It has been 127 years since spiritual energy revived, and cultivating immortality is no longer a matter of fated encounters and lucky breaks.
Want to establish your Foundation? Take out a loan. Want to buy a cultivation manual? Pay in installments. Want to join a sect? Sign away your freedom first.
Lin Yuan, twenty-four years old, is at the peak of Foundation Establishment, stuck at the bottleneck to the Golden Core realm with no end in sight.
Burdened with 280 spirit stones in student loans, he works for a subcontractor clearing demonic beasts, earning 10 spirit stones a month, 70 percent of which goes toward his debt.
To break through to the Golden Core realm, he needs “Dao Resonance.” The only way to obtain it is to clear haunted domains, whose exploration rights are monopolized by the major sects.
For a lowly rogue cultivator, there's no way out.
Until a mission sends him tumbling into a wild haunted domain...
There, rules are written in blood, violating a ghost story means certain death, and companions betray one another just to stay alive.
But no one knows that Lin Yuan's eyes can see what others cannot:
The contradictions between the rules.
“Rule Three: Do not look directly at the red door at the end of the corridor.”
“Rule Seven: When the red door opens, everyone must face the end of the corridor.”
Everyone else sees unbreakable laws. He sees a crack between the two rules.
While everyone else struggles to survive by obeying the rules, he finds a path in the gaps between them, a path that belongs to no one.
