Under the Beech Tree

There is a nameless fog at the edge of the Weaving World, where all undefined things settle. Lyu was born here—no name, no gender, no memory, and a face as blurry as wet clay. There are no "weaving traces" on his body, which means that he is an existence not recognized by grammar in the weaving world ruled by Demuge. A passing Whisperer tried to define Lyu's identity, but all grammar failed him one by one. The old man told him: "You are not qualified to be programmed." Every creature in the Ori Realm was programmed with basic definitions at birth, but Liu was the only one who never put pen to paper. He was taken to the town of Luocao, where he learned to imitate—to smile, to frown, to feel pain—but never truly "became" anything. Only the girl under the dead zelkova tree looked different. She drew a word on Liu's blank palm with her fingertips: "Liu", which means "meaningless light". Wang told him that Demuge in the central tower stitched the entire world together with order, and those exiles who refused to be stripped of their aura were called "self-obscuring people." In the early morning of the 72nd day, Wang disappeared, leaving only a note: "Your road is further than mine. Don't look back." For the first time, Lyu felt the weight of loss. He put away the note and walked toward the center of the Weaving Realm—toward the place where the bells sounded the loudest, toward the god who refused to define him and could not destroy him. This book takes Gnosticism as its spiritual background and reconstructs a fable about how the "void" earned a name for itself through walking. The unwritten existence finds a place between order and desire.