On the night the blood moon hangs in the sky, Xiao Jin, the orphaned heir of the former dynasty, awakens the blood of an ancient Demon Venerable within him. The Heaven-Slaying Sword Spirit tears through his meridians. To stop a catastrophe that could destroy the world, he swallows the forbidden blood crystal of the Night Rakshasa, but burns the last remnants of his mother’s tenderness to ash. The face of his mother in his memories turns out to be that of Qing Mingzi, the leader of the Immortal Realm Alliance, smiling coldly. The truth behind the bloodbath a century ago appears through the cracks in the Reincarnation Mirror: the massacre array was engraved not with demonic incantations, but with the secret celestial sigils of the nine great sects.
Su Lixue, master of the Heavenly Secrets Pavilion, veils her eyes in gauze. The lover she sealed away with her own hands now calls her the mastermind behind the massacre from atop the execution platform. A shard of the Reincarnation Mirror in her hand reflects the phantom of a blood moon bride. When the poison vines of the healer Yue Jian pierce her heart, the seventeen-year-old girl’s eyes brim with a thousand years of sorrow. “This time, I’ll reset everything and shatter your destiny.” Meanwhile, the wandering cultivator Xie Wujiao cuts open his rotting heart. The fragment of a blood pact beating inside it resonates with the roar from the depths of the demonic realm’s ley lines. The chain that has bound the Three Realms for a thousand years was forged with the cries of infants.
When the scabbard of the Heaven-Slaying Sword cracks open to reveal an abyss, its interior a mass of flesh like a scarlet palace chamber, Xiao Jin points his blade at the Pillar of Heaven. Behind him, the Night Rakshasa’s crimson armor is already covered in stone veins; Su Li’s Heavenly Secrets Eye has burned into a charred, empty socket; Xie Wujiao’s heart bursts into a rain of blood. Amid the thunderous crash of the Immortal Realm’s sacred mountains collapsing, a drop of demon blood falls into the newly formed shell of the Reincarnation Mirror in Yue Jian’s hands.
There is no solution to this game:
Some burn their souls to rewrite the laws of heaven and earth,
Some gouge out their eyes to atone for a sea of bloodshed,
And when the world begins anew, a baby’s first cry comes from the shattered Sword Mound.
