Beneath the Three Elders of the Tianheng Palace, the Institute of Corrections oversees the fates of everyone across the Nine Realms. Anything erased is considered never to have existed. At fourteen, Mo Changzhu was taken in and put to work on the second underground floor as a character eraser in the proofreading room. For twenty years, he had never damaged a single sheet of paper or let a single character resurface.
But after the third watch, three red characters suddenly appeared on a page of the reproofing ledger that should have been blank: Zhan Gengyun. It was the name of the charcoal seller Mo Changzhu himself had erased two years ago. The red characters had edges as straight as if cut by a knife. There were characters on the front, but the back was blank. Even when a lamp shone through the reverse side, the light could not pass through. The characters were not on the paper, but inside it, pushing through from a place that did not exist.
Erased characters could never be restored. That was a rule recognized throughout the Nine Realms. But tonight, this page was lying. The Institute of Corrections had only one rule: never write back a character that had been erased. And the people upstairs, from the Office of Fate to Tianheng Palace, feared one thing most of all: that someone would discover the ledgers could remember on their own.
