The Dead in the Book of Fate Speak My Name

[Urban High Martial Arts][Alien Beasts][Eerie] Three hundred years after the sky split open, alien beasts descended. Humanity retreated behind the walls of nine great cities. Beyond the walls lay the wilderness; beneath the cities, an abyss. The beasts devoured more than flesh and blood: they ate people’s name records, body records, and fate records. Their names, their bodies, their futures. Those who were eaten remained alive, but slowly became people with no identity. Beneath the nine cities lay nine stacked layers of abyss, each one a history the world had erased as an error. The ninth layer was called Tomorrow. Everyone who had entered it had once killed someone important in the future. There were three volumes of fate records and seven beast-record realms. Name records defined who you were, body records defined what you were, and fate records defined what you were meant to become. Martial artists hunted beasts to seize their records, advancing through Listening, Borrowing, Exchanging, Casting an Aspect, Founding a City, Changing Fate, and Sealing Heaven. A hound record could track prey, at the cost of no longer recognizing your family. A mirror record could copy techniques, at the cost of forgetting yourself. A human record could copy identities, at the cost of losing your own. The more you relied on alien beasts, the less human you became. Shen Jin had spent three years moving corpses at the City Burial Bureau. His fate record had been hollowed out, leaving only a blank page. He could fuse multiple beast records and borrow the strength someone had possessed during the final three seconds of their life. But each time he used this power, the abyss gave birth to a burial of the future, inheriting his strength and eventually forming an army with one goal: to kill him. Because Shen Jin was the one who had stolen their lives. The City Defense Bureau was hunting him. The Fate Records Institute was erasing him. The Nine Royal Courts were watching him from the shadows. The only clue his mother had left him was this: You were not born to me. You are the future that was severed three hundred years ago.