Shen Mo became an overnight sensation because of an ancestral blood-jade pendant called Yu Pingfan, never realizing that an ancient evil eye lay dormant deep within the stone. After he wore it close to his body, cracks spread across the jade, and an eyeball formed from threads of blood burst through it, taking root in his chest. It made a nest of his flesh and fed on his pain.
> The moment he touched a bronze jue vessel from the Shang and Zhou dynasties at an auction, he glimpsed a "library of human skin" amid a churning sea of blood: bones for spines, grieving souls for ink, and a taotie pattern burned onto the book's cover, the very emblem on the bronze vessel.
> More terrifying still, the safe where he hid transformed into a living furnace. Its metal walls writhed with a gelatinous texture, trying to swallow and assimilate him...
> As the city became a hunting ground for "vessel spirits," Shen Mo's right arm turned to jade and became a blue-black claw, while bone spikes tore through his spine. To stop the "soul-devouring umbilical cord" from bringing down the Blood Tower, he gouged out the heart of a vessel spirit belonging to someone dear to him and fused it with the evil eye to forge a body of chaos-
