Seven-year-old Gu Xiaomei’s desperate, trembling cry echoed across the snowy square of Iron-Root Village #4.
“Please throw me out—I don’t right want my cursed bone to get a nice uncle killed!”
Down in the slush, ten thousand branch parents and miners bowed their heads and wept silently.
Every single family on Iron-Root Star knew that soul-crushing fear by heart.
In normal cultivation worlds across the cosmos, when a child awakened an innate spiritual bone, the whole village set off firecrackers and held a three-day banquet.
Only in the thirty-six outer branch star systems of the Galactic Immortal Gu Clan did mothers and fathers pray on their knees every night that their children would be born completely ordinary and dull!
Because for a thousand years, any branch child who shone even a little bit was dragged away in an iron cage, sawed open on an alchemy table to feed the main-clan heirs. Their parents were worked to death in the freezing ore shafts if they dared shed a single tear!
Holding the trembling seven-year-old girl in his warm wool coat, Gu Changsheng didn’t set her down in the snow.
