The Ring of Years

A Mu of Luoxia Village has been called an “idiot” by the villagers for twenty years. He is the village guardian.

Dim-witted and naive, he spends day and night beneath the old pagoda tree at the village entrance, watching the clouds drift by and listening to the chirping of birds and insects. He has become an unmoving part of the village scenery. No one knows what ancient pact lies behind the title “village guardian,” and no one believes that this idiot, who can barely even remember his own name, is the village’s final line of defense.

Until, on a stormy night, a wisp of black energy enters his brow, and searing pain tears through his muddled consciousness.

When A Mu wakes from the pain, fragments of images fill his mind: a burning village, broken chains, and a vague voice repeating, “I can’t hold on... It’s time to wake up...”

He still looks like the same foolish A Mu, but deep in his eyes is a clarity he himself cannot understand. The old pagoda tree begins to “whisper” more often, and shadows linger outside the village at night. The spirits, monsters, and sinister beings once found only in old folks’ tales are drawing ever closer to this remote border village.

It turns out that the village guardian protects not its fortune, but its seal. The rings of the old pagoda tree are not marks of age, but shackles.

When the “idiot” of the past takes up the rusty iron axe passed down by his ancestors, and the sleeping pact awakens in his blood, can he protect this land and the people who call him an “idiot”?

And as the seal weakens, a wider world and even older secrets begin to emerge. A village guardian has never been just the guardian of Luoxia Village.

A story of protection and awakening quietly begins beneath this old pagoda tree.