The Nine Vaults Continent

A single landmass whose people do not know a larger sky hangs above — the lid cosmology in its purest form.

• Lu ChenCharacter

  A village boy branded a "dead root" who is in truth the sealed heir of the erased Lu Clan, and the bearer of the Hollow Lantern — the relic that lets him name any technique's flaw at the cost of ageing his own soul.

• The Hollow LanternArtifact

  A relic holding the soul-ash of a dead immortal, which lets its bearer name the flaw in any technique and drink fragments of a vanished life — power whose price is measured in the years of the bearer's own soul.

• Universe: The Nine Vaults ContinentUniverse

  A single landmass whose people do not know a larger sky hangs above them — the clearest in-world statement of the Loom's cruelest law, that a sky can be a lid and the world beneath it farmed.