
Only once I had been born again into this world did I begin to see what was really going on beneath the surface.