When the scriptures of Dust-Crossing burned to ash, the gears of reincarnation began to grind against the corpses.
Mingche awoke in a mortuary strewn with corpses, his palms cracked like fragments of a ruined scripture. A corpse covered in golden specks of dust used blood to restore the memories erased from him: bronze Sanskrit characters branded into his leg bones, the phantom of a colossal tree scorched by karmic fire, and the fissure of the Avici realm sealed within cracks in the ancient Canaan bell.
The mute girl Su Chen concealed half a finger bone in her prayer wheel. The moment the tooth marks on the bone pen matched those on the finger bone, the tattoo of the Sutra of Deliverance on her back blazed like fire
“The blaze that burned through reincarnation a hundred years ago severed the chain of cause and effect.”
Su Chen was no ordinary dust, but a seed of purification forged from the remains of an old god, and also the original sin that would devour the present world. Mingche embedded Sanskrit characters in his leg to make an arrow, dipped it in the blood from his heart, and severed the power of karma. Su Chen burned herself into a blank scripture slip, using her body to block the crack in reincarnation. As the bronze giant tree toppled in the karmic flames, the newborn baby's brow glowed with a blood-red mark, while her ashes formed a starry track beneath the roots of the World Tree.
Yet strange things lurked among the ashes of cause and effect. The Buddha seed mutated in a filthy placenta, and the lightless sea flowed backward into the abyss. The remaining stardust embers formed a trail to guide the way. A suffering ascetic, sailing on a raft of broken ribs, opened the eye of Sanskrit embers that could see through illusion with his burning little finger. Ahead lay the final graveyard, where the scriptures of the old gods converged. Behind him was a ferocious fetus, its cocoon sealed by the brand of tooth marks.
The thirty-volume road of burning scriptures was a mantra carved into flesh by the Dust-Crossing Envoy to suppress calamities. At the moment the new scripture master picked up the stone slip bearing the tooth-mark brand and the empty gate of the Formless Realm opened, he saw:
The severed finger of an ancient Buddha falling into the abyss, Su Chen's ashes glittering on a glass stele, and Mingche's ribs turning into arrows that pierced the abyss, pinning down countless twisted scriptures wrapped around the heart of the Buddha...
