Chronicles of Golden Palace Talismans and Swords

During the chaos of the Five Barbarians, a blood-red mystic talisman appeared in the snowy reaches of Yin Mountain. Celestial Master Yan Chixia followed its trail, only to become embroiled in a shocking mystery spanning the realms of life and death Why do Buddhist monks skin people and make elixirs in the dead of night? A merchant caravan perishes in Hexi, its corpses crawling with secret mantras written in Sanskrit. The bodhisattvas in the murals of Longmen’s Thousand Buddha Grotto lower their eyes and weep blood, hinting that Hu nobles are boiling people alive in bronze cauldrons to worship the Wolf God… Even the underworld is in turmoil: the Messengers of Death seize the wrong souls, Lady Meng overturns the River of Forgetfulness, and the Book of Life and Death in the Judge’s hands holds the blood debts of Hu and Han soldiers from their past lives. And Yan Chixia’s own name has been circled in cinnabar in a prophecy titled “The Night the Celestial Master Perishes in the Rain.” More disturbing still, the heart carved out by a Hu courtesan as she dances with a knife beneath the moon bears a runic mark from the same source as the one on his sword. A nine-tailed fox demon, frozen for three hundred years in an ice cave, opens its mouth and calls him “senior brother.” A Buddha’s palm subdues a dragon, a star map hangs upside down in an underground palace, and corpse-speaking coins in the ghost market relentlessly pursue him. Then, during the battle at Mount Mang, Yan Chixia cleaves the boundary between life and death with a single sword strike, only to see, deep in the beacon-lit smoke The “Black Bird Amulet of State,” worshipped by the people, is unmistakably the soul-locking artifact lost by the Rakshasa woman of the underworld. The blood feud between Hu and Han remains unresolved, and the order of the Three Realms teeters on the brink of collapse. What coils around the Celestial Master’s sword: the orthodox path that will save the world, or the backlash of a deicide plot from a century ago? When Yan Chixia personally sets fire to Luoyang, he finally realizes that he may be the very first “talisman” in this catastrophe…