The starry sky is not the heavens.
It is an old woman who has been lying here for ten thousand years. Her bones became the stars scattered across the sky, the sun and moon are her eyes, and the Milky Way is the long river of her spine. People call her Ye Heng. Humanity built cities upon her bones and blood, while stargazers used the arrangement of her bones as a martial arts manual, gazing up at her generation after generation, yet no one ever imagined that the starry sky itself was being devoured, one bite at a time.
Wu Shijing, a scion of a family of stargazers, discovered while sorting through three hundred years of his family's star charts that an entire section of the southeastern sky had been deliberately cut away. The edge was smooth, no omission, but a deliberate cover-up. His discovery touched upon a secret that had remained hidden for three thousand years: Ye Heng was not entirely dead. An old wound from her youth in her right ribs had halted the process of her death, and someone had sawed that rib away. From that day on, her bones began disappearing from the starry sky, piece by piece. This was no natural disaster. She was being eaten.
To find the truth, Wu Shijing turned his back on his family and set out to find the stolen rib. His companion was Qiong Yue, the last orphan of the Night Clan, and the only person in the world who could sense Ye Heng's pain. Standing in their way was the Broken Star Altar, an organization that had endured for three thousand years. Its mission was to cut away the bones afflicted by the spreading erosion before it could take hold, using amputation to save the main world. They were not villains, but every time they wielded a saw over the past three thousand years, they had given the thing devouring Ye Heng a fresh wound.
As Wu Shijing drew closer to the truth, he realized he would not be facing an evil villain he could defeat, but a choice between two equally wrong answers: find a third path.
