Beneath the year-round snow atop the Twelve Peaks of the Northern Frontier lie three hundred jade-green skeletons. As Lin Yan uses half a broken blade to cut open the ninth rib, a cluster of white plum blossoms suddenly blooms at his fingertips.
Eight hundred years ago, a prophecy from the Tianji Pavilion foretold that a god-slayer would be born from the Lin bloodline on the night of Frost's Descent. On the day the entire Lin clan was imprisoned in the dungeons of the Xu Jing Bureau, Lin Yan's sword, "Ashfrost," pierced his mother's throat.
Now he is the youngest executioner in the Xu Jing Bureau. A chain of black iron, strong enough to crush a dragon's bones, coils around his wrist, yet every day at exactly 11:45 p.m., he coughs up blood flecked with ice. Each drop turns into a white plum blossom when it hits the ground, and every blossom holds a fragment of memory: a girl pierced through the pipa bones by chains, smiling; a man wearing a bronze mask, weeping; and Lin Yan himself, pushing his blade inch by inch into a beating heart.
On the night the first white plum blossom blooms in the Northern Frontier, Lin Yan sees a young man on the torture rack who claims to be his twin brother. The Longevity Lock hanging around the stranger's neck bears the same blood-red totem as the murder weapon that repeatedly appears in Lin Yan's dreams...
A new world, a new story