When Lin Zhaoming entered the Xuanqing Sect, a blood moon hung overhead. He cultivated the Brightness Art personally taught by the sect leader, convinced he was following the righteous path to immortality. Then, as he circulated his energy, something writhed in his dantian, and ancient runes surfaced along the meridians reflected in his mirror. The so-called "aura of righteousness" was actually sacrificial altar blood mist, while "three flowers gathering at the crown" was a blood-red lotus blooming in his sea of consciousness. Gradually, he began to notice strange things: elders encircled jade slips with their tentacles, delicacies at immortal feasts bore the scales of Deep Ones, and the surviving pages of cultivation manuals were inscribed with secret messages in the language of Cthulhu.
When he realized the cultivation art he practiced was actually a demonic technique for refining mortals into vessels for the Outer Gods, Lin Zhaoming discovered that the entire cultivation world might be an illusion twisted by the whispers of those gods. Tribulation lightning was the cruel laughter of dimensions tearing apart; exorcising demons was a slaughter meant to clear away sacrificial offerings. When he saw an inscription assembled from cultivators' finger bones at the blood-red mountain gate, "Brightness is a blindfold for prey", he had no choice but to grip the ring of tentacles and search for the "Anchor of the End" that could defy the ancient gods, with his sanity on the verge of collapse. The brightest path in this world, it turned out, grew in the deepest shadows of the indescribable.
