The Taoist Bai Ya

In the late 1980s, drought swept across China. A month-old baby boy was sent by his family to the Ancestral Temple on Furong Mountain. On the way, they encountered Xu Yun, a wandering Taoist from Mount Heng. The Taoist took the boy as his disciple and named him Yibai.

Twelve years later, the boy descended the mountain and entered the world. What he didn’t know was that his origins were bound up in a century-spanning conspiracy. The Japanese occult organization Yatagarasu had planted countless cursed nails throughout China for one purpose: to resurrect Xu Fu.

From the blood-soaked evil formation beneath the Jinling Pavilion to the chrysanthemum mark on the Three Gorges Dam; from the seven nights of bloody battles on the eve of the Beijing Olympics opening ceremony to the towering inferno at Tokyo’s Yasukuni Shrine, Wen Yibai and the “Iron Triangle” formed with Li Xiaoyu and Qin Ying spend fourteen years traveling across China and crossing the sea to Japan, pulling out cursed nails, severing dragon veins, burning shrines, and destroying evil pagodas.

This is the coming-of-age story of a new generation of young Taoists, and the settling of a debt that spans a hundred years.