Chapter 1: 毁灭Destruction

That night, the moon was red. The old folk of the western marches said that a red moon over the mountains foretold great calamity. But the people of Shenjun Village had long ago stopped lifting their eyes to the sky. The cracks in the god-sealing array had crept up from deep underground, first as fine lines like spiderwebs across the flagstones of the ancestral hall, then in the dry well in the clan head's courtyard, where the protective runes that generations of clan heads had carved into the walls with their own blood were dimming one by one. Like a lamp The old clan head sat in the center of the hall with the Tiger-Devouring Lock spread before him. The golden light within the black jade pendant had grown fainter than it had been days ago. The flowing gold had turned sluggish, like a stream in winter on the verge of freezing, every movement exacting an enormous price. His withered fingers moved over the face of the jade, the wrinkles on his fingertips fitting the grain of the stone as if they had been cut to match. He was seventy-three, the longest-lived clan head in the history of the Ji family, and also the one who had borne the curse the longest. When his father died, in the instant of his last breath, some unseen force had torn the soul bodily out of the corpse. He had watched his father's soul twist and scream in midair before it was dragged underground, denied reincarnation, denied a place in the ancestral graves, not even leaving behind a memorial tablet. Since then, he had heard those voices every night. The souls of the Ji ancestors struggled and howled in the fissures of the sealing array, devouring one another. The sound was like ten…