Li Huowang is an apprentice poison-tester at the Medicine Gu Valley.
His master, the Blood Gu Adept, raises gu with living people. His senior sister was ground into gu powder; his senior brother's body crystallized and shattered in the gu pool. Every day, Li Huowang kneels before that pool and grinds into the medicinal ingredients his master needs the people who once called him “junior brother.”
Then he wakes up.
The fluorescent lights of the psychiatric hospital buzz overhead. His girlfriend, Yang Na, holds his hand, eyes red, and tells him he had another episode that lasted forty minutes. The doctor says he has severe dissociative identity disorder, and that the bizarre cultivation world is only a hallucination created by his brain.
He almost believes it.
Until he finds a bone fragment in the shoe of his hospital uniform. Carved into it is a circle split in two, its edges scorched. It grows faintly warm in his palm.
Two worlds open up before him at once. The Blood Gu Adept says the modern world is a delusion, and swallowing the Ink Flood Dragon's silk will cure him. The doctor says the cultivation world is a fantasy, and a higher dose of medication will suppress it. In both worlds, people love him; in both, there are things he cannot bear to let go.
He must choose one.
But he does not know that the choice itself is a deception. The Deceitful Way laughs in the shadows. They have fooled the Heavenly Dao, the apostles, and the entire world. Li Huowang may be their greatest deception, or the one person they cannot fool.
In this world, power comes from pain. Pull out a fingernail to strike once; tear out a heart to gain a life. Some sacrifice all the skin on their bodies just to build a fire. Others refine their internal organs into a furnace, all to refine a trace of corruption.
