A warm, rhythmic golden pulse traveled up and down all thirty-three vertebrae of fourteen-year-old Gu Nian’s spine.
Setting his porcelain soup bowl neatly beside his chopsticks, the fourteen-year-old boy stepped down from his wooden bench. Moreover, Sat cross-legged on a woven straw meditation mat in the center of the courtyard grass. His back was straight as a young pine tree, and his hands rested calmly on his knees.
Around the hotpot table, the cheerful clinking of bowls quieted down. Empress Luo Qingxue, Grandpa Fu, Auntie Qin, Grandpa Yao, and the four other children all turned their eyes toward Gu Nian with quiet, protective focus.
A deep, ancient weight hung in the evening air above Dormitory Villa #404.
Gu Changsheng stood two paces beside his eldest son’s mat, holding his wooden soup ladle in one hand. Meanwhile, His other hand rested calmly on the pocket of his yellow bunny apron, right over the worn leather cover of Dad’s Plot-Spoiler Notebook.
Better than anyone else in the universe, Gu Changsheng knew what this exact moment had meant in the original fate written by the Heavenly Script Pavilion.
According to the cold, blood-soaked pages of that original script, fourteen-year-old Gu Nian’s breakthrough into the Rank 8 Star Realm was never supposed to be a celebration. It was designed to be the final, irreversible trapdoor of his life.
