Hidden Wind Pavilion

On the night Ke Donglin was fired from the museum, an ancestral stone talisman in his pocket grew hot for the first time.

He was led to Cangfeng Pavilion, deep in the antique street. The owner of the forty-one-year-old shop, Ruan Zhennan, handed him a bronze token and a scroll titled The Secret Transmission of the Five Arts, then left Jiangcheng that very night, leaving behind a letter. It contained only two sentences: “Master this scroll, and you can protect the shop. Go to Mount Luanke one year from now and find me.”

Then Ke Donglin discovered something. The bronze censer Ruan Zhennan had labeled “Republic-era imitation” looked old in its ceramic body, with verdigris sunk deep into the bronze. It was an authentic early Ming piece. The old man had spent forty years looking at antiques, yet Ke Donglin had seen through it at a glance.

The Art of Observing Qi. The bronze token cooled automatically whenever danger was near. Beneath every shop on this street lay a warding object. On the surface, the antique street was all about the human drama of scoring a bargain or getting swindled. Beneath that lay an entire battlefield of energy, held together by bronze vessels, ancient mirrors, and cinnabar talismans.

And the true master of this street, Lord Bai, had spent ten years setting up a Reverse Bow Sha formation. Its six nodes had choked off the wealth of half the street, and the core lay directly beneath the foundations of Cangfeng Pavilion. Ruan Zhennan had guarded the shop for forty-one years and kept him from succeeding. Now it was the turn of a dropout who had taught himself the Art of Observing Qi.

He had only studied it for a month.

What Lord Bai didn’t know was that Ruan Zhennan had left behind more than just a shop. He had left a pure yin constitution, someone able to see the qi of heaven and earth. And that burning stone talisman was far more than a way to “appraise antiques”...

It was a key.