Where the Sun Never Reaches

Scoring 487 on his second mock exam, Jiang Qian is destined for a second-tier university. Then he hears *The Heavenly Questions*. Under the corridor's fluorescent lights, which never touch the ground, a line explodes in his mind: "Where the sun never reaches, how does the Candle Dragon illuminate?" He thinks he’s going insane. Until an old man hands him a tablet displaying a world map lit with four million points—the world's awakened ones. Their sequences derive from their nations' mythologies: Greeks draw from Olympus, Norse from the Aesir, and Chinese from everything spanning the *Classic of Mountains and Seas* to the *Songs of Chu*. Jiang Qian is the only one marked by *The Heavenly Questions* with both a starting point and an end point—beginning at the Mountain Spirit, ending at the Supreme Eastern One. No one has ever walked the path between. Fall, and you're assimilated by divinity into a beast. Or you remain frozen in place forever.