In the final years of the Great You Dynasty, war ravaged the land and human lives were worth less than grass. Xiao Han, a former imperial guard instructor, fell into a fissure during a siege. When he woke, he was inside the tyrant’s legacy: the “White Bone Pagoda,” a rumbling underground factory of flesh and blood.
There are no ghosts here, only monsters built for specific functions. “Listening Urns,” embedded in the walls with their limbs removed, monitor heartbeats. “Candle Men,” kneeling beside the passageways with their bodies filled with corpse oil, detect warmth. And in the abyss, a beast called the “Corpse Wyrm,” stitched together from bronze gears and corpses, roars. To survive, Xiao Han joins forces with Liu Bai, an orphan of the Directorate of Astronomy, and Old Ghost, a greedy tomb raider. Together, they dismantle mechanisms made from living people in absolute silence.
When they near the secret of “raising the dead,” the truth is horrifying: so-called immortality is actually mutation and parasitic plague caused by radiation from beyond the heavens. The demons underground want to crawl out, but human hearts above are even more poisonous. Hell is behind them, purgatory lies ahead. There is only one way forward: draw your blade and fight your way to dawn.
