The deadliest weapon in this martial world is the blood-red pupil growing in a person’s eye socket.
Ming Zhu’s silver-gray eyes can see three moments into the future, but each time he uses his ocular technique, a page of his memories burns away. When he discovers that his beloved younger sister has been forged into the martial world’s supreme treasure, the Myriad-Eyed Candle Stand, the blood-written words on his eye-wrap begin to flow backward. The father who killed his own kin to prove his Dao twelve years ago took his first pair of eyes from his archenemy, Jin Tong.
Jin Tong’s deep blue eyes can command a hundred blades, but the talisman branded on his face in childhood turns against him. He keeps himself alive by eating the eyeballs of his enemies raw, yet when he devours the Ming family’s bloodline, he tastes his mother. When their blades clash, the figures reflected deep in their pupils are not mortal enemies, but mirror images of each other.
In the wager of this “Thousand-Eyed Banquet”:
- The wicks burning in the Buddhist shrine are living optic nerves
- The martial arts manuals up for auction are soaked in cerebrospinal fluid
- The left eyes wagered by the spectators twitch inside glazed cups
And the true host is weaving lies from a fragment of the Eyeless Sutra:
“Reach the Dark-Gold Eye realm, and you can glimpse the Heavenly Dao.”
But no one tells them that the so-called Heavenly Dao
Is a pupil beast dismembered and imprisoned a thousand years ago, waiting in the Abyss of Devouring to be reborn through a host.
When Ming Zhu’s eye-wrap strangles the last Lantern Bearer, Jin Tong’s heart-plucking dagger rests against his throbbing left eye:
“Look closely. In their eyes, you and I are nothing but... two drops of blood, poised to fall.”
This is a deception that dares death.
Archenemies like twins, pupils that serve as each other’s medicine, a martial world parasitized by an ancient ferocious beast: in this cycle, they recognize the souls within themselves have long since rotted.
