The Female Heir to the Lu Ban Book

The Strange Arts of Lu Ban

The forbidden book of Lu Ban has been passed down for a thousand years, along with an ironclad rule: it must never be taught to women. Anyone who learns it will lose one of their essential faculties and spend their entire life alone, bereaved, or disabled.

Huo Lijiang is the most sinister craftsman in the ancient town of Lutun. Neither weapons nor punishment can kill him. Long ago, he escaped the cycle of life and death.

Obsessive and mad throughout his life, he could not win the love he craved, so he ruined other people's lives instead.

He murdered my biological father and drove my biological mother to her death. When I was only three days old, he stole me away and imprisoned me in a frigid cave on Leigong Mountain for four whole years.

In that pitch-black childhood, no one taught me to speak or kept me warm and safe. He alone stayed by my side day and night, using a Lu Ban ruler to cleanse my marrow and reshape my meridians. Defying heaven itself, he carved the mark of the first female successor of the Lu Ban tradition into my bones and blood.

For sixteen years, his soul remained trapped in the cave, refusing to enter the cycle of reincarnation. He waited only for my return, so that I could break the Lu Ban taboo that had endured for a thousand years.

But the moment I set foot in Huo Lijiang's cave, my mother, dead for sixteen years, appeared with a sky full of vengeful spirits and tearfully revealed the truth:

He was not trying to teach me the Great Way. He was raising the perfect vessel to die in his place.

Once my mastery of Lu Ban's arts awakened and reached its peak, he would seize my body and use my living fate to escape the curse of loneliness and bereavement that had haunted every generation of Lu Ban's book, and live another life.

On one side stood the mad criminal who had drowned my family in blood and hatred, yet had been the only warmth and refuge in my dark childhood.

On the other stood my birth mother, separated from me by life and death, who would sacrifice her last remnants of soul to beg me to abandon the arts, go into hiding, and live in peace.

I was trapped in an inescapable death trap:

If I learned the arts of Lu Ban, I could not escape the possession and backlash, and would spend my life alone and bereaved.

If I refused, the baleful forces in my blood would draw the attention of evil spirits, and I would meet a gruesome death, leaving no whole corpse behind.

A thousand-year-old taboo shattered, while the love and hatred of two generations became entwined.