High in the vaulted ceiling of the Ink-Sea Library, seventeen-year-old Ye Xiao hovered at the exact geometric center between Floor Two and Floor Three.
Below him stretched a dark ocean of ink and ten million towering ironwood bookshelves. Floating in the aisles between those shelves were ten trillion open jade destiny books, each surrounded by a pulsing, dark-red spherical shell known as an Uneditable Grimdark Protection Barrier.
Inside those barriers, ten trillion automated Auto-Quill Brushes were still scribbling furiously in blood-red ink:
[Planet Azure-Cloud: On his sixteenth birthday, young Lin Hao returns home from hunting only to find his father crucified on the village gate by the Blood- Crow Sect...]
[Star-Realm of Falling Leaves: Gentle Mother Su coughs up black blood over her loom as the clan elders steal her daughter’s spiritual bone...]
[Mortal World #8,492,103: Framed for stealing a single spirit herb, the honest carpenter and his wife are sentenced to be crushed under iron rollers while their seven-year-old son watches from the mud...]
Down at the base of the eastern stairwell, Grand Proofreader Mo Wu picked himself up off the frost-covered bridge where Gu Changsheng and Empress Luo Qingxue were blocking his path. Looking up at the seventeen-year-old boy hovering in the sky with a bamboo ruler and a red pen, Mo Wu let out a shrill, desperate bark of laughter.
