Seventeen-year-old Lin Yan thought his life would amount to little more than worrying about his next meal and the latest rent hike in Lan Ke Alley, a place almost entirely demolished. Then a vermilion-lacquered coffin set with mysterious black jade appeared out of nowhere, shattering the fragile peace he had managed to maintain. The figure inside wasn’t a corpse, but a mysterious young man named Xuan Chen.
With eyes that seemed to drink in starlight and ancient robes untouched by dust, Xuan Chen awoke and looked at Lin Yan with a familiarity that spanned a thousand years, as if their bond had been written long ago. Stranger still, Xuan Chen’s awakening forcibly bound Lin Yan to the Coffin Keeper System. Now Lin Yan had to fend off sudden attacks from “outer-realm evil spirits” while teaching this “Immortal Venerable” how to survive in the modern world, from wearing jeans to paying by QR code. Every detail was absurd.
The old locust tree at the end of the alley shed its leaves ahead of time. A supposed expert from the demolition office died under mysterious circumstances. The ordinary jade pendant on Lin Yan’s chest resonated with the black bead Xuan Chen carried… As more and more impossible events unfolded, Lin Yan discovered that his seemingly ordinary life hid a forgotten secret. Xuan Chen’s awakening was not only the beginning of their fated journey, but also the harbinger of a storm sweeping across the ages.
A down-on-his-luck young man struggling to make ends meet, and a star-eyed Immortal Venerable who has slept for a thousand years: in the soon-to-vanish Lan Ke Alley, how will they unravel the conspiracy behind the System’s missions? And what promise, spanning time and space, lies within the fragmented images flooding Lin Yan’s mind?
When the Coffin Keeper meets the Awakened One, is it a gift of fate, or the beginning of another calamity?
