Heaven's Retribution Hunts Me, and I Hunt the Truth

The Heavenly Punishment pursued me for three years.

For the first two days, it followed me over the mountains, and I thought Heaven had gotten drunk. On the third day, I believed it. The lightning didn't strike trees or houses. It struck me, and only me.

I, Shen Che, am twenty-three. I've killed demons for others and risked my life, but I've never defied Heaven or rebelled against the court. I've never killed an innocent person, and I've never even skipped out on paying for a bowl of wontons from a roadside stall.

Yet it refused to leave me alone.

Then, one time, when I was struck by lightning and driven to the end of my rope, time suddenly stopped for a moment. A voice said, "Go."

The one who took those five bolts of lightning for me was neither me nor anyone I knew.

It was another me.

He lay buried in the deepest part of the void, hidden inside a stone shell riddled with cracks. Every day I survived brought him one step closer to annihilation. Every time I was saved, he cracked a little more. I got the relief; he took the pain.

But I didn't know who he was, or why he was the one taking the hits for me.

All I knew was that someone had tampered with the history of this world. The Heavenly Dao had erased a piece of true history with its own hands, and the only ones who remembered it were him and me.

He left me a fragment and a jade talisman. The fragment concealed a wisp of someone else's consciousness. The talisman sealed a wisp of a remnant soul, along with a piece of history no one dared to acknowledge.

I'm pursuing the truth. The Heavenly Punishment is pursuing me.

I want to see what the Heavenly Dao is so desperate to keep hidden.