There isn't just one universe, but many. They're called "planes," embedded horizontally and vertically in an invisible web. The planes are connected by "corridors". They're not roads, but routes: passages that can be traversed. All the corridors meet at a single point, where an academy stands, called Jingyuan Academy.
Every plane grows old. And when it does, it encounters "Sulingling."
Sulingling is a kind of erosion. It seeps in from the edges of a plane, slowly turning everything meaningful into meaningless gray mist. In places consumed by Sulingling, people disappear, history disappears, and causality disappears. The cruelest part is that no one remembers they ever existed.
The Academy publicly claims that Sulingling is a natural disaster: inexplicable, impossible to stop, and something they can only rescue people from. The Academy trains students for that very purpose: to help them grow stronger and mend planes that are coming apart. For more than three hundred years, that's been the Academy's story. As for the truth, that will have to wait until a boy whose readings can't be measured turns over the monument, the bell, and the ledger, one by one.
His name is Lu Zhiye.
