Endless Reincarnation

Nine hundred years have passed.

The black-armored soldiers and black banners of the Heavenly Mandate Bureau have slaughtered their way from north to south. Fewer than one in ten of the Reincarnation Clan remain. In the end, only one child is left.

Shen Du, fifteen years old, is hung in a funeral home with a blade at his throat. He thinks he is doomed, until the dragon-and-phoenix pendant his mother left him grows hot, and the blood flowing from his wound turns gold.

He kills the four black-armored soldiers before him, and nearly burns himself to death.

The one who takes him in is an old man in gray robes, missing a thumb. As he brews medicine, the old man tells him: Other people drink Granny Meng's soup when they reincarnate, and their past lives are erased. But he remembers each and every one of his lives. He has died nine times already, each time at fifteen, each time in autumn.

And in his ninth life, the man who raised him was this very old man.

This time is his tenth life.

The stones in the mountains can teach him nothing more. He heads three thousand li south to Lin'an City to retrieve a ledger: a register secretly kept for thirty years by a senior official in one of the Heavenly Mandate Bureau's branch offices.

The ledger contains names. Beside each name are the words