Poetry can kill, and prose can reach the divine. This is a world where everyone cultivates the "Literary Bone," and a lie that has endured for a thousand years.
Lin Wenyuan, a poor scholar, heads to the capital to sit the imperial examinations. Along the way, he witnesses a "literary duel" in which poems transform into weapons and the words of sages take lives. Still reeling from the shock, he refuses to sing the court's praises in the examination hall. Instead, he follows his heart and writes down the truth he has seen, unexpectedly awakening the exceptionally rare "Iceheart" Literary Bone: his writing reveals itself, and no evil can touch him.
Yet when he enters the court as the third-place laureate, he discovers that treacherous currents churn beneath the prosperous age. The Imperial Preceptor, Fang Mingjing, uses a "Silence" bone token to suppress Literary Bones across the land. The Crown Prince has been sealed inside the Eastern Palace for sixteen years, reduced to living blood food from which literary marrow is extracted. The unsolved massacre of Lin's family twenty-four years ago points straight to the previous dynasty's most mysterious organization, the "Bone Token Envoys." Everyone who tries to uncover the truth dies mysteriously before a bone token engraved with the words "Silence."
A forbidden book titled *An Examination of the False Classics* and a broken bone token engraved with the character "Wait" are the only keepsakes his father left him. When Iceheart resonates with the bone token, secrets buried for a thousand years come to light: the very origin of the Literary Bone was sealed away by ancient sages on Heavenly Pillar Mountain, and what his father died protecting was the key to exposing this world-shaking deception.
"Even the books of sages contain lies."
From the capital's court to the northern frontier, from the forbidden Hanlin archives to the summit of Heavenly Pillar Mountain, Lin Wenyuan wields a brush and an Iceheart, drawing on the strengths of the Literary Bones of every school to break a thousand-year-old scheme of bone tokens.
If there can be only one truth in the world, then he will rewrite the laws of heaven and earth.
