“The new textbooks are ready for distribution right now,” sixteen-year-old Ye Xiao smiled, leading his father and siblings into the grand rotunda of the central university library.
Inside the ten-story marble rotunda, the air no longer smelled of moldy blood-parchment and snake-venom ink as it had under Headmaster Hong’s five-thousand-year reign. Instead, the sunlit reading halls smelled of fresh pine-pulp paper, roasted sesame ink, and clean lemon floor-wax.
Earlier that week, when Grandpa Fu, Ye Xiao. The student volunteers had audited the twelve million shelves of the old Protagonist Academy library, they had carted out twelve million scrolls of pure toxic garbage.
There had been three hundred thousand manuals on How to Poison Your Sworn Brother After Sharing a Secret Realm. Half a million treatises on Slaughtering Nine Generations of a Waiter’s Clan Because Your Tea Was Lukewarm, and entire floors dedicated to Refining Innocent Saintesses into Disposable Luck Batteries.
Stacked in the center of the library courtyard, that mountain of twelve million corrupt murder manuals rose eighty feet high.
Gu Changsheng walked up to the eighty-foot pile of black-and-red scrolls, rolled the sleeves of his linen tunic up to his elbows, and looked at Grandpa Fu.
“Grandpa Fu,” Gu Changsheng asked practically, “if we burn all twelve million of these old scrolls in the cafeteria boilers, will the smoke make the steamed buns taste funny?”
