Elio5566
In a city of neon and glass, ancient demons are waking up. And only one man remembers how to send them back.
Lucien Arcus lives two lives. By day, he is a mild-mannered museum conservator, repairing Tang dynasty pottery under soft lights. By night, he is the last inheritor of the Xuanzhen Daoist lineage, armed with coin-swords, blood-sealed talismans, and a millennium-old mandate: Guard the boundary between the human and the unseen.
But the balance is shattering. When a 1,300-year-old bell chimes by itself at midnight, releasing a creature that feeds on human joy, Lucien realizes this is no isolated incident. It is a herald. The Seven Passions-demonic entities born from the excess of human emotion: Joy, Rage, Sorrow, Obsession, Grief, Fear, Shock-are returning. And they are hungry for a modern world drowning in its own desires.
His only ally is a woman with secrets of her own.
Sylvia Rayne, a sharp-witted police consultant specializing in "impossible" crimes, carries the legacy of a forgotten exorcist clan. When their investigations collide over a corpse found smiling in death, an uneasy alliance forms. She deals with the forensic evidence; he handles what lies beyond it.
From museum basements to rooftop shrines, from glitzy wedding halls to the darkest corners of the digital realm, they will hunt demons that wear human faces. A rage-monster stoking viral hatred online. A sorrow-entity turning apartments into tombs of despair. Each victory reveals a fragment of a larger, more terrifying design: the Seven are being called to unite under Aethelred the Sevenfold, and their convergence will turn the city into a feast for nightmares.
METROPOLITAN MONSTRUM is a gripping fusion of urban fantasy, detective noir, and authentic Chinese Daoist lore. It is a story about the shadows cast by our brightest lights, the ancient prices of modern excess, and the lonely guardians who stand between the world we know and everything that hungers in the dark.