“If the rules won't make room for me, I'll drag the rules, and the people who made them, down to hell with me.”
Lu Chen died on a rainy night after failing the exam for the fifth time.
A noose ended twenty-three years of struggle and humiliation.
When he opened his eyes again, he was back seven days earlier.
The hemp rope around his neck was the very one that had ended his life.
But this time, the rope had come alive.
It could see the “threads of cause and effect” wrapped around everyone:
The rich young master's murderous intent was dark red. The examiner's bribes were murky. The failed scholars' resentment was pitch-black.
Lu Chen's own thread had already knotted into an impossible tangle.
“Want revenge?”
The rope whispered in his ear, its voice like a snake flicking its tongue.
“Trade your remaining years for their lives.”
And so...
At the provincial examination, he drew cursed runes on his test paper.
During an exorcism at the Li residence, he used a peachwood doll to summon countless vengeful spirits.
When his enemies melted into pus before everyone's eyes, Lu Chen gripped fifty taels of bloodstained silver and turned toward a darker path.
This path was called the “Uncanny Way.”
Tempering skin, flesh, and organs, changing one's blood and reshaping one's marrow: every step brought grotesque mutations and endless pain.
Controlling cursed objects, shifting karma, stealing lifespans, and shedding the corpse to ascend to immortality: every step climbed higher over someone else's bones.
When the heretics of Ghost Alley tried to use him as a sacrifice, he refined their entire altar into his own grotto-heaven.
When orthodox Celestial Masters came to grind his bones to dust, he made all thirty-six ranks of righteous gods fall into depravity and become demons.
Read 2026/8/11