Dawn in Huashan Village
It was still dark when Tianming woke. Not the darkness of night, but that peculiar dimness that came just before dawn in Huashan Village, a pallid, weightless grey that seeped through the slats of the old wooden shutters and settled like mist over the world. It was the kind of light that made you feel like you had never really woken, like your dreams might still be trailing behind your eyes.
And what a dream it had been. Flames, crimson and violet, licked the sky like the tongues of old gods. A palace of obsidian stone crumbled in silence as if it had died long before it fell. On its throne, a figure draped in robes that shimmered like constellations turned to face him. Tianming could not see the emperor's face, only the eyes, which blazed like twin stars. The figure reached toward him, not with a hand, but with something deeper. A whisper echoed inside his skull: "Your blood remembers."
He sat up, breathless. The fire was gone, and so was the palace. The thatched roof of his home stared down at him, patched in too many places to count. The old mat he slept on crackled beneath him, worn thin by years of poverty and cold mountain nights. His heart still pounded, though the silence of morning had returned.
He wiped his face with a threadbare sleeve. He did not speak of dreams. In Huashan Village, no one did. Dreams were indulgences, luxuries reserved for cultivators of higher realms, for city-born prodigies, or monks secluded in star-viewing towers. Here, in this nowhere-village beneath a never-blue sky, survival was more important than omens.
Tianming pulled aside the curtain and stepped out into the grey. Huashan Village clung to the mountainside like an old wound, small, quiet, and easily forgotten. Its people rose with the mist and slept before the stars emerged. The soil was poor, the winters long, and the nearest sect outpost was three valleys away. Most here lived and died without ever forming a single spiritual core.
Tianming was seventeen, and he had yet to break through the Third Layer of Body Tempering. It was shameful. At least to him. Others didn't speak it aloud, not out of kindness, but resignation. His father had been a hunter, not a cultivator. His mother, a weaver of ghostsilk who died when Tianming was five. No legacy, no technique manuals, no bloodline gifts. Only a surname, Li, that once might have meant something, and a wooden pendant with a sigil no one could recognize.
Still, each morning he practiced. He had to. Even if it was hopeless. He walked past the other huts, some still shuttered, others faintly glowing with the orange light of cookfires. Children were already fetching water. Old men sharpened sickles for fields that barely grew rootweed. A dog barked at a passing crow. Life continued, stubbornly, like a flame under wet wood.
At the edge of the village, just before the forestline, a worn platform made of stone and cracked jade stood half-buried in vines. No one remembered who built it. Some said it was once a teleportation dais, others that it had belonged to a wandering cultivator who died meditating under the rain. Tianming knelt there every day.
He removed his tunic, exposing a lean body marred with bruises and faint scars, the result of his self-training. He sat cross-legged and closed his eyes, inhaling the mountain air. It was sharp, but pure. Inhale. Cycle through the meridians. Exhale. Find the core. The same routine. The same stubborn blockage. Like trying to breathe through stone.
The Qi in Huashan was thin, barely enough to nourish moss, let alone a human core. But Tianming didn't blame the mountain. He blamed himself. He remembered how Liu Mei, two years his junior, had entered the Third Layer with ease. Her parents had gifted her a low-grade spirit pearl on her twelfth birthday. Tianming had received a hand-me-down robe and a wooden training sword with a cracked hilt.
Still, he persisted. He always did. Because some strange part of him believed there was something inside him, not talent, not luck, but a kind of hidden ember waiting for the right breath to flare. And because of the dream. It wasn't the first time he'd seen that burning palace. The first had been when he was eight. The next, when he was twelve. It came once every few years, always just as vivid, always with the same whisper: "Your blood remembers."
But what did it remember? A past life? A forgotten bloodline? The villagers scoffed at such ideas. But Tianming wondered. The cultivation books he'd begged from the old merchant at Spring Market spoke of ancient reincarnations, lost cores, soul echoes. He had read each one a hundred times, even if half the characters were archaic. Some nights, he copied them by firelight until his fingers cramped, just to feel the words sink into him. If I am nothing, then let me become something by will. That was the vow he whispered each dawn.
But today, something shifted. As he cycled his Qi, there was a faint resistance, not the usual blockage, but a different pressure, like a door with no handle slowly cracking open. It came from deep in his spine and threaded up toward his heart. He opened his eyes. The sky had lightened, but only slightly. Birds did not yet sing. But the wind, the wind was warm. Unnatural.
Tianming rose, unsure if he had imagined it. He turned toward the village and saw something he could not explain. On the elder's hut, the one with the dragonbone chimes that never moved, the chimes were swaying. Slowly. As if stirred by breath, not breeze. And for the briefest moment, he felt it again, that presence. Not in the dream, but here, awake. A sense that something vast had taken notice of him. That he had been seen.
Then it was gone. The mountain was quiet. The chimes were still. Tianming exhaled. His hands trembled. He looked down at his wooden pendant. The sigil carved into it shimmered, just for a heartbeat, then faded.
Morning Training Failure
The training ground of Huashan Village was nothing more than a circular clearing of packed earth and worn stone, surrounded by crooked bamboo fences and a ring of ancient cypress trees that whispered when the wind passed. Mist still clung to the soil, curling around the ankles of barefoot children, evaporating with each shaft of pale sunlight that pierced the ever-present grey canopy above. The morning air tasted of cold dew and faint bitterness, like dried herbs steeped in regret.
Tianming stood at the edge of the circle, eyes fixed on the line of cultivators-in-training before him. His hands, calloused yet trembling, gripped the hilt of his wooden practice sword. The dream of fire still lingered behind his eyes, the cracked golden throne, the silent figures kneeling in ash, and the soundless scream of a man whose face he could not see. But now, here, the only fire was the warmth of breath and effort, the kind earned by those who woke before dawn to chase a dream they barely understood.
"Begin the Fifth Breathing Sequence," Elder Fang's voice cut through the fog like a blade honed by repetition. "With intention, not haste."
Tianming exhaled slowly, drawing his breath through the lower dantian as he'd been taught. A pale, nearly invisible wisp of spiritual qi curled from the soles of his feet into his meridians, at least, it was supposed to. But as always, the sensation stopped just below his knees, dissolving into a numb tingling, like snow refusing to melt. He grit his teeth. Not again.
Around him, the others moved in quiet unison, palms turning in synchrony with the pulse of their breaths. Jiao Lin, the son of the village smith, was already forming a faint aura of blue light around his wrists. Even Little Mei, barely nine and missing two front teeth, had managed to summon a thread of spiritual essence around her fingers. Tianming could feel the difference. It was like standing in a river but never getting wet.
He tried again. Breathing deeper, more forcefully, guiding his thoughts into stillness the way Elder Fang had said. But instead of rising, the qi within him scattered. It felt fractured, like cracked porcelain trying to hold water. Something was wrong, not with the technique, but with him. He had felt it since he was six. As if the world had forgotten to plant the seed of cultivation in his body.
"Stop!" Elder Fang barked. "Open your eyes." The circle froze. Birds scattered from the trees. Elder Fang's gaze swept across the group, stopping squarely on Tianming. "You. Step forward."
Tianming obeyed, legs stiff. The silence behind him was not cruel, but pitying. Even the wind stilled as if waiting to see whether he would break again. Elder Fang folded his arms, his expression unreadable. His robes were old and patched, but the quiet pressure he emitted marked him as the only Foundation Stage cultivator in the village. Not powerful by world standards, but to Huashan, he was a pillar.
"Your breathing lacks harmony. Your meridians are blocked." Elder Fang didn't raise his voice. That made it worse. "At your age, most have begun channeling qi through at least three minor circuits. You haven't opened even one."
Tianming swallowed, shame welling in his chest like bile. "I try every day, Elder."
"I know you do." Elder Fang's eyes softened slightly. "That is why it is painful to watch."
Laughter would have been easier to bear than this silence. "I," Tianming began, but no words came that didn't taste like excuse. Elder Fang turned away, sparing him the mercy of dismissal. "That is enough for today."
As the group bowed and began to disperse, Tianming remained standing, wooden sword limp in his hand. Jiao Lin passed by, his aura already fading from his skin. He gave Tianming a nod, not mockery, just resignation. "Maybe next time." Maybe. Or maybe not.
By the time the others had left, Tianming was alone on the training ground. The mist had lifted, revealing the cracked outlines of the mountain path beyond the trees. Birds sang cautiously in the canopy, as if uncertain whether joy was permitted under the grey sky. He sat cross-legged in the dirt, letting the cold sink into his bones. The wooden sword lay beside him, untouched.
There had to be a way. He wasn't cursed. He wasn't broken. Was he? He closed his eyes and tried again, slow breath in, imagining the breath traveling through his body, coaxing the meridians to open like morning flowers to light. Nothing. Just silence. No qi. No warmth. No proof that he was anything more than a boy pretending to be part of a world that had left him behind.
Why can I see the dream, but not cultivate? The thought echoed through him like a bell struck underwater. The dream had come again last night. The burning throne. The black feathers falling like snow. The voice that was not a voice, speaking from the flames: "Return what was forgotten." He had told no one. Not even his grandfather, who once whispered tales of emperors reborn and stars with names that bled.
"Still trying?" a voice called from the edge of the trees. It was Lianhua. Tianming opened his eyes to see her stepping into the clearing, her raven-dark hair tied in a loose braid, her training robe slightly dusted with ash from the kiln. Her family made talismans from sacred clay, inscribing them with protective seals. She was one of the best cultivators in the village, already channeling spiritual fire by sixteen.
"I saw the way you were breathing," she said, sitting beside him. "You're trying too hard."
"I have to."
She glanced at him. "That's the problem."
Tianming looked away. "Easy for you to say. You've already reached the Third Layer."
"And it didn't come easily," she said, voice firm. "I failed more than you know."
He shook his head. "At least you can fail. I can't even begin."
She didn't reply right away. Instead, she pulled a small talisman from her robe, red paper folded around a dried petal, and handed it to him. "Protection seal. It's weak, but it listens better than some elders," she said with a smile that didn't quite reach her eyes. "It won't fix your meridians. But maybe it'll remind you that not everything is measured by qi."
Tianming took it silently. The petal inside was warm. "Thanks."
She stood. "Don't give up. Not yet." As she left, he remained seated, watching the wind toy with the edge of the talisman in his hand.
The sky darkened slightly, though it was only mid-morning. A passing shadow. A flicker of something vast far above the clouds, gone before it could be named. Tianming didn't see it. But the ground beneath him thrummed faintly, like a drumbeat too deep to hear with ears. And deep within his body, beneath blocked meridians, beneath blood and bone and breath, something shifted. A memory not his own. A coil of red light, buried and forgotten, stirred once. And went still. For now.
Village Life and Bonds
The morning haze had not yet lifted from the cobbled paths of Huashan Village when Tianming wandered through its gently stirring heart, the village market. The sky remained a stubborn grey, as if reluctant to bless the land with either rain or light. In this subdued dawn, the colors of the world felt muted, ochre clay, ash-washed rooftops, and tired greens of late spring, and yet, to Tianming, it was still beautiful in a way that made his chest ache. Not because it was perfect, but because it was familiar.
He passed by a crooked stone lantern covered in moss, one of the many relics from an older time no one quite remembered. Children were chasing a feathered wheel down the slope, their laughter echoing off the old walls like ghost bells, their voices too young to carry burdens. Tianming exhaled softly. His body was sore from the morning training, or more accurately, from his repeated failure in it. But here in the bustle of the village, the sting of comparison faded just a little. There were no spiritual veins to channel here, no masters to disappoint. Just the rhythm of daily life, slow and enduring.
He turned a corner into the main square and found the stalls already half-open. The smell of boiled millet, sharp ginger, and roasted chestnuts laced the air, earthy and comforting. "Tianming!" A rasping voice pulled him from his thoughts. An old man waved from beneath the thatched awning of a medicinal stall, a crooked wooden frame draped in yellow cloth and tied together with red string talismans. Elder Shen, the village's herbalist, stood hunched but alert, his silver beard braided into a small knot at his throat.
"You're early today," Tianming greeted, stepping forward.
The elder chuckled. "The roots wake before we do. Besides, I need your hands, not your greetings. Help me with these crates before my bones become dust."
Tianming smiled and moved to lift the small wooden boxes filled with dried mountain herbs, snowvine, guhua bark, and the bitter yangthorn leaves that smelled like sorrow. As he carried them into the elder's shop, he noticed a loose scroll near the counter, an old diagram of meridian lines drawn in faded red ink.
"You studying again?" he asked, half-curious.
"Always." Shen leaned in close. "The body hides more secrets than the stars. Yours especially, boy. I see your pulse. It beats like something remembering itself."
Tianming blinked. "That doesn't sound like a good thing."
The elder only grinned, revealing two missing teeth. "Neither good nor bad. Just old. Like you were shaped by something deeper than the womb. Something before."
Tianming had heard this kind of talk before. The villagers were kind, yes, but they also loved stories. Some whispered that Tianming had survived a fire when he was a baby, a fire that claimed an entire clan from the capital. Others said he was born under a blood moon and left at the edge of the village with silver ash in his lungs. All half-truths. All without answers. But he didn't mind. Not really. In Huashan, people didn't need reasons to care for one another. They just did.
After helping Elder Shen arrange the display, Tianming continued down the lane, weaving through the modest crowd. A merchant from the next valley was showing off cheap trinkets made of spirit-glass, the kind that flickered with faint energy when held under moonlight. A little girl gasped when a charm lit up in her hand. Tianming stopped to watch, his gaze warm. He recognized her, Lian'er, the daughter of the potter and the weaver. She'd once brought him rice cakes on the eve of the Cold Moon Festival because she said he looked "lonely."
"Brother Ming!" she called, spotting him. He knelt beside her, smiling. "That's a fine charm you've got. What does it do?"
"It glows when you're sad," she said, proudly holding it up. "But only a little. That means I'm only a little sad today."
He touched the charm lightly. It flickered pale blue. "Then I hope it glows less tomorrow."
Her eyes sparkled. "You're always sad, but you still smile. That's magic too." She skipped away before he could reply. Tianming rose slowly. Her words lingered.
Later that morning, he helped the butcher's son chop firewood. Then repaired a broken waterwheel paddle for the miller. At midday, he sat under the willow by the stream with Auntie Mu, the blind storyteller, who said she could "hear truth better than most could see lies." She fed the koi and spoke of ancient cultivators whose blood burned with starlight and sorrow.
"The core remembers, child," she told him. "Even if the mind forgets."
"What core?" he asked, half-laughing.
She turned her sightless eyes toward him. "The blood one. The one they tried to erase from heaven." Her words sent a chill down his spine.
By the time the sun began its slow descent, still hidden behind its curtain of cloud, Tianming had worn the day like a balm. The ache of the morning's failure had dulled into something bearable. Here, amidst baskets of spring onions and the creaking of cart wheels, he was not the weakest cultivator in the village. He was just Tianming, the boy who helped carry things, who listened to the stories, who remembered the names of the dead during winter rites.
As he walked back toward the small courtyard house he shared with the old calligrapher Master Lu, the wind picked up slightly. Leaves scattered like whispers. Somewhere behind the hills, thunder murmured without conviction. He looked up. The sky remained grey. But he could almost imagine, just for a moment, that something moved beyond it. A shape. A fire. A palace. A name he did not yet know, etched in crimson. He shook the thought away. Just tired, he told himself. Just sore muscles and too much air.
Back at home, Master Lu had already started heating tea over the old stove. "You look like a man who's fought a bear," the elder quipped.
"Only my own spirit," Tianming muttered, sitting down with a groan.
"That's the most dangerous beast," Lu replied. "But if you survive it, you'll tame anything else."
The tea was bitter. Ground from a root that grew only where lightning struck. Tianming drank it slowly, letting the warmth unfurl in his chest. "I failed again today," he said finally. "At the training grounds."
"You'll fail again tomorrow," Lu answered, without cruelty. "Until you don't."
Tianming looked at him, startled. The old man met his gaze. "The path is long. Some sprint. Some crawl. Some are pulled by ghosts and memories they don't yet understand. It doesn't matter. You walk it."
Outside, the village began to dim as lanterns were lit, each flame a gentle defiance against the sky's indifference. Tianming leaned back. Despite everything, the weak core, the unshaped future, the lingering dreams of a burning palace, something inside him stirred. Not strength. Not yet. But maybe the beginning of direction. Or perhaps the first echo of something older than direction.
The Strange Symptoms
Under a grey sky, the blood remembers what the mind cannot.
The wind had begun to shift. Where the morning had offered a dull sort of stillness, like breath held in a dying room, the afternoon came with a subtle unease. It wasn't in the sky, which remained the same pale expanse of ashen clouds. Nor in the village, whose rhythms pulsed with the familiar noise of living: children chasing shadows, traders haggling over bruised root-lotus, and smoke curling from clay ovens.
It was inside Tianming.
He first noticed it as he sat beneath the crooked almond tree near the old shrine, helping Elder Shen grind dried star-anise for the village's nightly broth. The pestle trembled in his hand, a tiny quake that didn't come from fatigue. His heart stuttered once, then resumed, but slower, like it was listening for something that hadn't spoken in years.
"Boy?" Elder Shen's voice cracked like the bark he leaned against. "You alright?"
Tianming blinked. His fingers had turned white from gripping the pestle too hard. "I… Yes. Just a little lightheaded."
Shen squinted at him, the way elders do when they smell something spiritual in the air and aren't sure if it's auspicious or a warning. But he said nothing more. He merely handed Tianming a bamboo flask of jujube water and went back to whispering to the wind. Tianming drank deeply, but the unease didn't fade. If anything, it deepened.
By late afternoon, the dizziness had become a drumbeat behind his eyes. When he knelt to refill the temple's offering bowls, he saw the bronze ripples in the water shimmer with unnatural hues: crimson, violet, a flicker of gold. He blinked again. Just water. Just shadows. But his blood… It was burning. Not like fire. Not like fever. It was alive.
There was no other word for it. It flowed through him like it had remembered something that he hadn't. A rhythm older than his breath, older than this village, older than the fractured sun that watched from behind the cloudveil. Every pulse was a whisper. Every heartbeat a shiver of heat and forgotten name. "Drink. Rise. Return." The voice was not a voice, but it echoed in his marrow. Deep, vast, genderless. Not sound. Essence. He stumbled backward, knocking over the incense bowl. Ash scattered over the stone floor like dead snow.
He didn't tell anyone. That evening, he sat alone near the western edge of Huashan Village, where the mountains met the clouds and the fields gave way to crumbled pillars no one dared approach after nightfall. The fog rolled low across the earth, hiding the ruins like secrets. Tianming pressed a hand to his chest. It was still hot, just under the skin, beneath the bones. A coiled warmth. His Blood Core.
He barely understood what that meant. At sixteen, he hadn't awakened it properly. Most cultivators his age had already entered the First Circulation, channeling spirit qi through their meridians like streams through valley paths. Some even reached Second. He remained… stagnant. Fragile. "Broken lotus," they called him when they thought he couldn't hear. "Too kind for the path. Too soft for the climb."
And yet this fire inside him… Could it be awakening? No. This wasn't the proper way. There were rituals. Meditations. Spirit-pools. Masters who guided the channeling with incense and talismans and patience. Not… this. Not sudden heat. Not voices in the blood. He closed his eyes and breathed as his grandmother had taught him. "When the sky trembles, breathe from the earth. When your blood speaks, ask nothing… only listen."
And so he listened. And what he saw, not with his eyes but in the dark behind them, was not Huashan. He stood on steps made of molten gold, looking down on ten thousand bowing cultivators. His hands were not his hands: slender, pale, etched with sigils that glowed. His hair was tied in threads of obsidian and light. And behind him, a throne floated upon a sky of bleeding stars. Someone was dying in his arms. A woman. Eyes full of tears and a kingdom. "Promise me," she whispered. "You'll return…"
Then the vision shattered. He gasped, choking on breath that wasn't his. The world reeled. His own body returned, but it was damp with sweat, his nails biting into the cold dirt beneath him.
Later that night, Tianming lay on his woven mat, staring at the roof of his family's hut. The old wood moaned with the weight of time and damp. His grandmother had already fallen asleep beside the incense altar, breathing in her slow, rhythmic way. The air was thick. Outside, wind whispered through the cracks in the wall, carrying the scent of wet stone and something faintly metallic. Not blood, not quite. But memory. And silence.
He pressed a trembling hand to his chest again. The heat remained. Quiet now. Coiled. What was that vision? A past life? A dream from the heavens? A delusion born from desperation? But he remembered her face. The woman in gold. Her eyes. How they burned with both love and farewell. And he remembered his own voice, not this voice, but another, saying: "The Empire will not end with me. The blood remembers."
He turned to the wall and shut his eyes. Sleep did not come. Only the distant sound of thunder, far beyond the mountains, where the stars had once fallen.
Elder Shen's Concern
There are some winds that arrive before the storm, and some eyes that remember the storm before it returns.
The mist never truly left the village. It clung to the rooftops like a silent pact, whispered between the earth and sky, and drifted low across the stone paths with the languor of a forgotten prayer. Morning had long passed, but the clouds above remained heavy, stained the color of ash and memory. The sun was merely a rumor behind them, too weak to pierce the grey canopy.
Tianming sat alone at the edge of the training yard, legs dangling over the moss-slick stone ledge that overlooked the valley below. His hands trembled slightly, not from exhaustion, but from something deeper, something unnameable. There was still a faint warmth pulsing behind his ribcage, a strange echo of the sensation he'd felt earlier: heat in the blood, like fire beneath the skin. He tried not to think about it.
Behind him, a slow and deliberate tread approached. No cultivator's footfalls, not quiet like a hunter or swift like a warrior, but measured, familiar, and unmistakably human.
"Boy," came the voice, low and grizzled, "you've been staring at the fog like it owes you an answer."
Tianming stood quickly, turning to bow. "Elder Shen."
The old man raised a hand to wave the gesture away. His face, lined like ancient bark, wore that perpetual mix of tired amusement and wary wisdom that the villagers had come to rely on. "You missed the second round of morning drills," Elder Shen said. "Again."
"I wasn't feeling well."
"Hm." Elder Shen's eyes, the color of cold tea and tired years, studied Tianming with the sharpness of someone who had seen too many excuses and lived through too many wars to be fooled easily. He looked over the boy's face, his posture, the faint discoloration beneath his eyes. But instead of pressing, he merely lowered himself onto the ledge beside him with a quiet grunt.
Together, they stared into the valley. No words passed between them for a while. The wind moved gently across the grass, stirring old leaves and the smell of rain yet to come.
"You're not a liar, Tianming," Elder Shen said softly. "But you are hiding something."
Tianming tensed. "I don't know what it is. Honestly."
The elder tilted his head slightly. "Tell me."
Tianming hesitated. Part of him wanted to lie. To dismiss it as dizziness, as the strain of training or the air being too thin. But the other part, the part that still felt the heat in his veins, the part that had glimpsed something ancient in that one terrifying moment of disorientation, whispered that truth might already be outpacing denial.
"It started yesterday," Tianming said finally. "During meditation. I felt… something stir. Inside. Like my blood was boiling, but not from exertion. Like it wasn't even mine."
Elder Shen didn't react immediately. He rubbed his thumb along the edge of his cane, eyes narrowed at the horizon. "And today?"
"It came back. Stronger. My head swam, my skin felt tight. I thought I was going to faint, but I didn't. I just… saw something."
"What?"
Tianming's breath slowed. He closed his eyes. "A throne made of bone and jade. A hand reaching toward fire. A sky that bled."
The moment the words left his mouth, he felt foolish. He expected the elder to chuckle, to shake his head and dismiss it as poetic hallucination. But Elder Shen did not laugh. Instead, he sighed, a sound that came from a place far older than his voice, and rested both hands atop his cane.
"There are stirrings in the marrow of the world," he said quietly. "And some bones never forget how to ache."
Tianming turned to him, startled. "You believe me?"
"I've lived long enough to know when truth dresses itself in madness," the old man said. "And I've seen what it looks like when the blood remembers more than the mind does."
A crow passed overhead, its cry sharp and lonely, echoing off the stone. The fog shifted as if listening. Elder Shen continued, more to the wind than to the boy. "There are legacies that sleep not in books, but in blood. Histories buried not by time, but by necessity. And sometimes… sometimes they wake."
Tianming's voice was barely above a whisper. "You think something is waking in me?"
"I don't know yet," the elder replied. "But your blood speaks louder than your words, and I have seen too many storms begin with such silence."
He stood slowly. His legs cracked like old bamboo, but he moved with quiet authority. "Tianming, I want you to avoid meditation for the next three days."
"What? But—"
"Listen," Elder Shen said sharply, and for a moment his voice held the weight of command, the edge of someone who had once led men through death and fire. "Your body is shifting. But you must not force it. If you open a door before you're ready to walk through it, you may never come back."
Tianming lowered his head. "I understand."
"And… if anything strange happens again, visions, dreams, pain that doesn't belong to your body, you come to me. Not to anyone else."
Tianming hesitated. "Why only you?"
Elder Shen looked at him for a long moment. Then he said, softly: "Because not all the elders in this village have forgotten what lies beneath its soil."
The boy's eyes widened. But Elder Shen merely turned, his cane tapping the stones as he made his way back toward the heart of the village. He paused once, at the edge of the path, without turning.
"And Tianming," he said, "your kindness is a shield. But even the kindest of swords must one day remember its edge."
Then he was gone. Tianming sat in silence. The fog thickened. Somewhere beneath his skin, the heat pulsed again, subtle and rhythmic, like a forgotten drum. Not pain. Not power. Not yet. But something ancient. Something watching. And something waiting.
Evening Contemplation
The grey sky bled slowly into amber. Evening in Dalu Village was a hush wrapped in soft gold, the kind of quiet that didn't simply mean silence, but absence. Absence of burden, of weight, of the world beyond. Only the slow breath of the wind, the rustle of trees, and the distant clinking of pots in fading homes accompanied Tianming's solitary steps as he made his way to the hill that overlooked the rice paddies.
The villagers called it Guanyin Ridge, though there was no statue of the Bodhisattva there. Only an old, twisted pine that had grown slanted toward the west, like it had spent centuries trying to chase the sun but never caught it. Tianming sat beneath it now, arms wrapped around knees, gaze heavy with the kind of longing no youth his age should carry.
He watched as the light folded itself along the paddies, golden squares becoming sheets of glass, then quicksilver, then shadow. Beyond them, the silhouette of the forest stretched like a sleeping beast, ancient and unknowable. And above it all, the sky, always grey, always watching. He exhaled. It came out shaky.
Today had been… strange. He still felt the lingering heat in his veins, though dulled now, reduced to embers beneath the skin. The dizzy spell earlier had faded, but something deeper remained, a phantom weight behind his ribs, like something was curling awake within him. He clenched a fist, then let it fall.
"Am I… broken?" he whispered.
The pine didn't answer. Neither did the wind. He thought of the other boys in the village: Junbei, Yao, Han. All had passed the preliminary Qi Tempering test last spring. Even Mei, the blacksmith's daughter, was already being courted by a traveling cultivator from Black Hollow Sect. Everyone, it seemed, was moving. Becoming. Except him.
He remembered standing in the courtyard of the testing hall last year, the Elder's wrinkled hand on the measuring orb. The light barely flickered. "No affinity," they had said. "Just a dull vessel." He remembered the silence that followed. The way the villagers averted their eyes. The way his own father, before he left, had looked at him, like something unfinished. Unclaimed by heaven. Tianming buried his face into his knees.
It wasn't as if he hadn't tried. He rose before dawn each day, carried water from the well, split wood, helped Elder Shen with the drying herbs, practiced breath cultivation even though it gave him headaches and no reward. He was not lazy. He was not unwilling. He was just… ordinary.
But that wasn't the worst part. No, the worst part was the voice. Not a voice he heard, exactly. But a feeling, curled somewhere behind his thoughts. A kind of pressure that surfaced only when he was alone, quiet, still, like now. A whisper not in words, but in ache. It told him he was not meant to be this way. It told him he had forgotten something.
Sometimes, he would dream of fires. Of crowns. Of cities falling into the sea. His hands soaked in blood, and his eyes blind with starlight. But he would always wake up empty, his chest hollow with a longing he didn't understand. Tonight, that ache returned.
He looked up toward the sky. A single bird traced a lonely arc against the clouds. He followed its path until it vanished into the dusk. "What are you searching for?" he asked aloud.
The wind stirred the grass. A whisper of sound, like breath over ancient stone. He thought he heard a word in it, something not of this tongue. Something that did not belong to now. Tian…
He stood abruptly. His heart was pounding again, but not from fear. From recognition. "Who...?" he began. Nothing. Only the rustling branches, the scent of pine, the creaking of the tree above him like old bones shifting. He held out his hand. It was trembling again.
The blood in his veins pulsed with that strange warmth, not feverish, not painful, but alive. Like it had awoken from slumber and was trying to remember its shape. "Elder Shen said to rest," he muttered, trying to push the feeling away. "I'm just tired. That's all. Nothing more."
But he didn't believe it. Not really. Something was coming. Something was changing. He could feel it in the earth, in the air, in the pit of his chest where his breath kept catching as if something deeper wanted to rise. He looked once more toward the fading horizon.
"I don't know who I am," he whispered. "But I want to find out."
The words surprised him. Not because he hadn't thought them before, he had, countless times, but because tonight, they didn't feel like desperation. They felt like a vow.
The wind picked up slightly, tugging at his robe, carrying with it the faintest scent of smoke, not woodsmoke, but incense. Familiar, though he had no memory of it. Like temples he had never visited. Like wars he had never fought. Like names he had never spoken, but which had once belonged to him. He turned back toward the village.
Below, faint lanterns flickered in windows. Someone laughed. A dog barked. The world remained, unknowing. But within Tianming, something shifted. He did not know if he would awaken tomorrow as the same boy. But tonight, for the first time in months, he didn't feel like a failure. He felt like a question waiting to be answered.
And somewhere deep within the marrow of his forgotten blood, something pulsed in response. A memory. A promise. A core. Waiting.
The Ominous Night
The sky bled slowly into night, not with fire and gold as it once had in the tales of the old, but with a smudged charcoal that clung to the bones of the mountains. The grey that had ruled the day simply deepened, less a transformation, more a quiet suffocation. The villagers called it "cloud-thick dusk," a time when light forgot its own name, and shadows no longer needed torches to dance.
Tianming stood outside the thatched hut, his breath leaving faint plumes in the cooling air. His hands were buried in his sleeves, his posture still, but his mind churned beneath the surface like a storm waiting for permission to arrive. Something was wrong. He could feel it.
It was not a sound, not a shape, not a presence. Just… the absence of something that should have been. The village, always humming with gentle life, fires crackling, children chasing each other even after supper, the old muttering lullabies as they cleaned their pots, had grown too quiet. Even the dogs, usually howling at the moon, lay curled in tight knots, ears twitching to things only they could hear.
The dusk deepened into early night. Above, the clouds moved unnaturally fast, like silk pulled taut by invisible hands. No wind brushed Tianming's cheeks, and yet the trees swayed. The leaves rustled, but the grass remained motionless. It was a contradiction that made his skin crawl.
Behind him, the hut door creaked softly as Elder Shen stepped out. He carried an old lantern etched with calligraphy that no one in the village could read anymore, not even Shen, who only knew to refill the oil and never let its light go out.
"Tianming," the elder said, voice calm but edged with gravity. "Still outside?"
Tianming hesitated. "I couldn't sleep."
"Nor should you," Shen murmured. He didn't explain why. The lantern flickered between them, casting uncertain shadows that wavered too long after they should have stilled. The old man walked past him and held the lantern up toward the trees at the village's edge. "The air smells too clean tonight. As if something is trying to scrub away its own scent."
Tianming shivered. He didn't know if Elder Shen was speaking metaphorically or literally. With the old man, it was often both. Then, somewhere beyond the trees, a branch snapped. Too heavy. Too sharp. Too deliberate. Tianming's spine stiffened. His training from the outer sect, however incomplete, had taught him the difference between natural forest sounds and something else. That had been a footstep, not a deer.
Shen lowered the lantern, his eyes narrowing. "Go inside. Bar the windows."
"I can fight," Tianming said, too quickly.
"I know you want to." The elder's tone was not cruel, merely resigned. "But you are not ready, not for this."
Tianming clenched his fists. That feeling again, uselessness, the shame of watching danger circle those you love without the strength to lift a hand. Another sound came, this one closer, like a wet dragging noise. Followed by a silence even heavier than before. Lanternlight flickered. For a heartbeat, Tianming thought he saw something watching from the woods: a pair of eyes, not red, not glowing, but far worse. Eyes that were remembering him. And then they were gone.
"What was that?" Tianming whispered.
Elder Shen didn't answer immediately. He took a slow breath. "Old blood waking."
The words sent a chill down Tianming's spine, and somewhere in his chest, his heartbeat faltered. He had no idea what Shen meant, but the phrase coiled itself around his ribs like a snake made of memory. More noises now, but not from the woods—from the village. Screams? No. Not yet. Whispers. Low, broken, unintelligible. As if the houses themselves had begun muttering through their walls.
Tianming turned toward the square. An oil lamp burst with a soft pop, its flame snuffed instantly, as if offended by what it had seen. Then another. And another. The center of the village was going dark, house by house.
Shen placed the lantern between them. "Whatever happens," he said slowly, "do not go to the well."
"What? Why?"
"Because it will call you. And you are not strong enough to refuse."
The well. The old, sealed well that no one had used in years. The one Tianming had always passed on his way to the rice terraces without giving a second thought. Suddenly it loomed large in his mind, as if his very bones remembered something his conscious self had forgotten.
A dog howled. Not in fear, but in grief. Tianming stepped back toward the door. "Elder Shen, what's going on?"
But Shen's gaze was fixed far beyond the village. "Old oaths are breaking," he said, more to the night than to Tianming. "And the sky forgets how to lie."
The wind picked up at last, icy, unnatural. It came not from the mountains or the valley, but from below. From beneath. Tianming gasped as a sharp pain lanced through his chest, not deep, not fatal, but so precise that it felt like a key being turned. He dropped to one knee, coughing, and for a moment, his vision flickered.
In that flicker, he saw: A throne made of obsidian roots. A crown of blood floating above a headless body. A battlefield where names burned instead of corpses. A man with his face, older, regal, wounded, reaching toward the stars even as the heavens turned away.
Then he was back. Gasping. Kneeling. Human again.
"Tianming!" Shen reached for him, steadying his shoulders. "What did you see?"
Tianming's lips moved, but the words caught in his throat. "…Me. But not me."
Shen's expression darkened. "It's begun," he whispered. "Too soon."
The trees trembled. Far in the distance, a bell rang. Faint. Metallic. Impossible. There were no bells in the village. None that still worked. Tianming stood with effort. His legs shaky, but his spirit alight with something he couldn't name.
Shen met his gaze, and for the first time in all Tianming's life, the elder looked… afraid. "You must be hidden," Shen said. "If they find you now, it will all end before it begins."
"Who?" Tianming demanded. "What are you not telling me?"
Shen didn't answer. He turned toward the square, muttering in that forgotten script under his breath, casting wards with trembling fingers. Tianming looked up at the sky. The grey clouds had begun to part, not to reveal stars, but to unveil something moving beneath the firmament. A vast shape. Watching.
And behind it, behind the veil of this world, something ancient stirred, slowly, surely, drawn by the awakening of a Blood Core that had once silenced empires. Tonight, it would whisper again. And the world would shudder.
The village exhaled. It was the kind of night where even the stars dared not blink. A hush had fallen over the world, soft as the mist that curled like sleeping serpents between the wooden stilts of the homes. Chimneys no longer smoked. The lanterns, one by one, dimmed into exhausted glows. Children had long since been ushered to bed, their laughter replaced by the hush of wind threading through the grey boughs of the ghostwillow trees.
Tianming stood alone outside the hut, barefoot on the cool dirt path, staring into the shadowed expanse of the forest beyond. The same forest he had known since his first steps, and yet tonight, tonight it breathed differently. Behind him, the house was quiet. Uncle Bo had turned in early, his back aching again. Elder Shen's gentle admonitions still echoed faintly in Tianming's thoughts: "Strength without balance becomes a blade too heavy to wield." But those words, spoken from warmth, could not pierce the unease that now clawed at his chest.
He couldn't sleep. Not because of the day's exhaustion, nor the ache of self-doubt that had gripped him by the stream's edge. No, this was something older. Something he didn't have words for. A kind of ancestral discomfort humming in the marrow of his bones.
He glanced up. The moon, once full and pale with compassion, now wore a veil of cloud like mourning silk. Even the sky seemed to hesitate. The wind shifted. A subtle tremor threaded through the leaves. Not loud, not violent, just… wrong. The ghostwillows, known for their mournful rustle, suddenly sounded like whispering mouths trying too hard not to scream.
Tianming took a breath and held it, as if the air itself had become sacred. Or tainted. "Who's there?" he whispered, not a cry, but a cautious invocation. His voice died immediately in the open silence.
No answer. Only the creak of an old waterwheel turning lazily in the dark, and the far-off yawn of the river pressing against its banks. Still, something was watching. Not with eyes. But with awareness. Tianming turned back toward the house, but hesitated before stepping in. Something in him, instinct or fear or fate, made him linger. He sat on the wooden step, arms wrapped around his knees, watching the trees, listening to the breaths of the village, waiting.
And then, ever so faintly, it began. A flicker in the distance. Not fire. Not light. Movement. Like a ripple in still water, visible only in its afterglow. At the edge of the forest, just before the path bent and disappeared into the ancestral woods, something shimmered. Then vanished.
He blinked. Nothing. Only the trees. But the world felt tighter, like the sky itself had leaned a little too far forward.
"Tianming…"
He started. The voice was so soft he thought he imagined it. It wasn't Elder Shen, nor his uncle. It wasn't even truly spoken. It was like a memory that had escaped someone else's dream. He rose, feet still bare, dirt cool beneath his toes. He took a cautious step toward the woods, eyes narrowed.
And then he saw them. Just for a second. Figures, shrouded in grey, indistinct, almost like mist given human shape. They stood motionless between the trees, where the old burial markers lay half-swallowed by moss and root. They did not move. Did not speak. But their presence ached in his mind, like a wound he had forgotten he carried.
Tianming stumbled backward. By the time he looked again, they were gone. But something remained. The air felt denser now, as if the world had drawn a breath and refused to release it. He turned and rushed inside the house, bolting the door behind him. The sound of wood sliding against wood felt fragile, futile.
Inside, all was still. Uncle Bo snored softly in the back room. A single oil lamp flickered beside the shrine to their ancestors. Tianming's eyes locked onto the old blade that hung above it, his grandfather's. A relic, dull and long unused, its scabbard cracked with age. He reached out. Not to take it. Just to feel its weight in the air.
The silence pulsed. Then, somewhere far off in the woods, a cry. Not animal. Not human. Something between. Piercing, but restrained. As if the thing that screamed had forgotten how to sound alive. Tianming's heart slammed against his ribs. He stepped away from the blade.
Outside, the wind had ceased entirely. Even the ghostwillows held their breath. The storm hadn't come. But it was near. Beneath the earth, beneath the sky, beneath the memory of all things, something stirred. And Tianming… he could feel it watching him.