On an old street in Xuzhou stands a shop where the lights are never turned on.
Its owner, Chen Yan, is the thirteenth-generation inheritor of the Qing Nang lineage. He can read Feng Shui, adjust the flow of energy, and use sixteen different seals to lock down mountains and meridians. But what he does most often is send things that have no place in the human world back where they belong, one by one.
His family’s magical heirloom is a Qing Nang token. Even he has no idea what is sealed inside it.
Until one day, the token began to vibrate.
Only then did Chen Yan discover that the energy meridians beneath this land had been severed a thousand years ago. The ones who cut them were an organization called the Huangmai Sect, whose creed was that “energy meridians should remain still and lifeless.” Chen Hao, the seventh-generation patriarch of the Qing Nang lineage who stood against them, vanished after leaving behind three handwritten books.
Before he disappeared, he left only one message:
“I’ll be waiting for you over there.”
Now, something sealed inside the token for a thousand years is beginning to awaken. The deep meridians in the north are stirring, the tomb guardians of the Withered Bone Sect have emerged from the grasslands, the successors of the Meridian-Breaking Sect have returned from Central Asia, and the five nodes of the Huangmai Sect are appearing one by one in the heartland of the Central Plains.
Chen Yan doesn’t know whether he’s a pawn.
But he knows this: if he loses this game, there will be no next-generation successor.
