Liang is old-school in his approach and shuns typewriters and computers when working. He wrote the novel completely by hand, submitting more than 3,000 sheets of paper to his bewildered publishers. The endeavor that lay before them, Liang recalls teasingly, exhausted the editors from China Youth Publishing Group.

The novel was published in December 2017. Two years later, it won the Mao Dun Literature Prize－one of China's most prestigious literary honors. In 2019, it also won the biennial Wu Cheng'en Novel Award, a significant honor named after the writer of the 16th-century classic, Journey to the West.

But the novel had caught the attention of the studios before all that. In 2018, Tencent Pictures and director Li Lu, best known for the 2017 anti-corruption-themed hit TV series, In the Name of the People, decided to co-develop the project.