**Between life and death, nursing is deicide.**
When Lu Chen wakes amid blood and filth, the hourglass in his palm is running backward to a hundred and twenty thousand years ago.
That day, the Sea of Chaos boiled. He drove a demon dragon’s reverse scale into the heart of his Dao companion, Su Wanqing, and used her Lunar Goddess origin to forge the Wall of Eternal Night. Now reincarnated as a menial disciple of the Sword Sect, he sees the mark of nursing branded on the brows of cultivators from all nine sacred lands.
**“You nurture all of creation, yet all of creation uses you as a vessel.”**
Three thousand bronze coffins open at the bottom of the Dragon Burial Abyss, revealing the frozen truth of antiquity: what is called cultivation is merely a breeding experiment by the first observers, who harvested the marks of nursing. When Lu Chen discovers that Su Wanqing’s memories of nursing pain lie dormant in his hourglass, silver eyes beyond the Ninth Heaven already reflect his doomed fate.
**In this life, he will wield pain as a sword:**
- Make moonflowers nurtured by the Sun-Eroding Curse bloom with reverse scales in a saintess’s meridians
- Forge the tomb keeper’s sundial torture device into an armillary sphere for the Nursing Era
- Rekindle the primordial nursing hourglass of the Sea of Chaos using the deicide altar of the Nine Nether Sacred Land
And when the seventh reverse scale returns to its place and the ice coffin at the end of the Wall of Eternal Night opens, Lu Chen finally discovers the deepest conspiracy:
The nursing infant curled in the arms of the first silver-eyed being has the same face as him.
**On the day the marks of nursing awaken, all the gods and Buddhas of the heavens will be lambs.**
This deicidal nursing that has spanned a hundred and twenty-nine thousand six hundred years will finally tear away the last layer of Heaven’s swaddling cloth.
