Gu Xian has been able to hear objects talk ever since he was little.
The bronze mirror in the pawnshop loves dredging up the past, the jade hairpin complains about everything, and even a rusty woodcutter's knife boasts every day that its ancestors once cleaved a great general in two. He kept this oddity hidden for sixteen years, until a cracked black-bronze bell showed up at his door.
The bell doesn't make a sound. The moment it enters the shop, every magical treasure in the place pretends to be dead.
Later, an immortal sect takes him up the mountain and into the Repository of Artifacts, where he learns that the objects outside were merely noisy. The ones in the repository are the real old masters. The stubborn old rusted sword wants him to stroke it the right way, the vain bronze mirror needs to be coaxed with compliments, the gatekeeping stone is full of gossip, and someone is secretly raising deadly weapons and opening ancient pagodas.
Gu Xian has no cultivation and can't fight. He can only rely on his silver tongue and sharp ears to survive among a bunch of dramatic magical treasures.
He'd planned to keep his head down, but then the black bell spoke.
"It's not trying to get out. It's calling me."
