I was crouched in front of a stall at the Bronze Ghost Market. The instant my fingertips touched the blood-stained jade slip, a chill suddenly crept up the back of my neck.
“Don’t move.” Cold metal pressed against my spine, its muffled quality unmistakable: a silencer. “Put it down, then turn around slowly.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the stalls around me vanishing in a most unnatural way. Blood-red mist rose from the bluestone path. I pretended to tremble with fear, while my left hand quietly reached for the belt buckle at my waist. Three bone-piercing spikes soaked in black-dog blood were hidden there.
“Hey, big brother, let’s talk this out...” I turned around, my voice shaking, then suddenly flung a handful of cinnabar with my right hand. As the red cloud burst open, I kicked at the back of his knee, but my foot struck empty air.
Moonlight pierced the bloody mist, revealing a girl in an ink-black Taoist robe. She held one of my bone-piercing spikes between two fingers, while the tassel of her peachwood sword swayed in the night breeze, blurring into a streak. I spotted the purple-bronze compass at her waist, and my pupils contracted sharply. Seven mermaid tears were set into the compass at the points of the Big Dipper.
“Someone from Maoshan’s Heavenly Secrets Pavilion?” I stepped back half a pace, my back hitting a blue-brick wall that had appeared from nowhere. Dense incantations suddenly emerged across its surface, the cinnabar characters crawling as if they had come alive.
The girl flung out a stack of yellow talismans, which formed a Bagua diagram in midair. “You’re under a Shapeshifting and Shadow-Transference Curse. This ghost market is a trap set by the tomb’s owner.” She lifted the jade slip from my hand with the tip of her sword. “If you don’t want to be refined into a corpse puppet, help me break the formation.”
The jade slip suddenly burst into dazzling blue light, and the stone slabs beneath our feet collapsed with a roar. As the sensation of weightlessness hit, I grabbed the girl’s wrist. Under her furious gaze, I caught sight of a fleeting manjusaka tattoo at her collarbone.
The fall seemed to go on for
The author writes very attractively