On the night the Shen family was wiped out, fifteen-year-old Shen Jinxue leapt from Eagle Beak Cliff in the Cangwu Kingdom. All 136 members of her family were slaughtered by an immortal sect, their crime being that traces of an “ancient god’s bloodline” had been detected in her body. But this was only the beginning. When her four apertures first opened, the Heavenly Dao branded her with a vow-seal: the unfinished short blade in her palm was carving its way, stroke by stroke, toward her heart. She did not know whom the blade would ultimately point toward, until the man who pulled her from the Netherworld’s frozen abyss murmured to the depths, “To kill the one dearest to you.” He was Xiao Hanyuan, a Guixu sacrificial offering sealed by his own cultivation partner thirty thousand years ago, who had lived until now for the sole purpose of waiting for someone to come find him.
The two were forced to join forces and flee. A bounty of four hundred thousand spirit stones turned every righteous and wicked faction across the Jiuyuan Continent into a single net of slaughter. Yin Wuji hunted them relentlessly, refusing to stop until they were dead. The seven members of their group gradually came together before Jinxue Pass, each bearing the past and scars of an immortal sect’s human experiment, a prisoner with a sealed spiritual root, or a physician cultivator who had fled. Shen Jinxue’s only clue came from her father’s dying words: find the Cangwu Sword. But that sword was not in the Shen family, not in an immortal sect, and not even on this continent. Zhou Xuanshuang had locked it away deep within the Jinxue Pavilion in Guixu. What it had been waiting for all along was not a key. It was the choice Shen Jinxue herself would make when the vow-seal in her palm reached its end: to kill the one dearest to her, or to defy the Heavenly Dao.
Above the heavens, the Jiuyuan stars shifted, and the cracks of the Yaolai Calamity were creeping closer, inch by inch, from the horizon.
