Everyone says that Meng Po is a white-haired old woman waiting by the Bridge of Helplessness. What they don't know is that the one who now governs the Wangchuan River is Xiao Mo, a fragmentary soul split off from the Lady of Houtu.
She looks no older than twenty-something. She tends the pot of Meng Po's Soup at the bridge, accompanied by the divine beast Bai Ze, and bears the duty of guarding the ancient seals that protect the mountains and rivers of the Nine Provinces.
After tens of millions of years, the seals are crumbling. In the Sea of Blood in the Underworld, the ancient wicked relic, the Beads of Karmic Thoughts, leaks black, foul energy. It doesn't slaughter living beings outright. Instead, it magnifies the obsessions, regrets, and resentments in the hearts of the dead and the living, breeding inner demons and gnawing away at the earth-vein seals.
Every time Xiao Mo draws on Houtu's power to resolve an obsession or mend a rift, her divine soul is steadily depleted. The day it runs dry will be the day her fragmentary soul vanishes.
On a rooftop, the young Mo Wan waits in vain for her lover to be reborn. By the Bridge of Helplessness, Young Master Wang is trapped by heartbreak from two lifetimes. The scholar Li Jingci has kept a devoted vigil for three thousand years. The wronged God of War Han Xin has suffered for a thousand years. Emperor Wangdi Du Yu is imprisoned by rumors. Ziyu cannot let go of her obsession amid the lingering rain over the Wu Palace. A Yuan, the mountain spirit offered in sacrifice, has been forgotten by time...
One by one, these ancient loves and grievances turn into shackles under the influence of the foul energy, trapping countless wandering souls.
Xiao Mo and Bai Ze travel between the realms of the living and the dead, guiding trapped souls to peace, but they can only treat the symptoms, not the cause. Deep within the Sea of Blood, the seal on the Beads of Karmic Thoughts splits. A remnant of a demon god breaks free, swallowing the karmic flames of the Eighteen Levels of Hell on one side while using seeds of the world's earth veins to draw out the obsessions of all living beings on the other, laying a vast web across both realms.
On one side is the approaching apocalypse. On the other, her own divine soul is steadily weakening, on the verge of vanishing.
She must show compassion for all living beings, yet find a sliver of hope for her own survival.
Across the Yellow Springs, she guides the souls bound by obsession; across the mountains and rivers, she seals the rifts. See how Meng Po Xiao Mo cuts through ten thousand inner demons, and...