When Chereboni's blood carved growth rings on the deck, she finally saw clearly the lies of this world.
In the 21st circle at the end of the Milky Way cantilever, all life is undergoing a graceful decay. Star sand is the remains of aura, crystallized coral is a living coffin, and human beings are just luminous batteries fed by the planet - the aura leaking when we breathe is feeding the monster that gnaws at the growth rings.
The female helmsman who was expelled from the pirate group returned to the dying coral island and witnessed her grandfather's body being eaten by dark matter tentacles. The fragment of the star map that the old man held in her wrist before she died exposed a scam that had lasted for three hundred centuries: the so-called immortals were just the first generation of captives, and the entire interstellar civilization was built on the corpses of giant tree rings. When the outermost growth rings are about to collapse, only the "Light Eaters" marked by the Shining Clan can hear the bloody warnings of the Star Marrow Whales traveling through time and space.
Now, with golden blood flowing in Chereboni's veins, she took apart her grandmother's crystallized bones to forge a jump sail, and sewed her grandfather's star sand cloth into a god-killing banner. When dark matter symbionts crawled out of the wreckage of the Blood Shark, and when the black robes filled the cracks in the earth with undead, this woman who was exiled from all circles decided to do something big - she would drive a starship converted from a coffin, sail in the opposite direction along the path of spiritual energy escape, and become the first human to carve a mark into the heart of the world tree before the end of the annual ring.
Mission: The human spirit never decays