The Ink of Narrating the World

The universe is written in words. The stars are exclamation points, the mountains and rivers are declarative sentences, and human beings are just unfinished compound sentences, struggling to survive in the giant book called "The Book of Cang Mo". In the third month after Gu Yan traveled through time, he stood on the ink-washing platform of Qingshi City. When characters such as "sword", "fire" and "shield" appeared on the palms of other teenagers, what he awakened was a symbol that no one could understand - a comma. "Waste ink." The old scholar pronounced his fate. The boy who was banished to Waste Paper Alley discovered the secret of the comma late at night: he could pause time, insert gaps between the readings of real sentences, and put a question mark on this written world. When "The Book of Cang Mo" started to rot after writing the seven millionth chapter, when there were gaps in history and outside gods tried to tamper with the type of story, Gu Yan decided to be the first punctuation that jumped out of the manuscript. "The story never ends," he wrote in the margins of The Book of Destiny, "because the characters learn to write themselves."