Heaven's Ordeal Against Fate 2

“The Lu family’s mastery of feng shui can glimpse the secrets of heaven, but whenever the number three comes around, heavenly punishment is certain.”

Since the Ming dynasty, the Lu family has been renowned for its generations of expertise in feng shui and yin-yang arts. But they carry a cruel fate: once every three generations, one member will meet a “heavenly tribulation” and die at the age of thirty. The curse began when an ancestor defied heaven to alter an emperor’s fate, revealing too many secrets of the celestial order.

Lu Xun is the thirty-ninth-generation heir of the Lu family, and this generation’s chosen victim of the “number three.” Ever since childhood, he has known he would not live to see thirty. To break the curse that has endured for centuries, the family elders have spent everything searching for a way to defy fate.

At twenty-nine, with just three hundred days remaining before the tribulation descends, Lu Xun’s grandfather finally discovers the only possible way to survive in a fragment of the long-lost Arcane Heaven Secret Record: “Seven Stars Extend Life, Nine Yin Turn to Yang.” But the method requires gathering seven ancient artifacts scattered across the world and performing a ritual at seven specific times in seven feng shui sites of utter misfortune. Every step is perilous.

With time running out, Lu Xun sets out on a dangerous quest to fight heaven for his life, carrying the family’s inherited compass and half of the Arcane Heaven Secret Record. From the corpse-driving sanctuaries of western Hunan to the Miao villages of southern Yunnan, from an ancient tomb beneath a shipwreck in the East China Sea to a ghost city in the western deserts, he must face deadly thousand-year-old feng shui formations while evading the various factions coveting the Lu family’s secret arts.

As he searches for the artifacts, Lu Xun gradually discovers that the Lu family’s “heavenly tribulation” is no mere curse. It is closely tied to a thousand-year-old secret concerning the dragon veins of China. The souls of those chosen to face the tribulation in each generation are being collected by some mysterious force to sustain a world-shaking scheme...