The Wandering Recluse Who Gathers the Broken

His name is Bai Chenyi, known in the martial world as the Wanderer Who Mends the Missing.

He repairs incomplete manuals, restoring fragments of martial arts scrolls for others. He's been at it for twenty years and earned a modest reputation.

But no one knows who taught him. No one knows that, as a child, a man in white left him on a stone stairway, made him kowtow three times, and walked away. No one knows that every time he repairs a fragmentary manual, he must pay a price. Sometimes it's his life, sometimes his heart.

Then one rainy night, an old wandering cultivator who sold talismans died suddenly in the street, clutching half a broken scroll.

Bai Chenyi laid the old man's body to rest. When he opened the scroll and read just two lines, his expression changed.

The brushwork on the fragment came from the same source as the sword marks on the lonely grave from his childhood.

That fragment was a hook laid thirty years ago. That lonely grave was a tomb waiting for thirty years.

Some came to seize the scroll. Some stepped in front of blades. Some asked him, "Who are you, really?"

He mended what was missing, searched his heart, stood against blades, and pursued the Dao, until at last he asked the question he'd avoided for half his life:

Who, exactly, is Bai Chenyi?