Yuan Qing could never forget the day Daoist Niu disappeared. The morning mist carried the acrid smell of burning talismans.
The villagers had always said that learning the ritual steps of the Big Dipper from the crazy old Daoist was a waste of time. What respectable child would treasure yellow paper covered in cinnabar? But when the neon lights of the city couldn’t pierce the gloom of his rented room, and scratching sounds came from beneath his desk in the middle of the night, the incantations everyone had laughed off as “tricks” became the only charms that could calm his nerves.
The broken wooden sword his master left behind was still warm, and the thread-bound notebook held an astonishing secret. Its yellowed pages recorded more than just place names and people’s names. They also described one metaphysical predicament after another, left unresolved as if time had been paused: a substitute effigy left unburned in an ancestral hall, a vengeful evil spirit still lingering in an ancient well, a red thread still hanging from the beam of an old house... It turned out his master had left in such a hurry that he’d buried all these dangers in the past.
A compass for detecting evil was pinned to the collar of Yuan Qing’s school uniform, and talisman diagrams for dispelling misfortune were tucked between his textbooks. As he walked through the crowds with his schoolbag on his back, he kept remembering his master’s final words: “You learn the craft, but you incur karmic debts.”
The ink in the notebook was gradually revealing itself as he walked. Were the unresolved old cases closely connected to his master’s disappearance? When the inexperienced young man gripped the broken wooden sword, he realized that this cultivation journey, which had begun in the countryside, was already bound by an inescapable web of karma...
