Tracking the Unusual Path

Ten years ago, Jiang Xun's parents entered a mountain valley and never came out. Ten years later, he stood at the entrance with half a bronze fragment in hand. The townspeople said there were echoes in the valley: call someone's name, and they will answer, even if they're dead. Jiang Xun has a pair of eyes that can see the cracks between the present world and the "old track."

He meets two people. Wen Shuran studies toxicology and trusts only instruments and the words on paper. The back of her left hand bears a scar that the old track cannot reproduce. Kui Hu is the only living person to have crawled out of the old track. He fears anything repeated, and looks at Jiang Xun as if he were a time bomb. The three of them distrust one another and check one another's accounts, but when the world is about to swallow one of them, they grab them back in the nick of time. "You remember the scar on my left hand?" "I remember." "As long as the scar is there, you haven't gone mad." And then there's Xuanjizi. He doesn't kill people. He only lays bare the deepest regret in your heart.

Five rifts, five sets of rules.