Deep in the desolate marshes, the condemned-blood boy Han Qizhi has his right eye gouged out and barely survives among the Bone-Gatherer clan. At the once-every-sixty-years "Wulu Molting Sacrifice," he glimpses a network of stars hidden in the spine of a god statue. It is, in fact, a shackle forged from countless souls buried in the earth's veins! He swallows the baleful Yinghuo sand excavated from Burial-Bone Cliff, and his right eye transforms into a pulsing red crystal. As he flees for his life, a star-marked skeletal hand reaches out from a bronze coffin, a Wei constellation tattoo leaves his sister's body as she burns herself alive, and a blood-jade divination image is coughed up by his dying master. Together, these signs tear open the bloody truth: the so-called gods are nothing but "Heaven-Stealers" who imprison all living things.
From an ant secretly learning the Art of the Azure Tortoise Bearing the Diagram to a renegade cultivator wielding the Yinghuo Heaven-Burning Halberd, Han Qizhi treads the phosphorescent fires of Bone-Gatherer Cliff and carves a bloody path through a deadly formation of the Twenty-Eight Mansions. But when he cuts through the final star-chain, the sound that rings out from the depths of the Nine Hells is not the bell of freedom. The "divine husks" he has cut down are assembling into a colossal eye that will blot out the stars...
