For the past twenty-five years, I have dipped my needle into ink and carved marks into my clients' skin. I am Chen Mo, head tattoo artist at Thunder Tattoo, and I have witnessed the turbulent changes of this historic little city. Every mark I have personally inked carries countless desires and stories. Among them, eight people bear eight utterly different works, yet they seem bound together by the same thread of fate, branded with the strange and bizarre years we shared.
In just thirty days, calamity fell like hail: three died unnatural deaths, their reports vague and incomplete; one was thrown in prison, the charges shrouded in mystery; and two vanished without a trace, as if they had disappeared from the face of the earth. Someone was keeping an eye on that underground fortune, which became an abyss that swallowed everything in an instant.
When the only two old friends left, shaken and still spattered with fresh blood, barged through the heavy doors of Thunder, I knew the storm had arrived. They wanted to use my deeply rooted connections to dig up the truth in the city's shadows. But the threat came faster and colder: before they could even ask for help, the blade meant to silence them had already found its mark on me. In the gaps between attacks, the gifted Bearers scattered across the city became the only vines I could cling to. How can I see the truth behind those eight works, twisted beyond recognition by greed and betrayal? The first streak of crimson has already seeped silently across the battered threshold of Thunder Tattoo.
