“With this broken body, I offer up my lamp’s soul;
with this solitary lamp, I light your road to the Yellow Springs.”
A Dou only wants to spend her life making tofu, but the times insist she take up a blade.
Her grandfather, Yan Zhu, burned away his life to carve the taboo “Hundred-Year Lamp” into her abdomen.
From then on, as long as the lamp lives, she lives; if the lamp breaks, she dies.
Bearing this man-eating lamp, she slaughters her way from the snowy night of Wangchen Valley to the wilderness of Wuhui City.
She thought she was the lamp’s bearer. Only at the end did she realize she was merely a thought waiting to be burned, held within its wick.
This is a cruel tale of “forgetting” and “remembering”:
Ascend through nine realms, and the lamp burns through nine transformations.
* First Realm: Faint Light
* Second Realm: Reflected Shadow
* Third Realm: Warmth of the Past
* Fourth Realm: Reflections of the World
* Fifth Realm: Engraved on the Heart
* Sixth Realm: Nightless
* Seventh Realm: Burning the Body
* Eighth Realm: Heaven’s Taboo
* Ninth Realm: Everlasting Light
“This lamp, once broken, can never be put back together.”
“But if it cannot be put back together...”
“Then I will brand your name upon this entire world.”
So beautiful