Cloud and Mud: Volume One

In an old city in the Northern Frontier, marrowstone is stained with blood, and monstrous beasts lurk all around. Lin Xiangxi opened his eyes in the muddy rain, the fire marrowstone at the nape of his neck searing his flesh. A few days earlier, while protecting his younger sister Lin Wuyun, the claws of a Chikui beast had gouged out his left eye. If Zeng Fuchuan hadn’t come to his rescue, he would have become beast fodder. There was no time to hesitate. He knew only that every use of the fire marrowstone’s power scraped at his bloodline like the stone itself, leaving him in such pain he could barely draw his bow. His close friend Lu Ji had been poisoned by an iron aphid, leaving his forearm as hard as black iron. Even gripping a blade meant gritting his teeth through the pain of the backlash. Wuyun clutched a basket of herbs, her shoulders trembling at the roars of the beasts, yet she forced herself to stay calm as she applied mugwort salve she had boiled all night to the wounded. He didn’t want to watch anyone else become beast food. He didn’t want Wuyun’s red cord stained with blood again. He only wanted to drive his sharp arrowheads through the enemy, protect his only family, and fight shoulder to shoulder with Lu Ji, so that the cooking smoke of the Northern Frontier might rise for a few more days. But in the Northern Frontier, no one gets to choose how to survive. Beast roars echoed everywhere beyond the city walls, while people huddled inside, struggling to stay alive. Cultists of the Black Mud Sect scattered corpse-oil powder in the shadows, and black worms that devoured flesh lurked in the water sources by the city. Even the bricks in the city wall were carved with patterns he couldn’t understand, as if concealing a secret more terrifying than the monstrous beasts. Could he fend off the beasts’ claws with his half-blind left eye and the fire marrowstone’s backlash? Could he keep Lu Ji’s iron hands from being stained with blood and stop Wuyun’s herb basket from trembling? Just how many schemes, capable of swallowing the entire city, lay hidden in the reek drifting through the Northern Frontier’s morning mist?