Where the Heavenly Dao Ends

In the northern reaches of the Great Sheng Dynasty, cultivators seek immortality, martial artists guard the borders, and beyond the frontier lies an endless war against the tribes of the Northern Wastes. Shen Yan does neither. An obscure assistant in the Bureau of Artifacts, he spends his days inspecting broken formations, damaged spiritual weapons, and the remains left behind when cultivation goes wrong. His talent is unremarkable. His cultivation is mediocre. But Shen Yan notices what others overlook. When three cultivators are found dead in an abandoned temple, every sign points to an attack by the Wastes. The corpses bear traces of foreign qi. Their bodies have been burned by what appears to be a forbidden thunder art. And enemy riders have been sighted nearby. To everyone else, the answer is obvious. To Shen Yan, something is wrong. A protective jade shattered from the inside. The dead men never walked through the rain. And hidden within their artifacts is a trace of human qi that should not be there. What begins as the murder of three cultivators soon draws Shen Yan into a conspiracy involving sects, border armies, the imperial court, and an ancient fragment that causes every spiritual instrument around it to fail. The deeper he investigates, the more impossible the questions become. Why are vast regions of the world slowly losing their spiritual qi? Why do the oldest formations resemble parts of something far greater? And what if the Heavenly Dao that every cultivator trusts was never the natural order of the world at all? Others seek immortality. Others defy the Heavens. Shen Yan intends to understand them.