From Executioner at the Demon-Slaying Platform to Sainthood

The Great Yu Immortal Dynasty has stood for eight hundred years, its fate sustained by a single platform: the Demon-Slaying Execution Ground. Shen Jue is the lowest-ranking backup executioner there, the son of a man convicted of colluding with demons. Twenty years ago, his father, Shen Wudao, chief executioner at the platform, was executed there by his own disciple and condemned for “colluding with demons and setting them free, a crime punishable by the death of the entire family.” Shen Jue grew up beside a mass grave and joined the executioners for one reason: to understand that final stroke. Why hadn’t his father dodged? One rainy night, Shen Jue fills in for an executioner. As a head falls, the dead man’s memories burst into view: the so-called bandit was a schoolteacher who even kept orchids on his windowsill. The miscarriage of justice brings the past into the present, and awakens the broken family blade. Seven marks run along its blade, each sealing the memory of a death-row prisoner his father executed. At the moment a head falls, the one thing the deceased could never let go of in life becomes a “mark on the blade” and enters Shen Jue’s vision: a peerless technique, an old case, or a measure of cultivation. Slay a person, inherit their obsession; solve a case, advance a realm. But the faster the blade falls, the more something feels wrong. Why are there more demons the more he executes? What exactly is being suppressed beneath the platform? The truth behind the Qingqiu Release Case from twenty years ago, the blood debt owed by the court’s officials, and an eight-hundred-year-old injustice that cannot be defeated, only brought to a close, are all waiting for him to raise his blade.