The Saint King of Inverted Patterns

In the Age of Spirit Patterns, the world's spiritual energy takes shape as patterns, and cultivators attain the Dao by observing them. Lin Yuan, a disciple of Medicine King Valley, bears the secret of the Reversal Spirit Pattern. A soul-devouring curse burns into the bone on his left shoulder, while the fingertips of his right hand make plants flourish anew. As he breaks through to the Earth Spirit realm, he faces a double trial of inner demons: chains woven from devouring patterns bind his mother in a blood-red wasteland, intertwined with an illusion of the injustice that saw him falsely accused and cast out of Medicine King Valley. Yet this ordeal unexpectedly awakens the ancient Thunder Pattern Sword Soul within him, making him an awakening "living spirit pattern," the first in a thousand years.

The Heavenly Secrets Pavilion prophesies, "When the Reversal Pattern appears, the Heavenly Dao will fall." Lin Yuan is swept into the vortex of a collapsing spirit-pattern system. Jiang Lijing, the saintess of Medicine King Valley, transforms herself into a mirror of myriad forms, her pupils reflecting the remnants of three thousand worlds. Her fate intertwines with Lin Yuan's: when he reverses spirit patterns, golden gear-like patterns turn in her eyes; when he loses himself in slaughter, she uses the sound of her zither to subdue his inner demons. Together they explore a forbidden land, but trigger a light-tracing spirit pattern and fall into a twelve-hour loop, where they glimpse the forbidden truth: the first Saint King and the ancestor of the devouring patterns perished together.

Lin Yuan commands the Wither-and-Bloom Sword Casket, while Jiang Lijing shatters her mirror and becomes countless incarnations scattered across time and space. In their battle against the gods, the twin wielders rewrite the laws of heaven and earth with the Reversal Pattern, but the price is that they become eternal mirror images of the positive and negative spirit patterns: if one lives, the other is erased...

This novel and its characters are entirely fictional. Any resemblance to actual people or events is purely coincidental. Do not imitate.