Inside Asteroid Classroom #1, floating fifty thousand miles above the Sky-Hilt Main Planet, a warm. Golden beam of Heavenly Conscience Light rose straight out of the twenty-fifth page of Regressor Clone Leader #101’s examination packet.
For the past hour, under the watchful proctoring of Ye Xiao’s golden bamboo ruler and the gentle nourishment of the peppermint tea on his stone desk. Clone Leader #101 had written ten thousand completely honest words.
He had started by confessing how empty and ridiculous it felt to wake up in an ink vat with a pre-printed script telling him to hate a world he had never even seen.
By page ten, watching the senior and junior disciples down on Mount Sky-Hilt sharing spirit-fruits and bandaging each other’s hands under the new Fair-Play & Mutual-Aid Sword Code. He had written about how much he secretly envied them. Because in the King of Betrayal’s script, clones were never allowed to have a single real friend, a real name, or even a warm bowl of rice.
And on page twenty-five, in the final hundred grid boxes, his trembling hand had written:
I do not want to be a disposable dagger in a hack writer’s tale anymore. Even if I was printed out of blank paper today, I want to use my own hands to build something real, protect a real street, and earn an honest meal.
