Everyone in Huaiyin Town says A Yu is a fool. His father has been dead for three years, yet he still tends the shabby shop that no one buys paper figures from, waiting for the "person" his father never got around to explaining.
Then Zhao the Butcher from the eastern end of town brings him half a string of cash and asks him to make a paper effigy. A Yu accepts. That night, his peachwood knife grows hot, and the paper girl on the rack begins to speak. His father left a fragment of his thoughts inside the paper figure, along with a message: Nine formations lie beneath Huaiyin Town. As long as the formations stand, the people live. If they break, the people die.
Village chief Xu Si has spent seven years digging for the formation's core. His martial uncle, Cui Si, stole a set of coin blanks and is setting up a formation elsewhere. The Coin-Picking Gang, sniffing out the trail from the south, is making its way north. A Yu has only a peachwood knife, a tattered booklet, nine formation cores, and a ragtag band of helpers. When the knife recognizes one part of him, he repairs a formation core. When it recognizes all of him, he takes on a disciple.
From Huaiyin Town to Willow Gully, from the peak of North Ridge to South Screen Hollow, the nine formation cores form a line, and the heart of the formation lies beneath his own shop.
Paper figures are given bones; peachwood blades suppress evil. As long as the nine formations hold, Huaiyin will never fall.
