After transmigrating, Shen Yan becomes Zhang Haixia's guardian. He tells him, “I'll never let you end up in that wheelchair. Not as long as I live.”
In his previous life, Shen Yan was a Celestial Master of Longhu Mountain. After a ritual went out of control, he transmigrated into the book that had haunted him most, the one whose ending he could never accept.
In the Nanyang archipelago, during the Great Famine of the Ding-Wu Years, two boys have just been pulled from a pile of corpses.
He knows that in a few years, Zhang Haixia will be crippled while saving his younger brother at Panhua Reef, stabbed to death aboard a ship, and split into two personalities after taking a fake-death drug, becoming Hei Xia, a man who no longer recognizes even himself.
He knows the script of every tragedy, so he makes a choice:
He won't be the protagonist. He'll be the one standing behind Zhang Haixia, taking the blows for him.
When the poisonous vines of dusk grass wrap around them, he burns every talisman and gives his life to save Zhang Haixia's spine.
When the assassination attempt aboard the Nanan arrives, he cleaves the door open with one strike of his sword and stands in front of the boy.
As the Wudou disease spreads through Nanyang, he burns himself away with Daoist arts, bringing a thousand years of sin to an end.
Zhang Haixia asks him, “Who are you, really?”
He replies, “Someone who doesn't want you to die.”
Once every regret from the original story has been rewritten, the passage back to the modern world slowly opens.
Will he go back, or stay in the world where he has already burned himself once?
