Among the Zhuyou tradition, there is a branch known as the Covenant Examiner.
With a pair of clear eyes, they can see the hidden covenant patterns between flesh and blood, forests and mountains, and the souls of the dead, and read every oath people have ever made.
An ancient teaching of the sect is carved into the Zhuyou heart-lamp: bear your own cause and effect; never pay another’s debt, and never shoulder the karmic burden of someone else.
At an ancient mountain shrine, a written covenant to take another’s calamity bound Zhu Lingxi and Xie Linyuan, the seal-holder of the Covenant Tribunal, together.
He guards the eternal laws of covenants with a jade seal. Anyone who breaks a covenant must die.
She wields Zhuyou spirit herbs to discern truth from falsehood. If an oath was a fraud from the start, it must be exposed and torn apart.
A village where lives are exchanged, a medicinal estate that raises spirits, an old family that steals lifespans, a mountain god that imprisons souls... one eerie case after another comes to light.
The old rites that people revere as the will of Heaven are, beneath their polished surface, schemes by the powerful to prey on the weak.
When a Heavenly Dao covenant passed down for ten thousand years proves to have been a lie from its very origins,
Zhu Lingxi stands with her lamp in hand: the way of Zhuyou is to guide people through, not to offer them up as sacrifices.
