Clad in Yellow, This Daoist Has Made It

My name is Jiang Qing. On the day I was born, the heavens showed strange signs: eighteen thunderclaps split the sky, and snow fell from the midsummer sky in the seventh month.

The villagers saw me as a monster and avoided me. When I was ten, darkness filled my heart, and I nearly slaughtered my own family.

Just as the blade was about to fall, a Taoist priest intervened and saved me. He was Zhang Hongxuan, the sixty-second Celestial Master of Mount Longhu, revered as a living god among Taoists.

He said I was destined to “wear the imperial yellow robe,” taught me heavenly talismans and the arts of divination, and led me into the mystic traditions.

It should have been a story of redemption, the beginning of a righteous path.

But later, I used the very arts he taught me… to become a fraud.

They said I had betrayed my teacher and disgraced the Taoist tradition.

But no one knew that I had long since seen through destiny's cruel blade. No matter how many supernatural powers one possesses, they cannot change the inevitability of death or the coldness of human hearts.

Five years in prison confined my body, but they could not confine my challenge to fate or my questions about the injustices of heaven and earth.

Now my sentence is served, and I have returned to the world.

But nothing is over yet.

When my master saved me all those years ago, was it an act of compassion meant to enlighten me, or had he already laid out a breathtakingly vast game?

And what truths, unknown to the world, were hidden behind my past scams using Taoist arts?

With guilt and Taoist magic in hand, the moment I stepped out of prison, I had already fallen into an even deeper web of intrigue…