In Chen Prefecture, western Hunan, a dry well at the old residence of Prince Jing suddenly began emitting strange phenomena. Black smoke churned from it, and anyone who came near had black blood seep from their eyes, ears, nose, and mouth. They died with eerie smiles on their faces.
Shen Yan was descended from the guardians of the Chu Kings' tombs. The Shen family's arts could not make one fly or vanish, but they excelled at using paulownia talismans to suppress evil, cinnabar to ward off calamity, and cutting the sinister pacts that bound the living.
The paired black-jade fish pendant grew hot, and the paulownia talisman darkened. At a glance, he saw through it: this was no natural outbreak of evil. Someone was using the essence and blood of the living to cultivate blood moss, then using a baleful talisman to reverse the copper talisman that protected the realm. They were refining vengeful spirits, hoping to awaken an ancient evil that had slumbered in western Hunan for a thousand years.
The gaze of the one refining the evil had already passed beyond the dry well, fixed on the sealed tomb of the Chu Kings beside the Yuan River.
The talisman would fall at dusk, and the evil would rise at midnight. Night had already smothered Chen Prefecture in black mist.
With a paulownia-wood sword in hand, cinnabar ink on its tip, and the black-jade pendant around his neck, Shen Yan would use three hundred years of the Shen family's tomb-guarding arts to protect the city's people, sever the sinister pact, and suppress the thousand-year-old evil about to take form.
But who was the one refining evil in the shadows? And why were they so determined to disturb what lay inside the Chu Kings' tomb?
Did the Shen family's legacy of guarding tombs conceal an even more secretive pact of sorcery?
Tonight, Chen Prefecture had no moon. Only the paulownia talismans shone against the evil, while the practitioner walked alone.
