The Cyber Temple: Battle of the Twin Blossoms

This is a world where one's place in society is determined by immortal fate.

The Xuanyuan Realm has three tiers. At the very top, the Infinite Gate cultivates immortals and bestows immortal fate on Heaven's behalf. In the middle, Future City manufactures components and sells cybernetic bodies that let people bypass the need for spiritual roots. At the bottom are the market wards, where ordinary people live their whole lives without ever reaching Foundation Establishment.

At six, children are tested for spiritual roots. One test determines their fate for life. Future City has created the "Furnace Core," an artificial spiritual root that lets ordinary people draw in energy and cultivate. The Celestial Palace has charged it with one crime: stealing immortal fate. The harshest sentence is "Erasure": your name is struck from the immortal registry, and as far as the world is concerned, you never existed.

Water and Wind were two girls destined for the mountains. The day the clouds collapsed, Water traded a pair of hands for Wind's life. The sect's decree was clear: you are not people. Water uncovered the training platform's accounts: the stone was priced at three thousand taels, but only four hundred were actually paid. The two thousand six hundred saved went toward building the cloud stairway they would never be allowed to climb. Before dawn, she wrote three words in blood on Wind's palm and left. Wind read them as "Wait for me" and waited ten years. The three words were: "Don't wait."

Ten years later, Water became an exhibit in Future City, while Wind became the presiding lawkeeper of the Infinite Gate. They reunited on the battlefield. Neither struck a fatal blow in the first battle: both were waiting for the other to get serious first.

Then the Void descended: gray-white and faceless, it drained color from everything in its path before making it vanish. It showed everyone the truth: Erasure had never been a punishment. It was an offering. The names buried behind the Gate for eight hundred years had grown into it. The Dust-Cutting Grand Formation used names as fuel. The price of sealing this same "Nothing" was thirty years' worth of names from the market wards.

The old abacus finally asked the most costly question in the whole book: "Besides the names of eight hundred years... where did the erased go?"