Eternal Traits

In this world, everyone is born with traits.

Some have [Divine Strength], some have [Heavenly Eyes], and some have [Unfailing Memory].

When Chen Yan turned sixteen, not a single one of the nine grooves on the Trait-Testing Stone lit up.

The ancestral hall fell silent for three breaths. Then the clan leader said two words: “Struck from the rolls.”

No one knew that the person inside this body had once been called Shen Wujiu.

He had spent forty years inspecting traits at the Trait Pavilion, yet never fitted one onto himself. He had seen people fit the wrong ones and rot into empty shells in three years.

He could tell at a glance which traits were useless, which were treasures, and which were traps planted by others.

On the day he was driven from the ancestral hall, Chen Yan went to the pit behind the mountain where discarded traits were dumped. He crouched down and reached inside.

At the bottom lay centuries of broken refuse cast off by the Chen clan. In Chen Yan’s eyes, it was a pit full of divine gear.

While everyone else cultivated with all their might, Chen Yan put all his effort into finding bargains.

What you throw away as trash are the pieces that make up divine gear.

Later, Chen Yan slaughtered his way through the Luoxia Sect and headed north with a woman carrying other people’s traits on her back.

Beyond the boundary marker, the main road came to an end.

In the alkaline fields of the northern wasteland, a group of people had no traits and no names. The official register listed only their stations: stove, card.

There, Chen Yan learned another trade: keeping accounts for the nameless and recording the days for things that were never entered into the register.

Only once something is recorded can it be said to have lived.

There was just one trait Chen Yan could not see through.

It had no name, needed neither food nor drink, and stirred ever so slightly only when someone fitted a trait.

Only later did he learn that it was waiting.