Lu Ming is the lowest-ranking scavenger on a garbage planet. Cast aside by his family, he survives by rummaging through the debris of civilizations long since fallen. Then one day, among a pile of discarded Dao Mark fragments, he accidentally fused with a golden Dao Mark that could freeze time. In a single breath, everything stood still. He thought this was the start of his rise, only to discover that the Xuantian Sect, one of the Nine Great Sects, had set its sights on him. A contract bearing his true name was placed before him: sign, and he'd gain cultivation resources and become a Mark Engraver; refuse, and he'd be erased. Lu Ming signed. But he had never been one to follow the rules. When the Xuantian Sect discovered that he'd exploited every unfair clause by pausing time, when the sect's prodigies were crushed in front of a crowd by weapons he'd cobbled together from scrap, and when his marriage contract with the heroine Shen Yingxue turned out to be a possession trap, Lu Ming hit pause and stood before the slumbering sect patriarch, pulling out a specialty of the garbage planet: a self-destructing bomb. "Contracts are made to be exploited. You can't take my name."
