The protagonist, Master Zhao, is a gambling drunk who lives by begging. By chance, Wang Lang helps him scrape by. While searching for the Blind Poison Flower, he encounters ghosts and monsters, and is plagued by nightmares. It seems fated: first he sees the souls of his birth parents in an ancient coffin deep in the forest, then he meets the gambling saint Wang Mang at a casino. Through Wang Mang, he becomes the apprentice of a ghost-path priest. The old beggar transforms into a handsome young man and uncovers the mystery of his birth that has haunted him for years... only to be tormented beyond endurance at the same time... To fulfill his promise to help a female general of the Great Song find her bones, he merges with the spirit of the general. One man... one sword... facing the world.
Using ghostly shadow-tracking, he discovers the true cause of her death. The hatred inherited from two generations, his grandfather and father, and the whereabouts of a missing treasure map, ultimately set him on the path of revenge. With one sword, he slays three demons and storms the Seven Rosy Clouds Pass. Even the lamps on its eighteen levels of stairs are about to be extinguished. Eunuchs dispatch the Embroidered Uniform Guard to hunt him down everywhere. The immortal, demonic, and orthodox factions contend, yet it is all part of a vast conspiracy. At the critical moment, a strange demonic shadow drives him into chaos. He risks death nine times over to fight the eunuch Cao Huachun of the Eastern Depot. Before one crisis is resolved, another arises: attacked by the two sages of the martial world from the front and hunted by the Eastern and Western Depots from behind, he is tormented by nightmares along the way, dies and returns to life through nine cycles, and is reincarnated again and again... At the brink of death, a mysterious figure saves him. He escapes one den of danger only to enter another... Are all those bloody battles revenge, or is he being manipulated? Gratitude? Grudges? Was the emperor in the wrong, or was he? Why does his master's sinister grin appear throughout eighteen cycles of reincarnation? Who is the hypocrite, and who truly follows the righteous path? Good and evil are hard to distinguish, and gratitude and grudges are impossible to untangle... The final lamp to go out turns out to be... Note: Mystery + thrills, with a gripping plot twist in every chapter...
