Three years ago, every string instrument in the world rang out at once for nine seconds. The authorities called it noise. Shen Yanqiu heard something else: the sound beyond the strings, a vibration reverberating in his bones.
The day his master disappeared, he left behind just four words: Don't play Guangling San.
Shen Yanqiu restores ancient guqin zithers. He repairs instruments and scores, but never plays. That is, until a fragment of a score, hidden in the belly of a Song-dynasty guqin for three hundred years, fell out. The moment his fingers touched the strings, half the workshop exploded into pieces.
He discovered that the melodies in the fragment could rewrite the rules of reality. A single performance of Guangling San made the uncanny creatures within a hundred meters turn on and slaughter one another. But each time he played, the music eroded a portion of his memories.
Playing was combat. Playing was a wager.
He began gathering scattered score fragments from across the land, searching for the master who had been missing for three years. The Zhenyin Bureau was after him, underground organizations were fighting over the scores, and a man hidden behind a conglomerate planned to use the complete Guangling San to reverse the Stringfall, at the cost of countless people's memories.
Memory is identity. When he has forgotten everything, will he still be himself?
"What is broken can be made whole, even if only fragments remain."
