Crossing the Mystic Dust

In the turbulent years of the Republic, war rages across the land and demons roam unchecked.

After sitting in meditation for a thousand years, the cultivator Xuan Chenzi awakens in a dust-covered, sealed temple, his Dao heart shattered by a tribulation of love. The first person his fingertips touch is Lin Wanzhao, a widow branded an ill-omened husband-killer. She bears a luminous spirit body, shining like a lamp in the night and drawing the covetous attention of evil spirits.

One seeks to evade the fires of karma; the other has nowhere left to turn for survival. A wronged bride's ghost emerges from a dry well. Soldiers and bandits swarm across a living hell. Through blood and tears, Lin Wanzhao cries, “If you won't save the dying, what kind of immortal are you?” Her words shake the Dao heart that has lain still for a thousand years. Deep in his sea of consciousness, the dying cry of his beloved, “Protect all living beings,” overlaps with the cries before him.

At last, he sweeps out his sleeve and lays a formation. Nine ancient coins summon the Big Dipper, and in the eyes of the defeated soldiers, the village becomes a hellish realm. From that moment on, clad in his old Daoist robe, cleansed of dust, he steps into this murky human world. A glimmer at the fingertips of the spirit-seeing girl can free tormented souls from their obsessions; the thousand-year cultivator's sleeves summon wind and thunder, and he dares to draw his blade against the chaos of the age.

Along the way, they join forces with a hot-blooded but scatterbrained young Taoist, a paper effigy maker skilled in every craft, a soldier strong enough to bear a thousand jun, and a shamanic spirit medium who is neither wholly righteous nor wholly wicked. With the Taoist sects in decline and their fellow practitioners gone, they establish the League for the Salvation of the World amid the fires of war, uproot evil nails embedded in the earth's ley lines, and break through underworld soul-refining rituals.

Yet fragments of a lightning-struck stone at the bottom of the dry well and an evil thunder weapon seized on the battlefield both point to a conspiracy a thousand years ago, a lightning tribulation that destroyed the Dao and annihilated souls. When the dry well's buried grievance turns into blood tears on an embroidered shoe, and a stray bullet at an ancient temple reveals half a piece of lightning-struck wood, Xuan Chenzi finally understands: the blood and fire of this world are merely a prelude to the tribulation. The karmic ties he has awaited for a thousand years, and the overwhelming karmic burden he must overcome, have only just begun.