The world is a book, and once a volume is complete, it is burned.
All living beings are no more than a few lines on its tattered pages. Once their words are written, they are burned away.
Gu Qingci was merely a young Daoist in a dilapidated temple, hired to read auspicious dates and write memorial tablets. But during a strange dream of a burning book, he snatched a charred fragment from the discarded drafts of the Heavenly Book: the mortal world from the previous volume, already reduced to ash. From then on, he could add a stroke in the blank margin, letting a town that should have been wiped out lose only half its people, allowing a sword attendant fated to die young to live a little longer, or giving a sacrificed soul another path to follow.
The price was this: every time he changed a word, the world remembered him a little less. First, it forgot his name, then his face, until even the line “this person once existed” would be scraped away as a blemish by the Heavenly Dao.
Beneath mountain rain and the glow of a dying lamp, a cold-eyed sword attendant, a fox-eared priestess, a red-robed ghost lord, a saintess who abandoned the Dao, a master of the scholars, and a goddess in the water appear in turn. These six anchors of the mortal world pin him firmly to this volume, refusing to let him repeat the old path of the previous one: “establishing himself as the ultimate law of Heaven and burning the book with his own hands.”
This is a long tale of the strange and the occult, where the transmigration “golden finger” becomes “the sickness of being forgotten by the world”:
He seeks no ascension. Before he is burned away, he only wants to write a few more strokes on this page,
even if, in the end, all that remains of his name is a trace of ash, quietly tucked between the pages of a book.
The writing is good, but the plot is a bit confusing. The heroine is very cute.