With a compass in hand, he charts the forces of the world; with cinnabar, he marks talismans to subdue the netherworld. A thousand-year-old wolf-hair brush drinks in the baleful energy of corpse-strewn battlefields, while three Kaiyuan Tongbao coins divine the karma binding the worlds of yin and yang. From the introductory Evil-Repelling Heart Sutra to the thunder arts of Mount Longhu, he measures humanity’s darkest depths with his own backbone and inscribes exorcistic mantras on peachwood swords with the blood on his tongue. He burns rhinoceros horn to illuminate the road to the Yellow Springs, scatters glutinous rice to trap the Bone Demon, uses the Big Dipper formation to pin down a century-old corpse in its coffin, and summons heavenly thunder and earthly fire to refine an evil jade that devours living souls. Even as the neon lights of the city drown out a thousand years of occult tradition, he still carries a soul-guiding lantern at midnight, showing wandering fiends the way back to the abyss at crossroads.
