In Mingyun Town, where peach blossoms blaze in profusion,
Xue Lingyu, a young man with crippling social anxiety, never imagined he would become the sort of man burdened with romantic debts in a stage play.
Until the cold moon over the mass grave that night revealed a red-robed performer, whose haunting opera voice sank into his bones
From then on, he was Lei Yin, the asura who wielded a blade in the Yu family massacre, and a piece on Old Daoist Lü Shang's divination board, stirring the whole world into upheaval.
Some said he owed too much to the women who loved him:
His childhood sweetheart kept vigil for twenty years outside the palace gates, just to protect his orphaned bloodline. As her plain robes were stained with blood, she smiled and called him by his childhood name;
The snow-white cat he rescued in the wilderness became a stunning spirit creature. It brought him immortal herbs to heal his wounds, yet carved its obsessive love into his son's very bones;
Even the ghostly performer who crawled out of a grave, sleeves swirling wildly in her madness, had a wisp of a broken soul in her heart that loved to watch flowers, glowing like blue phosphorous…
He strode through mountains of corpses and seas of blood, witnessing dynasties rise and fall, yet never understood:
Why did someone burn away the rest of their life for him every time he turned away?
Why, whenever he looked back, did he grasp nothing but a bloodstained corner of a sleeve?
