The martial way begins with the spine.
The human body has seven vertebrae, each like a palace that can house a strange bone and bear a divine ability.
Some are born with a blazing fire bone and can burn mountains with a thought. Some refine a thunder bone and soar across the skies. Others hide a bone of myriad poisons within them, able to swallow the world's deadliest toxins and live.
Strange bones have their ranks, and divine abilities their strengths and weaknesses.
The difference of a single bone can separate heaven from earth.
At twelve, Gu Ming underwent a bone reading. Eight bone patterns shook Qingya City, and he was hailed as the greatest prodigy the Gu family had seen in a century.
But three years later, his bone patterns began disappearing one by one. His cultivation vanished, and he became a good-for-nothing with unmarked bones in the eyes of the world.
The woman once promised to him in marriage joined the Tai Xuan Sect and came to his door with powerful allies.
She wanted to break off the engagement.
She wanted his bone.
She demanded that he return the Azure Phoenix Cry Bone, given as a betrothal gift and long since fused into his fourth vertebra.
Under the cold stares of everyone in the hall, Gu Ming ripped out the bone with his own hands and tossed the bloodied thing back in front of her.
“The engagement can be broken.”
“I'll return the bone, too.”
“After today, we owe each other nothing.”
But no one knew that the moment the Azure Phoenix Bone left his body, the seven dormant vertebrae that had lain silent for three years truly awakened for the first time.
Unmarked did not mean boneless.
It meant the unprecedented: the Formless Spine.
Myriad poisons, wind and thunder, dragon-subduing, immortality, the void...
Every divine ability under heaven can reside in my seven bones.
Years later, standing at the summit of the heavens, Gu Ming finally discovered a secret hidden for ages.
The strange bones that cultivators throughout the world took such pride in had never belonged to them in the first place.
If that's the case...
Then he, Gu Ming, would rather do without this borrowed heaven!
