The lone mercenary Gu Xuan can see a “Fate Notice” above everyone's head: their name, what will happen to them, and a countdown. His own head is blank. People call him the “Undetermined One.”
At the gates of Luoyan City, he sees a notice above the Crown Prince of Zhao: “Tonight, at the Hour of the Dog, he will die in a rebellion at the city gates.” The night he saves the prince, he discovers the truth: the notices aren't written by Heaven. Someone is “writing” them. The writer is locked beneath the Weaving Fate Bureau, using the lives of two hundred thousand households across the city as paper.
An even deeper secret lies in his bloodline: his mother is the Bureau Chief's deputy scribe, and he himself is the child whose name was erased twenty years ago. His mother traded her entire life for his fate-thread, and the pen is now in his hands.
He can see, cross out, and write. But every character he writes makes him forget something about the person it concerns; crossing out a major notice burns away a piece of his own existence.
When the notices above three hundred thousand people's heads vanish all at once, the Changfeng Army enters the city, and the Bureau Chief who spent twenty years writing meets his end, Gu Xuan finally realizes that the true ending isn't finishing the writing. It's letting go. Give “writing” back to everyone, and let them live their own lives.
“The pen is dead. People are alive.”
A story about “who should write fate.”
