“Those who tend the Way must treat all living beings as straw dogs.”
That is, until Lin Mo discovers that he is the very dog the Heavenly Dao has kept in captivity for a thousand years.
Lin Mo, the lowest of the low, a pearl-diving slave in Chilin Town, awakens the bloodline of a Dao Tender when he touches a bronze die.
The instant stardust gathers in his palm to form the Art of Tending the Dao, he sees a horrifying truth: the “merit” earned by generations of Dao Tenders who carved out their hearts to calm the seas is really a lie, devised by the Immortal Realm to drain the fortune of the lower world!
“For every person you save, the calamity ash grows a yard thicker.”
When his childhood friend A Yin’s silver hair coils around his neck, and a healer’s silver needle is sewn into his star marrow, Lin Mo finally understands:
The so-called “tending the Dao to save the world” is nothing more than refining all living beings into fleshly vessels to shield the Immortal Realm from calamity!
The demon clans of the Eastern Wastes unearth a fragment of the Art of Tending Heaven, carved by Lin Mo in his first life onto the skull of the Demon Ancestor.
The Buddhist kingdom of the Western Regions enshrines a demon-subduing pestle, forged from Lin Mo’s spine, atop its pagoda.
At the South Sea auction house, the price of “a Dao Tender’s primal yang” has reached half the value of a city.
And at the end of the Starfall Wasteland in the Northern Frontier,
the heart-carving knives of three hundred generations of Dao Tenders are stuck into the coral hairpin he carved for his junior sister with his own hands.
“So the Art of Tending Heaven was meant to tend the Immortals all along.”
Lin Mo melts the seeds of calamity ash and takes up a sword of jade and coral. At the moment he cleaves open the Gate of Heaven:
Deep within the Ninth Heaven, three hundred bronze dice circle an Immortal Venerable who looks just like A Yin.
The star-dust blood flowing beneath her skirt is the blood of Chilin Town’s people, drained dry!
“This sword: to tend Heaven, or to tend the Dao?”
“Neither. It tends the Immortal Calamity!”
