Editing the Heavenly Dao: You Survive Tribulations While I Tweak the Settings

While cultivators across the city trembled beneath the tribulation lightning, Chen Jin saw the Heavenly Dao's draft in the surveillance footage of the museum storeroom.

Put simply, it was a set of rules written by a higher-dimensional civilization. Heavenly tribulations weren't Heaven's wrath, but scheduled inspections: lightning tribulations were purges, inner demons were scans, and ascension was deregistration. The venerable Xuantian Ancestor, who had dominated the world for three thousand years, was erased in front of everyone over a single line: "Energy output limit: zero." No one even remembered he had ever existed.

Chen Jin was a night-shift restorer at the Yunjiang City Museum, and the only exception to these rules. He watched on the surveillance monitors as Old Fan, who had offered him a cigarette that very day, faded into nothing in three seconds. "Overdue stay. Failed to deregister on time." His name vanished from every document, and Chen Jin was the only one in the entire museum who remembered him.

He could read the red corrections suspended in the air. When one of those lines came crashing down on him, marked "Deregister. Execute immediately," he didn't run. He traced the stroke of the annotation with his fingertip and changed "immediately" to "tomorrow morning."

From then on, he squared accounts with the gray-clad revisers from across the street, changing times, locations, and targets until every law of Heaven fell silent in his hands. Following the deregistration quotas, he investigated from the streets and alleys of the city all the way to the coordinates of Xu Fu's voyage east, and then onward to the entire sea of stars.

There was always someone standing behind him, too. Xu Qingzhao, a restorer of ancient texts, upheld the rule "Where the scrolls remain, so do I," lighting lamps and unrolling volumes for him. He shielded her from the unseen blades. Neither of the two who remembered each other intended to let go first.

If fate is nothing more than a set of parameters waiting to be changed, then why can't I be the one holding the pen?