Time passed in silence.
Keshav was two now. Though his limbs were still small, they moved with unusual precision. He could walk with balance, climb with ease, and mimic speech faster than the other children. Still, he remained quiet. Observant. Watching.
Inside, he was waiting.
Waiting for the world to reveal its rules.
Waiting for himself to understand what he had become.
The Hunger
It was always there.
Not the hunger of the belly—though food disappeared faster than his mother could prepare it—but a deeper hunger. A pull. The desire for something he couldn't name, a kind of gnawing emptiness inside his bones.
He discovered it by accident.
One morning, while hiding behind a pile of spirit herbs in the garden, Keshav watched a young cultivator from the noble family practice sword forms. The teenager's blade shimmered faintly with spiritual energy—raw, focused, elegant.
As the cultivator swung downward, the sword sliced the air itself, releasing a thin arc of qi that lanced through the soil, scattering petals and dust. Keshav stared, mouth parted, eyes locked onto the fading trail of energy.
Then he felt it.
The hunger surged.
Before he could stop himself, his body pulled—not physically, but spiritually. The energy residue from the sword slash twisted, broke apart, and was drawn into him, invisible threads of light pulled like smoke into a vacuum.
The cultivator paused, frowning.
"…Was that fluctuation from my own qi?" he muttered. "Did I make a mistake?"
Keshav ducked out of sight, heart racing. He didn't understand what he had just done. But it felt… good. Satisfying. Necessary.
His body had devoured the energy without permission, without effort.
But it wasn't cultivation—not in the way this world defined it.
It was consumption.
That night, his temperature soared.
Sweat soaked the straw bedding, and his skin glowed faintly under moonlight. His mother panicked, cradling his burning body, calling for help. An old healer came from the outer district, sniffed some herbs, shook his head.
"No sickness I know. But look at him… his pulse is too strong. His body's fighting something… or maybe growing too fast."
They dosed him with cooling teas, crushed spirit mint, and grounding powders.
The fever lasted three days.
When it broke, Keshav was taller. His eyes had changed too—no longer dull brown, but a strange amber shade with flickers of gold when they caught the light.
He began to see it.
Not always, and not clearly—but enough. In quiet moments, when no one was looking, the world shimmered with veins of invisible current. Faint streams of spirit qi drifting through trees, coiling in herbs, pulsing from cultivators like steam from a boiling pot.
Most people were blind to it. Even the low-level cultivators in the estate could only feel energy, not visualize it. But Keshav—he saw threads. Shapes. Colors.
He didn't understand the patterns, but instinct told him they mattered.
When he sat under a willow tree where the energy flowed brightest, his skin tingled. When he held a discarded herb root that glowed faintly blue, his bones ached with joy.
His body was a sponge, but more than that—it changed what it absorbed.
The noble family, the Jinhai Clan, never paid him much attention. He was a servant's child—destined to follow his parents in weeding spirit grass or washing bloodstained robes of young warriors.
But there were murmurs.
Servant boys his age still crawled or barely stood, yet Keshav climbed trees, stacked stones, and never got tired. His speech was careful, almost adult-like.
"Strange one, that boy," muttered the garden master. "Eyes too sharp. Not natural."
And then there were the animals.
Cats avoided him. Dogs whimpered and backed away. Birds watched him with tilted heads, as if sensing something buried under his skin. Only the old orchard turtle—a massive beast used to fertilize spirit fruit—would let him climb on its shell and rest under the sun.
Despite his strength, Keshav was alone.
Other children whispered about him. "He doesn't smile." "He never cries." "He talks like an old man."
He didn't belong among them.
But neither did he belong among cultivators. Not yet.
He often stared into his reflection in a water basin, wondering what he truly was. Not human. Not cultivator. Not child.
His only comfort was his mother's lullabies and the warm shell of the orchard turtle.
One night, he meditated beneath the willow tree.
He hadn't learned to cultivate, not formally. No one would teach a servant's child with "chaotic meridians." But he tried anyway. He breathed, followed the rhythm of the wind, listened to the water trickling from a distant bamboo pipe.
And for the first time, he heard it.
Not a voice exactly—but a feeling.
A whisper in the deepest parts of his body.
"More. Feed. Evolve."
He opened his eyes.
The willow's leaves were glowing.