[Also known as: Beneath the Waning Moon] "I went solo again" "Urban high-martial-arts fantasy" "“No angst from start to finish”" "Draw a blade to cut the water, and it flows on; raise a cup to drown your sorrows, and they only grow"
When the dark red sky screen descended, the entire city was still bathed in neon and the hum of engines. The fragmented glow of advertising screens reflected in passersby’s eyes, but no one looked up at the blood moon hanging over the steel jungle. It was perfectly round, like a curse calculated with precision. Its crimson halo, like a bloodstained veil, silently covered the stream of headlights on the overpass.
A sudden crack, like bamboo slips snapping, rang out from an old bookstore deep in the alley. The long-sealed Nine Nether Record was opening by itself inside its cabinet. A prophecy written in cinnabar appeared on its worm-eaten silk: “The moon’s soul is devoured, and the Yellow Springs boil.”
…
In the vast whirlpool of capital, it seemed that everyone’s value was being ruthlessly and invisibly exploited by a perfect system, right up until the moment of death.
When the starless night fell, the horizon turned dark red. Though it was only the beginning of the lunar month, the moon was full, and blood-red.
The foolish still thought this fantastic sight was romantic, perhaps some cosmic phenomenon that occurred only once in a very long while.
But beneath the surface, currents were stirring. The oldest scroll in the land, long ignored by the people, silently unfurled. The waning moon appears, the Ghost King emerges, and peace can no longer last!
