On the frontier of Yan lies a place called Mangshan Village. Though not far from Baizhao, it appears on no map, and the moment you step inside, not even a signal will reach you — an eerily hushed little village.

In that village's little teahouse, though no customer had come for the longest time, the waiter kept scrubbing the floor until it shone. Just who could he be waiting for this badly?

At last a customer walked in. Not to drink tea — but to kill someone.

A teahouse that sells neither tea nor wine — but poison, apparently

The two robbers who came were the Lu brothers, once known as the 'Three Storm Bandits.' The third had already died; what the surviving eldest and second brother were after was the peerless manual, the Martial Codex, held by a certain clever girl.

The girl pretended to hand over the manual obligingly, but the price the brothers named was the girl's own life. Just then, all three of them keeled over — the tea had been poisoned.

The one who poisoned it was the waiter, Hu Jun. A captive guest, the scrawny scholar Yun Qingping, tried to stop the killing at least, but Hu Jun tied him up too.

Hu Jun says he simply wants to leave this village, and that is why he needs the manual. In a village you can loop in 2,900 paces, he had been worn down by scenery that never changed no matter how many years passed.

Meanwhile, the Celestial Master Lin Qingyan, who had just entered the village, carried a letter from Zuo Le, a nephew of sorts. It was a plea to find her missing friend Yun Qingping.

Something about the village was off. An old man who pulls a freshly baked flatbread from his robes, and a girl named Xiaoxu who cannot tell time and so counts numbers all the way to 9,000.

Xiaoxu was on her way to meet Hu Jun. But she had lost the letter she had been asked to deliver, and failed to keep his secret too. Hu Jun said that if things had gone well, he had meant to take Xiaoxu and leave together……

"Farewell, Xiaoxu." After those few words, all that remained in that spot was Xiaoxu's umbrella, left forlorn.

When Lin Qingyan followed the clues to the teahouse, a smear of paint on the front of Hu Jun's robe caught her eye. It was the very color she had seen on Xiaoxu's umbrella.

His identity exposed, Hu Jun fled to the second floor, where some swordsman stood holding the manual. And a moment later, Hu Jun tumbled out the window.

What was left on the ground was no corpse — only a teapot smashed to pieces.

The schoolmaster who asked her to steal the dead waiter's 'remains'

Over the teapot shards, the village's Teacher Bo steps forward. This old teacher, who instructs the children in their letters, insists he must have Hu Jun's 'remains' back.

Lin Qingyan goes to him and hears the truth: a great many of this village's people are in fact Changgui — beings that gained consciousness when a person's obsession lodged in an object.

Nearby is Sui's Mausoleum, where the sealed Behemoth 'Sui' slumbers. Even after a thousand years sealed away, the power leaking out was more than enough to turn objects like teapots, fans, and pebbles into Changgui.

Teacher Bo was once a Behemoth scholar. Pitying the Changgui who would perish for causing a scene, he founded the Academy of Objects to teach them benevolence, righteousness, and propriety.

Hu Jun was the Changgui dwelling in the teapot of a tea farmer who set out across the southern sea in search of fine tea and never came back. That is why he always longed to leave the village.

But a few days ago, someone spread a letter carrying a rumor of a Martial Codex that held 'the secret to turning a Changgui into a human,' throwing the village's hearts into turmoil.

The man who spent a whole lifetime coming to buy a single pebble

Long, long ago, a gentle man asked a child by a river to sell him one pretty stone. He would pay whatever price the child named. The child refused.

From that day on, the man kept returning — as the child grew into a youth and then an old man — sometimes after ten days, sometimes after three or five years. Yet not once did he take it by force.

That child is now Elder Man, lying on his sickbed, staking half his fortune on a Celestial Master to find the stone he had lost.

Lin Qingyan quietly reveals that the thief's true aim was not the stone but the inheritance in the storehouse, and that the culprit was the elder's second son. And the stone itself, as it turned out, had become a Changgui by the riverside.

At the elder's side, that gentle man had come to visit once more. Asked why he kept coming when he went home empty-handed every time, the man said only that he simply loved this stone, and loved the wind and the people along the road here.

To the elder, who now offers to give him the stone, the man answers that they should let the stone choose for itself — and that it is all right, now, to finally let go.

The elder closed his eyes in peace, and the stone by the river, too, slipped quietly down into the water.

The man who, for a hundred years, has tried to win an unwinnable game of go

On the hill behind, a boy named Lanke had been locked in a single game of go for over a hundred years. A certain immortal had promised, "Win this game and I will grant your wish."

His wish was to be reunited with his dead lover, Baijin. The trouble was that this game could be neither won nor lost — a draw, a triple ko. The more he obsessed over winning, the more hopelessly tangled it became.

Yun Qingping, climbing the hill, took a look at the board. Then he abandoned the decisive point and placed a single stone somewhere unexpected, breaking a hundred years of deadlock in one move.

First you let go, then you look, and only at the last do you gain.

— Yun Qingping

The immortal kept his promise. Lanke reunited with Baijin and departed without regret — for Lanke, in truth, had died long ago as well.

But the very Baijin who had climbed the hill alongside Yun Qingping was…… the joss paper, soaked in Lanke's tears and longing, that had been laid before Baijin's cenotaph — that paper had become a Changgui.

The 'Baijin' whose wish had been fulfilled left a plea to be sure to meet again in the next life, and returned to being a bundle of joss paper. On that night of disaster 120 years ago, Lanke was swept away while saving others, and Baijin drew his last breath pulling him free.

The lost sword was the girl who came to him every single year

The swordsman Zhengxiu, bynamed the 'Soul-Severing Blade,' lost his sword in this village seven years ago, and taking it as a warning from Heaven, means to wash his hands of the jianghu.

But ever since, every autumn, a woman bearing a sword comes to pester him to teach her swordplay. Over seven years of such meetings, the girl grew astonishingly strong on her own.

That very girl was, in fact, Zhengxiu's lost sword turned Changgui. Having only ever watched the jianghu alongside her master, never walking it on her own feet, she wanted to live the jianghu under her own name.

But a Changgui cannot cross the invisible barrier that wraps around the village. And so that girl had tried to seize the Martial Codex to break through the barrier.

Before Lin Qingyan, who says a killer must be punished, the swordsman shields her. Yet the girl was already slipping into the grip of a savage Changgui frenzy.

As the thunder magic struck, the girl vanished, and all that was left in her place was a single plainly bound book — the 《Martial Codex》.

The swordsman, his sword lost, resolves to turn himself in. And before him appears a woman who remembers nothing, saying she "wants to go forward." The swordsman hesitates a moment, then asks if she will not come along with him.

To become the greatest under heaven, he went so far as to summon a 'god'

Meanwhile, there was a martial artist who had broken into Yumen, stolen the Martial Codex, and vanished — Waai Fu's father, the man people called 'the Great Hero,' Waai Tin Pui.

His daughter Waai Fu and the seasoned tracker Lee give chase. Waai Fu simply could not understand why her father, always so honest in his martial arts, had come to this.

At the center of the uproar was a clever girl named Mo Yi. Using the Martial Codex as bait, she had summoned the people of the jianghu and the Changgui to the mountaintop, staging a 'feast of heroes' to make them fight one another.

Mo Yi had Yun Qingping appraise the manual's authenticity. But Yun Qingping told the truth before everyone: this book holds no mysterious power at all, it can be printed and handed out endlessly, so there is nothing to fight over.

As the crowd turned its back on her, Mo Yi played her last card. Using the power dwelling in the Martial Codex, she summoned the avatar of the sealed Behemoth 'Sui.'

Before that phantom, against which even thunder magic passed as if striking empty air, one man stepped forward — Waai Tin Pui, gripped by the obsession to once more defeat the grandmaster he had dueled half a year before: that very 'Sui.'

Some thirty exchanges. Driven to the very edge of the cliff, he would not retreat. Then his daughter's cry brought him to a halt, and Waai Tin Pui reclaimed what he had forgotten — a forty-year promise, a daughter to protect, and his own name.

The only one who can contend with me is myself. If there is no road ahead, then I must look back.

— Waai Tin Pui

With a final blow he erased 'Sui,' and with that he fell down the cliff. Zuo Le hurriedly ordered a search below the mountain.

This village was something someone had built for them

Mo Yi is caught in the end, but there was a reason behind all this uproar. She had set the whole scheme in motion to find a certain object that could stop a war — by meeting 'Yi,' the master of Ji Garden.

Ji Garden is a garden built directly atop Sui's Mausoleum. Its keeper, Liang, tells a story from long ago.

Once, Liang was ordered to dispose of every Changgui wandering near the mausoleum. But upon learning that they held emotions and longings just like people, instead of disposing of them he built a village for them atop the ruins.

He had made up his mind after seeing a returning villager who insisted on coming back to till the fields again even though his hometown had been razed. Because a hometown, even ruined, is still home.

In that village was also the vase Changgui that Lanke and Baijin had shaped together as the first object for their new home. For a hundred years it has been waiting for the two of them to return.

Teacher, I am waiting for someone.

— The vase Changgui

And so Mangshan Village was born — a place where things shaped by obsession wait and long, living side by side with people.

Do you remember that teahouse waiter who scrubbed the floor though no customer came? In truth, the whole of this village was that teahouse. Sweeping quietly again today, for someone who will come one day.

Liang, sweep the garden clean and make ready to welcome our guests.

— Yi