White Eaves Ferry Souls

Expanded and enhanced synopsis (preserving the original healing core, completing the Three Talents setting, main conflict, and long-term villain arc, fleshing out the story, and matching the full plot of Spirit Crossing Beneath White Eaves) War rages across a troubled land. Soldiers and bandits run rampant, while rogue cultivators sow chaos in secret, hunting down people born with innate spiritual bodies to extract their spiritual essence. Ordinary people and creatures of the wild alike are plunged into misery, each struggling simply to stay alive. The young Su Xun always wears a plain white hat with a timeworn brim, carries a wooden medicine chest on his back, and has a white-cloud crow circling by his side day after day. Five years ago, his Granny, who taught him to recognize medicinal herbs and cherish life, wandered into the thick mists of a remote mountain and vanished. He has traveled alone across thousands of miles of barren ridges, hoping to follow the faint, familiar scent of mugwort and find his old friend again. He has no innate spiritual meridians or heaven-bestowed powers. He knows nothing of cultivation or leveling up, and all he has is the kindness etched into his heart. Whenever he encounters trapped eggs, injured birds, or dying aquatic beasts, he stops to help, never disturbing the small and vulnerable creatures. His many years of good deeds have given rise to a unique path of compassion, the Eave Crow’s Passage. A whistle carved from green bamboo summons birds from across the sky to obey him. They scout the way ahead, avoid ambushes, and carry messages for thousands of miles. In an ancient city at the western foothills, Su Xun meets Qing He, a girl born with an innate spiritual essence of plants and trees. She carries a bone whistle for spirit beasts and is naturally connected to the plants, trees, bees, butterflies, and beasts of the land. She can hold off countless enemies, identify every herb, and command all living spirits upon the earth. One commands the birds of the sky, the other rules the spirits of the land. Traveling together, the two companions support one another as they investigate the schemes of rogue cultivators lurking beneath the city’s black markets. But the spiritual veins of heaven and earth remain incomplete. Across the rivers, lakes, and seas, in the vast waters of Lop Nur in the Western Regions, dwells Cang Jiao, the Azure Water Spirit Lord. Cold and fierce by nature, he commands the savage clans of the deep. When he first encounters the two, he...