The stars are the board, and power is the blade. A fated calamity that will shake the High Tang quietly descends.
In the fifteenth year of the Yuanhe era, undercurrents surge through Chang’an.
The Imperial Astronomical Bureau reads the stars to alter fate, manipulating the nation’s fortunes with secret messages encoded in the Twenty-Eight Mansions;
The Unorthodox Ones hide among the common folk, while the thirty-six Celestial Stems lay out a century-spanning game;
Military governors command their own troops, while the Five Surnames and Seven Clans conspire with Daoists and Buddhists;
The four great martial masters guard the four corners of the realm, as one cult, four schools, and six paths divide the land.
And on the night the light of the Big Dipper’s Greedy Wolf Star stains the Ziwei Emperor Star, the three thousand Mo Dao blades of the Prince of Qingling’s estate gleam coldly, cleaving open the prelude to this chaotic age.
Seventeen-year-old Jun Qi, heir to the Prince of Qingling, is dragged into a shocking assassination plot spanning court and martial world on the night his father dies suddenly:
- A bronze coffin formation from the Imperial Astronomical Bureau rises from the earth’s veins. The Five Thunder Sand of Mount Longhu carved inside the coffin bears a secret recipe for royal alchemical poison;
- The Wuning Army’s funeral procession hides banners of the Seven Fiends Formation. The blade of military governor Wang Zhixing points straight at the dragon veins of the Li Tang dynasty;
- On Yuan Tiangang, the Unorthodox Marshal’s, Celestial Stems Compass, cracks spread across the position of the Ziwei Star, foretelling: “The Li bloodline, the Big Dipper is the key”;
- The morning bell at Taiqing Monastery rings without a breeze. Li Rong, the Daoist sect’s foremost leader, points his white jade whisk toward a thousand-year-old Black Tortoise inscription beneath Mount Zhongnan:
“When the Primordial Realm emerges, the land and state will fall.”
Chang’an has never been a chessboard.
“You and I are both dust crushed beneath the turning stars.”
