The Twelve Zodiac Signs Were Never Merciful

The Twelve Zodiac Beasts Have No Mercy

The instant the invitation was torn, the midnight gong rang, and a hundred ghosts knocked at the door.

When the Gates of Hell opened at the winter solstice, “Day and Night” lit the blood-written, gold-embossed contract for the Zodiac Banquet. Twelve bronze gates, each corroded to the bone, ground open and shattered the boundary between yin and yang.

The Rat Banquet steals moments (soul thieves slit throats to steal time, one breath for one life); the Ox Banquet forges iron bones (corpse tillers carve out hearts to refine armor, wearing flesh and bone as their shell); the Tiger Banquet burns hearts and souls (ghost servants gnaw on the shadows of the living, scattering their souls)... Each eerie feast takes one of the Earthly Branches as its coffin. The victor tears away the power of a zodiac ghost, while the loser is imprisoned forever as a banquet sacrifice.

“Day and Night” was forced to bear the mark of the Horse of the Hour of the Goat and gallop across the scorched earth of reincarnation. He had to collect all twelve ghost tokens and put an end to this ravenous ghost banquet, which devoured three thousand mortal realms.

The red-clad ghost woman in the Dragon Hall gouged out her own eyes, her bloody tears becoming a talisman that cursed him to a hundred lifetimes of solitude. In the Snake Pit, a tongue-severed shaman cut off her tongue to feed her gu insects, which bored into his heart and cursed him to eternal damnation... Only when the soul-luring lamp shattered at the Boar Banquet did Day and Night realize that every departed soul was a remnant of a lover he himself had buried in one of his past lives.

The twelve ghost markings in his palm burned, roaring out their decree: “Only one who severs all bonds and abandons all desire can become the divine sovereign who reaches Heaven.”

Heavy snow buried the cinnabar seal on the contract. Day and Night stood atop the ruins of the Monkey Banquet, ghost markings piercing his heart. He finally understood: what he had destroyed was never the Heavenly Dao, but the soul within himself that longed for warmth.