Shen Li was born with the ability to see spirits, and grew up surrounded by gossip and loneliness. At five, she saw the spirit of a deceased orphanage director and was deemed cursed with an unusual fate. She was passed from one relative to another, with misfortune always at her heels, until her late aunt revealed the truth: Shen Li was a fated guide, born to find the Undying One.
In search of the person bound to her destiny, Shen Li apprenticed herself in the restoration of ancient artifacts. By chance, she encountered a demon spirit inside an old painting and was rescued by Xie Wuwang, the Undying One who had lived for a thousand years. She entered the Wuwang Studio, hidden amid the bustle of the city, and met Xie Chang'an. There she learned the cruel truth of a century-long cycle: each of the nine guides before her had died taking calamities meant for Xie Wuwang, while every hundred years he forgot everything and began another cycle of endless solitude.
Even more shocking, the ninth guide, Su Wu, also known as Awu, looked exactly like Shen Li. A fragment of her soul dwelled inside Shen Li, and from then on, the two souls shared one body. Bound by a blood pact, they shared both fortune and misfortune. To protect Shen Li, Xie Wuwang was willing to sever the pact himself and suffer the backlash. As demon spirits ran rampant, the Heavenly Dao hunted them, and the half-demon Pei Zhaoye and fox spirit Liang Wanjuan plotted in secret, five seals were broken one after another, leaving the gates to the demon realm on the brink of opening.
Burdened by the obsessions of those who came before her and the mystery her mother, Shen Qingwu, had left behind, Shen Li refused to accept her fate. She learned talisman magic and fought demon spirits, joining forces with Xie Wuwang to stand against conspiracies and the Heavenly Dao. A thousand years of solitude would finally find its home. As for the fate that demanded she die in another's place, she would rewrite it with her own hands.
