Mending the Heavenly Dao

You've been counting for a long time.

You can't remember when you started, or how many rounds you've counted before.

All you know is that the people you know are being crossed off the ledger, one by one.

You ask around, but everyone says that person never existed. Only you remember them.

You look down at your hand. That thread has grown shorter again.

The last person to be crossed off said only one thing before they left: "Don't come in tomorrow."

You count how many turns are left before it's your own?

Shen Lian arrives in this eerie cultivation world, a place "patched up" with seams, and becomes a lowly cook who could be erased as a patch at any moment.

Fortunately, he can see the threads of fate: the lifelines of the living, the severed threads of the dead, and the enormous rift in the sky.

On the twenty-eighth day of the twelfth lunar month, the steward hands him an extra New Year's gift and sentences him to death.

Surrounded by red and white fiends as far as the eye can see, twenty-three people wait to die.

Shen Lian silently picks up his woodcutter's cleaver.

Cut an eerie thread, and he can seize vitality. But every person he saves shortens his own lifeline.

If these rules demand my death, then I'll sever every seam in the heavens!