No Grain, No Dao

Eleven thousand years ago, heaven and earth split apart. The sages stitched the firmament together with sealed seed-patterns and established the system of Dao Seeds. Those who possessed a seed entered the Higher Academy; those without one farmed the earth for generations. Their fates were recorded in official registers, and once the final stroke was written, they could never be changed.

The Seedless Village lay in a land of dregs where the patterns seeped through. Pattern mist hugged the ground, heaven and earth often dozed, and strange phenomena were commonplace. But getting registered meant certain doom.

The youth Su He learned to discern scattered patterns and their paths. The gray-white threads of mist that everyone else avoided always seemed to circle around him.

From the strange stroke at the Seed-Illumination Ceremony, where "ink came before light," to the missing stroke in the character for "seed" at the foot of the academy wall, and the old altar sealed off in the back hills...

Following each pattern, he dug deeper and uncovered texts that had been altered, eras that had been erased, and the truth of the Great Dao, monopolized for ten thousand years.

It turned out that what people called fate was merely a patch applied by their predecessors, and being seedless meant having one's ability to perceive the Dao castrated.

He sought neither to claim the Great Dao for himself nor to defy heaven and become a god. He only wanted thousands upon thousands of seedlings to grow in seedless soil.