The black cat with the lame leg in the back mountains of Qingxuan Sect lets out mournful cries on moonlit nights, revealing three black-iron spikes embedded in its spine.
A new medicine apprentice, A Li, cuts her palm. Her blood transforms the black cat into a young man in bloodstained blue robes. A hundred years ago, he was Xianchan-Jun, the mountain's guardian spirit beast, but his bones were ripped out and forged into an evil artifact to protect the formation. She, meanwhile, is the sword cultivator Wuyuan, fated to kill him in every one of her seven reincarnations.
On a stormy night, Xiao Man Ci arrives through the mist, holding a jade tobacco pipe.
He says A Li's blood can be forged into a god-slaying talisman, that the cat demon's twisted spine hides a sword capable of tearing apart fate, and that the bones of her first six lives lie at the bottom of the River of Rebirth. Every skeleton bears a verdict in its destiny record: "Slain by a god."
"So-called fate is nothing but a script written by the gods." Xiao Man Ci flicks away his ash. It gathers into the shape of A Li's altered destiny: "In the seventh life, at the third quarter of the Hai hour, your heart meridians will be severed."
But the cat demon tears the page to shreds the moment the destiny record appears. His fangs pierce her neck as he laughs hoarsely. "This time, I'll defy the gods on their own stage."
A Li guards a pawnshop, using white hair as thread and demon bones as scales to rewrite the tragedies ordained for all living beings.
Blood seeps from the peachwood sword tassel the lame-legged shopkeeper polishes. The thousand-year-old peach tree in the pawnshop's courtyard withers overnight. And on the night the River of Rebirth flows backward, someone glimpses a missing page in the Seven Fiends Destiny Record in the gods' pavilion of judgment
The missing page is wrapped around the cat demon's remnant soul, nailed into A Li's heart.
Only when Xiao Man Ci's jade tobacco pipe shatters and becomes a stele at the ferry crossing, and A Li's ninth white hair coils around the spirit of the divine brush, do they understand:
The seven reincarnations are not a curse, but a challenge mortals have sent to the gods. That stubborn cat, limping along, insists on shattering the long stairway to godhood paved with destiny records.
(A customer trading a soul at the pawnshop drops a bronze sword crown from his sleeve. The divine realm has not yet been reduced to ashes. Beneath the withered peach tree, the heart-devouring cicada gnaws at the cover of a newly born destiny record...)
Theme: Fate is a chain the gods use to tame all living beings, but with seven lives' worth of mortal blood and bone, and love that grows wild, ordinary people forge a god-slaying blade from the depths of reincarnation.
