Resting both ink-woven palms atop the closed golden cover of the [Supreme Book of Fate], the Chief Author of Fate leaned forward over his ten-thousand-foot Jade Writing Desk.
With every breath he took, millions of phantom lines of text—descriptions of burning villages, assassinated fathers, stolen spirit bones, and weeping orphans—rippled across his towering chest like crawling black centipedes.
His cold, golden-ink eyes locked directly onto the middle-aged man in the blue cotton kitchen apron standing calmly at the front of the family formation.
“Gu Changsheng of Frost-Pine Town,” the Chief Author said, his voice echoing simultaneously across Floor Nine and through every sky-screen in the three thousand worlds below. “Do you have any idea how small your role was supposed to be in my grand design?”
The Chief Author raised one long, ink-stained finger and tapped a tiny, dog-eared footnote on the very first page of his outline ledger.
“Three lines of text,” the Chief Author sneered, his voice dripping with ten billion years of divine arrogance.
“Out of three thousand pages of Record of the Nine Heavens Sword God, your entire existence was allocated three lines of background exposition on Page Three! You were a nameless, crippled mortal father in a backwater snow town whose sole purpose in the universe was to cough up blood. Fail to protect your seven-year-old son’s Chaos Bone from the clan elders.
