Li Du is a food delivery rider, widely known as the unluckiest guy around.
On a stormy night, he falls into a pawnshop he has never seen before: the Hidden Life Pavilion. When blood from his forehead drips onto the ledger, he sees the truth of the world:
Everyone is covered in “pawn marks.” Health, memories, emotions, talents, luck... Anything can be pawned, refined, bought, or sold.
His lifelong bad luck comes from his fate, the Three Gui Waters, which naturally absorbs everyone else’s “lacks.”
Worse still, eighteen years ago his mother pawned her health to pay for his surgery. After four rounds of compound interest, she has only four years left to live.
Xu Yanshen, the Hidden Life Pavilion’s proprietor, tells him, “Want to redeem it? You can. Just trade all the luck you have left.”
After pawning it, you will live under a constant run of bad luck and may not survive the year.
Li Du refuses.
“Lack can’t be filled by pawning. It can only be nurtured by living.”
He begins learning to read marks, redeem contracts, and rewrite them, while navigating the powers of the Nine Schools and Ten Houses: the Pawn Sect’s Legalist order, the Redemption Guild’s Mohist ideals, He Tianhong’s cutthroat commercial battles, and Xu Yanshen’s thousand-year struggle as a Confucian trapped in time.
He meets Su Zhi, a girl who pawned away her “ability to be loved.” She remembers every moment of warmth, but can no longer feel it. He is the only one who can hear the “echo” in her heart.
In the end, Li Du must face a choice:
Will he be a river choked off at its source, or one that flows forever?
