Su Niangui, an antique book restorer from Suzhou, never imagined that the little bit of “qi” in her fingertips, the qi she used to restore ancient books, concealed a secret that could shake the world of the extraordinary. She was the last “shadow-puppet artisan qi master,” able to read the “qi memories” of the dead from the patterns on donkey-hide puppets, but only at the cost of temporary blindness.
Half a year after her master, Lin Yansheng, disappeared, a Qing-dynasty shadow puppet of a court lady became her only clue. The instant she touched it, her master’s urgent last words burst in her ears: “The Relic-Burning Office took half the Shadow Bone. Find the Wooden Kite Post Station at once!” Before the words had faded, a black-clad attacker’s blade was at her throat. The puppet spontaneously combusted, leaving behind only a scorched brand in the shape of “Mao.”
The “Shadow Bones” were tokens carrying thirty-six supernatural folk-art techniques. They had been created in the late Ming dynasty when the artisan sect split apart the Hundred Crafts Qi Manual: shadow puppets concealed souls, marionettes gained intelligence, and mortise-and-tenon joints locked qi. Whoever gathered them all could awaken the “Lu Ban Qi Seal” and reshape the order of the extraordinary. The Relic-Burning Office, which hunted qi artisans, was led by Xie Yan, a mortise-and-tenon inheritor blinded by hatred. He had vowed to destroy every Shadow Bone.
To find her master, Su Niangui set out on a perilous journey across Suzhou, Shaanxi, and Fujian.
When all thirty-six Shadow Bones came together on Mount Tai and Xie Yan activated the Lu Ban Qi Seal, Su Niangui finally realized that the so-called “reshaping of order” was actually a plot to awaken the ancient Qi Locust. She used her own qi meridians to seal away the calamity, but lost her supernatural ability forever. Even so, the warmth of the shadow puppet lingering on her fingertips still whispered: the Shadow Bones are incomplete, and the Qi Locust will awaken again...
This is a contest among the extraordinary, with traditional folk arts as weapons and the human heart as the game board. When shadow puppets reveal the truth, would you believe that every line on the donkey hide conceals the answer to a life-and-death game?
