Warden of the Netherworld

In the twenty-ninth year of the Republic, on a snowy night beyond the Shanhai Pass.

My name is Guan Shan.

I am a geomancer. I can read the earth’s energy and discern yin from yang.

Then those people broke in

and dragged me into the mountains to the north.

The entire mountain had been hollowed out.

A vast, inverted Bagua altar beyond imagination

was being built under the direction of Japanese yin-yang masters.

They used the flesh and blood of my countrymen as bricks,

and twisted runes to guide their work,

trying to defy the laws of heaven

and steal the fortune of the land.

Here, I watched living laborers

age into skeletons in a matter of breaths.

Time was being torn apart like scraps of cloth.

Before my grandfather died,

he gave his life to buy me these final eight words:

“Guizang is not the end; the origin begins anew.”

I understood. I was no prisoner. I was the last “Guardian of the Ruins.”

Facing a foreign prodigy versed in the Book of the Three Changes,

a ruthless fellow countryman who had betrayed us,

and the power of the “Ruins,” which could devour everything at any moment...

I gripped our ancestral compass

and the “key” on which everything depended.

This underground lair of demons would not be their ladder to heaven.

It would be the mass grave I had chosen for them!