At three thousand meters in the air, Yun Yi, the nineteenth-generation heir to a family of shamanic healers, hears the first sound of "Heaven's Judgment": blood mist exploding against the window, and her grandfather's desperate plea sent from a thousand miles away. Seven years ago, her father passed on the art of shamanic curses to her, then coughed up blood and died, leaving behind a single prophecy: "Within seven years, the Yun family will face Heaven's Judgment. Their evil will have piled up to the skies." Now the prophecy has come true. Her grandfather's head is severed by a tire chain, her grandmother freezes into an ice sculpture, her eldest uncle suffocates beneath a single fallen leaf, and her cousin sinks to the bottom of the river with his car. Death has no countdown and follows no pattern. It is like a die casually cast by nature.
In a bamboo house with blood droplets hanging overhead, Yun Yi finds a cracked clay ocarina, the only key left to her by the "Rules."
Every night at midnight, she plays the ocarina and questions Heaven: first, who was the blood oath of vengeance sworn against? Second, how should the responsibility of gods and ghosts be divided? Third, where is the justice of creation? Fourth, where can the heart find peace? Fifth, have the watchers failed in their duty? Sixth, why does karma bring calamity upon the innocent? Seventh, do gods and ghosts fulfill curses or trample the Way of Heaven? Seven questions over seven days. Once they are asked, the final reckoning begins.
The answers come as random blizzards, hurricanes, landslides, and blood-borne curses, along with the "god" who stands above the Rules, clad in snow-white robes and carrying a metal flute. He could have watched impassively from the sidelines, yet at the edge of every calamity, he alone reaches out to Yun Yi. He could have let her be shattered to pieces, yet instead he uses his own cultivation to shield her from lightning and fire.
She crosses the line, and he lets her. She questions everything, and he indulges her. She declares war on Heaven, and he clears a path for her through the light of the sky. This is neither redemption nor pity, but the possessive devotion of a higher-dimensional being toward the "sole variable." The disasters remain random, but he decides whom they take.
