They weren’t going to catch criminals. The things they hunted were called “Shanhai.”
Two moons hung above Nanhan City, one normal and the other dark red, its surface covered in cracks. The city’s brick walls sometimes had the gray tiles and blue bricks of the Ming and Qing dynasties, then suddenly changed into unfamiliar dark-red stone. Beneath those stones lay anotherworldly city sealed away a thousand years ago.
Chang Yuesheng was the captain of a military action squad. He led his team into Nanhan City to hunt down two “Shanhai”: an eight-year-old girl who could reflect all damage, and a man who could randomly snatch a life from the crowd. But this wasn’t an ordinary manhunt. Someone wanted to drive him mad. His sanity was the anchor holding the underground demon city’s seal in place.
He couldn’t go mad. Not even with his teammates’ blood on his hands, with the sins of three generations weighing on him, or after discovering that he had been chosen long ago: chosen by a red dragon a thousand miles long, and an ancient deity whose open eye brought day and whose closed eye brought night.
Deeper truths cracked open before him, one after another. The world had been warped from the very beginning. The balance of yin and yang between the gods and the evil gods was collapsing. The guardian gods were dying one by one, or being imprisoned by the very humans they protected and butchered for meat until nothing remained but bones. And the rifts that should never have existed, beyond the gates, were slowly opening.
This was an arrest squad stained with sin. Every Shanhai they captured led to a greater answer. But when they finally stood before that answer, what they saw was a god holding up a world on the verge of collapse and saying, “Come on, you ants. Give it a try.”
