[Grassroots protagonist + servant background + gifted superhuman + coming-of-age story]
[Learning to read is learning your fate + commoners awaken + truth and lies + power as a private weapon]
A servant hides a heavenly eye; the Heavenly Book hides the secrets of fate.
The Heavenly Book Bureau has laid a vast net. With a single character as his blade, he breaks free of destiny and returns the written word to the people.
The Jing Dynasty has stood for 180 years, but natural disasters and human calamities plague the land, and the court is crumbling.
Characters appear in the sky, drifting among the clouds. Some can see them; others cannot.
Those characters foretell death, war, and the fortunes of dynasties. They are called the “Heavenly Book.”
Lu Shi can see the Heavenly Book. But he doesn’t know how to read a single character.
He sees the character for “mourning” above the Wang family’s courtyard, and three days later, Old Madam Wang dies. He sees the character for “water,” and three days later, a flood sweeps people away at the ferry crossing. He sees everything, but can do nothing.
To understand the Heavenly Book, he becomes a student of a down-on-his-luck former archivist of the Heavenly Book Bureau and starts learning stroke by stroke.
But learning to read also means uncovering the truth about his own origins.
The secret organization known as the Heavenly Book Bureau has been searching for him all along. And his grandfather’s name is carved on the stele of the Bureau’s first director.
The Heavenly Book is no divine revelation. It reflects the tides of fortune in the mortal world.
The powerful use it to rule; Lu Shi uses it to learn to read.
From the muddy ground to the clouds, a servant uses a charcoal pencil to pry open the foundations of an empire.
