“Get out of Yanmen Pass!” Shen Yi’s red-tasseled spear pressed against the mute groom’s throat, but its tip stopped at an old scar on his neck. It was an arrow wound, and the shape of the arrowhead was exactly like the one that had pierced her father’s back when he died in battle twenty years ago.
How could this cripple have a scar from an arrow unique to the Northern Frontier Army?
She was about to press him for answers when the horn of the wolf cavalry tore through the night sky.
Amid the chaos, he snatched up the spear she had dropped. His flourish was three times sharper than anything she had achieved in ten years of practice. When evil spirits pounced, he crushed their ghostly flames with his bare hands. The black iron spear mark that surfaced in his palm overlapped with the emblem of the “War God Zhaowu” in her family’s ancestral spear manual.
“I am a remnant soul sealed away.” He wiped the blood from her face. “But I remember the smoke from the army’s cooking fires, and the chants you shouted while training the troops...” When dawn reddened the walls of the pass, she raised her spear and broke the seal. He took up his own black iron spear, and together they pointed it toward the northern sands. “In this life, our spears share the land, and our souls return together.”
Theme: Suppress restless spirits.
