The world was drowned in darkness.
Not the soft, gentle dark of night — but a suffocating black, where even the memory of light felt like a lie.
In the center of that emptiness, the small child stepped forward. His face was pale, eyes lost — confusion and desperation mixing into something fragile… something on the edge of breaking.
He set the lotus-shaped object down.
And the darkness shattered.
Light roared out — not light like the sun, but something infinitely sharper, older. If two suns had hung in the sky, they would have looked like dying embers compared to this blaze. It was the kind of brilliance that stripped shadows from the soul, leaving nothing hidden.
Far away, on a jagged mountain within a forbidden sect, a figure in dark robes froze… then laughed.
The sound was wrong — too deep, too joyous, too cruel.
> "If it's here… if that thing has been brought into this world," he whispered,
"then the end is closer than anyone dreams."
A second man stepped from the shadows.
> "Brother… have you found him?"
"I have," the devilish figure replied. "The boy. The day we spoke of… it's nearer than ever."
---
Sunny did not see the lotus. He couldn't.
But the moment it was placed, something moved inside him — something ancient, massive, and coiled in silence.
This… thing was inside his body. And it was alive.
> "Whatever it is… I'm not strong enough to even look at it. But it's coming. I can feel it."
A hand gripped his shoulder.
> "Sunny. Awake, bro."
The haze lifted. He looked up, breath ragged, and saw Shen Luò watching him.
> "Tell me… whatever's happening… there must be a reason.
A reason someone killed an emperor.
There's something, isn't there?"
Shen Luò's gaze lingered, unreadable. For a long time, he said nothing.
In his mind, he weighed the truth — the dangerous, world-shifting truth — against the gold coins Sunny had paid him.
If I refuse to speak… will he cancel the contract?
He exhaled slowly, like a man preparing to walk into a storm.
> "Adam…" Shen said at last, his voice low as a coming tide,
"Adam is coming."
Sunny's heartbeat quickened. The thing inside him pulsed once — as if acknowledging the name. His mind flashed back, not to Adam, but to whispers he'd once overheard in a smoky tavern… and curses carved into stone in forgotten ruins: The White Ancestor.
---
Shen's voice lowered further.
> "He was no Silence… yet his age was called the Golden Age."
As Shen spoke, the air around Sunny seemed to warp. Shadows in the room shifted like they were being pulled toward a figure that wasn't really there — a tall man in flowing white, a folding fan in hand, hair bound with a jade pin.
His movements were unhurried, his eyes half-lidded as though nothing in the world could surprise him — yet in those same eyes burned the kind of mind that could measure empires.
> "They say he once stood against a Silence… and survived.
Not by strength alone — but because even the proud must clasp hands with the despised when the profit is great enough."
Sunny saw flashes — the White Ancestor standing across a battlefield from a shadow-clad figure. No killing blow struck. Only a slow, mutual turn away, as if both knew this was not the day to end each other.
> "But when his usefulness ended… the Silence moved to erase him."
Another flash — the White Ancestor closing his fan, smiling faintly.
A glint of something in his hand, so strange Sunny's mind slid away from it.
> "That day, he revealed a weapon no one — not even the Silence — had known he possessed."
The vision tore open. A soundless explosion.
The sky itself bent, stars dimmed, and Sunny felt his skin crawl as if the blast could still reach him.
> "If it had struck the mortal world… an entire sun would have been undone."
And then — nothing. The man in white was gone.
---
Shen's tone grew almost reluctant, as if speaking this much was dangerous.
> "Some say he mastered a rebirth technique… others that he split his inheritance into three pieces, scattering them across the world.
Each piece could make its wielder unstoppable… but the inheritance will not suffer unworthy hands.
Even with the key… you may not be allowed to touch it."
The shadows eased. The vision faded. Sunny was left staring at Shen Luò, pulse still racing.
The White Ancestor's folding fan lingered in his mind like a ghost.