Lin Jian is twenty-three years old and works as a night shift maintenance worker on Beijing Subway Line 7. There are three more things in his toolbox than his colleagues: a torn copy of "The Classic of Mountains and Seas", a sharpened pencil, and a photo of his mother - she walked into this tunnel seventeen years ago and never came out again.
Over six years, he drew seventeen marks on the walls. In the early morning of the eighteenth painting day, the wall cracked. The crack wasn't concrete—it was an eye. Something alive and warm was looking at him.
From that day on, Lin Jian's retina felt as if someone had torn off a layer of membrane. The proprietress of the Sanlitun bar is a nine-tailed fox who has lived for three thousand years. One thousand meters underground in Beijing, an ancient emperor named Di Jun blocked a door with his body and it has not moved for four thousand years. Lin Jian was selected as a "witness" - an ordinary person whose only ability is to "see". The price is that every time he witnesses an abnormality, he will get an unhealed bruise on his body. Average lifespan of witnesses: eighteen months.
He was only eighteen months old. But it's not God he's looking for—it's his mother. Seventeen years ago, she was also a witness. She is not dead. She stood for Emperor Jun for seventeen years.
The choice before him was not to live or die - to let a god continue to be forgotten, or to let everyone remember that the myth of four thousand years ago was never a myth.
