Gu-Bone

Xuanming, the Gu doctor from Medicine King Valley, discovers that every person he saves develops a soul-binding pact on their neck, identical to his own. When the thirty-seventh corpse puppet, embedded with bronze scales, claws its way out of the earth, he recognizes the rotting stitches as his own handiwork. The patients he had treated over the past three years had all been substitute vessels for the Gu his elder brother was cultivating. In the blood pool at the bottom of the Sword Burial Abyss, the truth is reflected: the remains of his younger brother, who drowned at the age of seven, float in the water, with the Five Poisons knot he had woven still tied around his wrist. To sever the life-swapping technique, Master Ming shatters his 306 sword bones and uses poisonous blood as a catalyst to forge the seventh-generation corpse Gu that had parasitized him for half his life into a blade to kill his own kin. When bronze scales crawl over his heart, he finally understands his elder brother Qingque's last words: “A-Ming, you are the perfect vessel for your elder brother's Gu.”