The Library of Sundered Scrolls was a place of suspended time. Located in the northern spire of the Iron-Thorn complex, it was a vertical labyrinth of cedar shelves, each one reinforced with protective runes to prevent the dense Qi of the mountain from rotting the parchment. The air here was dry, smelling of old ink, dust, and the faint, sweet scent of preservation oils.
Wei Chen walked through the aisles alone. Elder Jiro, had granted him access under the watchful eyes of four silent sentries. To the guards, Wei Chen looked like a blind man lost in a forest of paper. To Wei Chen, the library was a physical map of the world's ignorance.
He did not read with his eyes. He ran his fingers along the spines of the scrolls, listening to the vibration of the wood and the weight of the ink. Information, like everything else, had a frequency.
From a series of star-charts etched into heavy vellum, Wei Chen reconstructed the world they currently occupied. They were on the planet Eos-Prime, the largest terrestrial body in the Seventy-Two Lower Planes.
Eos-Prime was a world of "Heavy Reality." Unlike the Wastes, which were a thin, dying crust on the edge of the void, this planet was a sprawling landscape of jagged continents and spirit-saturated oceans. It served as a massive "Filter" for the hierarchy above.
Wei Chen felt the shape of the continent they were on, The Iron-Thorn sect. It was one of twelve great Sect-states that carved the world into bloody territories. The Iron-Thorn was a mid-tier power, rising quickly because of Thorne's aggressive consolidation of spirit-veins.
Deep in the restricted history of the "Great Descents," Wei Chen found a fragment of a record.
It was a redacted entry regarding a "Celestial Fall" nearly twenty years ago. The text described a meteor of white and black light that struck the Wastes, followed by a brief, violent skirmish between "Foreign Wills" that left a hundred-mile crater of glass.
Wei Chen's fingers lingered on the page. The "Foreign Wills" were his mother's pursuers—the agents of the Yin and Yang lineages who had chased her into the mud of the Lower Realms. She had died to turn that glass into salt, to hide him in the one place where their cosmic senses would be blinded by the density of the earth.
He didn't feel rage. He felt the weight of her choice—a queen who chose to become a ghost so her son could be a man.