On the Cangyin Continent, spiritual energy reigns supreme.
The Spirit Realm has nine stages, each with ten levels. Talent determines your potential, while bloodline determines your starting point. But those with depleted spirit veins, known as "Spiritless," cannot even get through the door. Grade D, unregistered, their deaths unrecorded: the perfect expendable labor for the mines.
Lin Yan, a video game systems designer from Earth, opens his eyes to find himself Grade D.
By the normal script, he should survive three months in the Blackstone Mining District before being registered as "attrition."
But he bites a carrion rat to death and gains an entry no one else can take from him:
[Blood Scent: Gray (Mortal Mark)]
From that moment on, everything in this world becomes a commodity he can appraise: the teeth that bite through iron, the skin that feels no pain, the blade technique practiced for forty years, even an ancestor's "Blood Fiend."
He plunders, he fuses, he bestows.
The price is that every time he takes something, another obsession that isn't his grows in his heart. Hallucinations, brutality, loss of control. In the end, his greatest enemy is "himself," pieced together from everything he has stolen.
"They say plundering everything is the demonic path."
"But who in this world doesn't plunder?"
"When they take what belongs to others, they just call it destiny."
