THE NINE-STROKE TALISMAN A Synopsis Shen Moyan is not a lucky man. He's twenty-four, he's just failed his postgraduate entrance exams for the second time, and he's two months behind on the rent. His only real skill is one he's spent three years honing in a tiny repair shop down the lane behind the City God Temple. He can date any paper stock at a glance, his brushwork is exquisite, and he's restored more books than most people will ever own. The most valuable book he ever worked on, he did for free. At least, to begin with. At midnight, a woman in red knocked on his door. She brought with her a damaged Taoist scripture. The title was mostly missing—only four characters remained legible: The Violet Tapestry of Divine Soldiers. She offered him five thousand yuan to have it restored by morning. Shen Moyan, who hadn't seen that much money in months, said yes. At three in the morning, working on the final page, he noticed something. Indentations. Someone had written on the page above, pressed too hard. The marks had transferred. He passed a pencil lightly over the surface. Words emerged. Nine strokes. Each stroke a trial. When the ninth falls, he who bears the talisman inherits the debts of all who came before. Below that, two more words. His name. Shen Moyan. From that night on, his world was no longer his own. First came the voice. Zhu Quan, the Prince of Ning, dead for six hundred years and apparently incapable of shutting up. He claimed to have invented the Nine-Stroke Talisman. He claimed Shen Moyan was something called a Debt-Bearer—a vessel born once in a millennium, designed to house the souls of every cultivator who'd ever left a debt unpaid. He was the first. He would not be the last. Then came the things. With his newly opened eyes, Shen Moyan could see them now. Wandering souls. Vengeful ghosts. Earth-bound spirits. They crowded every corner of the lane behind the temple. Most just watched. Some came for help. Some came to kill him. The first talisman he learned to draw was the Soul-Guiding Stroke. The first soul he sent on its way was a child who'd been dead for thirty years. His name was Xiaoman. He was five when he wandered off and fell into a well. He'd been standing at the end of the lane ever since, waiting for his mother. When Shen Moyan found her house, she was already gone. She'd died the previous winter, sitting on her doorstep, waiting for a son who would never come home. Before he left, Xiaoman said, "Thank you, Uncle." Shen Moyan stood in that lane and understood, for the first time, what repaying a debt truly meant. Zhang Shouyi found him next. An old man who stoked the boiler at the Jiangnan Taoist Temple. Once, he'd been the closest of his generation to achieving the rank of Heavenly Master. Now he was broken, spending his days shovelling coal. He told Shen Moyan that some people are born to carry what others leave behind. There was no escape. He would teach Shen Moyan what he needed to know. In return, Shen Moyan would handle the cases that came to the temple. So Shen Moyan began his new life: restoring books by day, driving out spirits by night, and trying to keep the peace among the voices in his head. A second voice arrived. Wang Qizhen, a Taoist from the Southern Song. He'd compiled the Biographies of Exemplary Women. The debt he carried belonged to a girl named Sun—sixteen years old, pushed into a well, her death unrecorded, her name forgotten by history. He had come to repay that debt. And to help Shen Moyan repay his. Sun was Zhu Quan's daughter. Illegitimate. Unacknowledged. Four centuries dead, and her soul still waited at the bottom of that well. The well was behind the City God Temple. There were dozens of bodies down there. Sun was only the first. A third voice came. A fourth. A fifth. Shen Moyan's mind became a boarding house for the indebted dead. They argued constantly. The Tang Dynasty called the Song pedantic. The Song called the Ming frivolous. The Ming called the Qing ill-mannered. Shen Moyan lived in the middle. Every time he tried to draw a talisman, he had to wait for them to vote—two to one and the stroke failed, three to two and it might just hold, four to one and the whole thing collapsed. But every time he did manage to complete a Nine-Stroke Talisman, the darkness at his fingertips deepened by a fraction. Nine strokes. Nine trials. Ten thousand debts. He met Gu Qingning. An inheritor of the ancient Nuo shamanic tradition from the southwest. She wore a mask and summoned gods to fight through her. Her combat ability was terrifying. But her secret was worse than his. She was the unwed bride of the Nuo God himself—a bond forged three thousand years ago. She'd been sealed away for three centuries. Freed, her mind was stuck at seventeen, and her body was slowly unmaking itself. She had less than a decade left. He met Lu Jiuyuan.