Listening for the Blade in the Eternal Night

Xiao Jin, a disgraced prince blinded by a veil over his eyes, bears the curse of mind reading: touch someone and he can hear their thoughts, but the price is eternal darkness. Ten years ago, a great fire on Consort Chu's birthday burned his mother's family to the ground, crippled his right leg, and left behind only half of a bloodstained jade token. Ten years later, disguised as a medicine seller in the ghost market, he makes a deadly pact with the mysterious “mechanical puppet” Jing Li: help her seize the martial world alliance leader's token, and in return, she will help him uncover the truth behind the Chu family's massacre. When the alliance leader's token breaks, it reveals the secret of the former dynasty's Dragon's Wrath explosives. When the two halves of the bloodstained jade token are joined, they expose the emperor's crime of murdering his brother to seize the throne. Xiao Jin listens to the storm in the darkness, taking one perilous step after another as the backlash eats away at his heart and bones. Beneath Jing Li's cold exterior lies the remade soul of his prematurely deceased maternal aunt, Chu Yue, guarding the last of their bloodline in a body no longer human. From the iron legions in the underground palace at Burial Ridge to the bloodstained edict deep in the imperial tombs, the two fight side by side through political schemes and deadly martial-world plots. When the Dragon's Wrath ignites the final battle, Xiao Jin pays with his remaining sight to tear away the false emperor's disguise before the Golden Throne Hall. Jing Li (Chu Yue) burns through her ruined body to give him a sliver of hope. When the dust settles, amid the rice fields of Jiangnan, the blind Xiao Jin clutches a lock of cold, ash-gray hair. In eternal darkness, he finally learns to “see” the world with his ears: the wind brushing the tips of the rice stalks, the rain falling beneath the eaves, the flutter of eyelashes like a breeze. These are the whispers of the dead, who are never far away, and the faint light of the living kindling anew from the ashes. This is an epic tale of revenge in the dark, a tragic story of a puppet and a bloodline fiercely protecting one another, and a path to redemption found by listening to life's lingering echoes at the end of the endless night.