Flame Patterns

The thunder-and-flame tattoo between Si Cang’s brows burned for five thousand years.

When King Wu Ding of Shang drove his bronze battle-axe into Si Cang’s neck, the drops of blood formed the oracle bone character for “calamity.” Aboard Xu Fu’s mirage ship on his voyage east, soul lamps made from the spirits of boys and girls revealed the face of his past life. Beneath the iron hooves of An Lushan’s rebel army, he picked up Du Fu’s shattered poetic bones and swallowed the last of the High Tang’s literary spirit.

From a primitive man of the Thunder Marsh in the era of the Three Sovereigns to an observer in a quantum laboratory,

the calamities of twenty-four dynasties, sedimented in his flesh and blood,

are becoming a passage through which chaos devours the present world...

Every heartbeat feeds the Taotie eye opening between the lines of Records of the Grand Historian,

and the truth of immortality

is the most vicious parasite planted by the Heavenly Dao to annihilate civilization.