[Artifacts] are divided into dead artifacts and spirit artifacts.
Dead artifacts are used or discarded, leaving no trace behind.
But when spirit artifacts spend a long time with their owners, the owners' obsession, longing, greed, resentment, anger, hatred, and love gradually cling to their surfaces... Eventually, they shatter because they carry too much spiritual power.
Spirit artifact restorers use themselves as a conduit to cleanse the spiritual power clinging to these objects, return them to the state of dead artifacts, and give them back to their original owners, descendants, friends, or relatives.
That
is their unique purpose as they walk the world...
Ji Yanli, a spirit artifact restorer, had lived for hundreds of years. His mission was to find his destined successor, pass on all his skills and spiritual power, and then fade away. He thought he was simply waiting for someone to take over.
Xu Sui'an, fresh out of college, walked into Changyin Alley carrying his grandfather's shattered black-glazed porcelain.
He never imagined he would stay, much less that the shattered artifacts held the truth behind his mother's death twenty-one years ago.
Blood-written characters inside a peachwood hairpin, fingerprints that wouldn't wash off a scalpel, the last three days encrypted on a hard drive.
Every spirit artifact pointed to the same date:
May 14.
And the truth he most wanted to know was that Ji Yanli had known from the very beginning that he would die.
"When did you know?"
"The first time you opened the door to the bamboo house, carrying that shattered piece of black-glazed porcelain. That's when I knew it wasn't a coincidence, and Aunt Xiang hadn't sent you here. I was here, so sooner or later, you were bound to come."
Theme: Waiting for someone for so long that waiting itself becomes an obsession.
