Longevity is not a blessing. It is a contract.
In the final years of the Northern Song, Zhao Yanshi, a guardian of Mount Tai, bound himself by a blood pact to the earth’s ley lines to protect the core shard of the Heart-Illuminating Stele. He gained a century of life, but at the cost of losing one emotion every thirty years and one sense every century. From then on, he became the stele’s seventh guardian, witnessing a thousand years of Mount Tai’s vicissitudes in a body no longer quite human.
From the Jingkang Incident, when Jin armies threatened the land, to the flames of the War of Resistance, when the nation’s spirit endured; from the grand pageantry of emperors performing sacrifices at Mount Tai to the humble faith of ordinary people’s prayers, he guarded the soul of a mountain with emotions that grew ever colder, losing along the way his claim to being human. When a Jurchen shaman came south bearing the relics of the third guardian, and signs of a traitor within the Song court began to emerge, Zhao Yanshi realized this war was about far more than protecting a stone.
This is a clash between two systems of immortality, a struggle over the memory of civilization, and the story of a vessel growing ever more hollow as it asks amid the torrent of time: when fear, anger, and guilt have all been pawned, is what remains a matter of faith, or an abyss of habit?
The mountain remembers everything, while he is beginning to forget. Yet whenever snow falls on Mount Tai, someone is always standing there.
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