Beneath the blue-scarred sky of the Southern Vale, where mists pooled like thought and the wind sang in the tongues of old maps, the young man crouched by a broken spring. He cupped the water in both hands, the reflection trembling — not from the current but from his pulse. In that small silver theatre, the world he knew narrowed to the hollow between two fingers: a jade shard, tiny as a fingernail, half-buried in the mud at the spring's lip.
There were legends that every sect in the Vale quoted with the lazy reverence of those who had never faced a price: that the land kept secrets in its bones, and that those who took one secret could never return the favour. Bai Lian — he was not yet Bai Lian with the capitalized certainty of a name that would mean mountains or tides — had come to the spring because a dream tugged like a fishhook in his sleep. In the dream, an old voice hummed like a mouthful of chimes: something about a "bloodline trace," and a stair that began at a broken stone.
The shard was cold. When he brushed mud from its smooth face a pattern bloomed: a lattice of lines that each looked like a tiny path, and at the lattice's heart something like a seed — impossibly fine, as if the world's first hair had been split and recomposed into meaning. Bai Lian's fingers trembled, a trembling not of flesh but of consequence. Around him the Vale exhaled: insects, distant bells, the low muttering of cultivators up on the cliff-paths, and far off, the starless cry of a gull that had forgotten its sea.
"Don't touch it," hissed the voice behind him.
He whirled. Old Mu, village doctor in most seasons and old soldier in the ones that lingered inside his bones, stood in the doorway of the ruined shrine with a staff crooked like a question mark. The doctor's eyes were the colour of river pebbles, indifferent but not unkind. "Some stones wish to be left as they are," Mu said. "They keep the town honest."
Bai Lian had not expected audience. His mouth opened, closed. "It called to me," he said, the words soft, as if admitting the truth would make it less dangerous. "In a dream."
Old Mu's lips twitched. "Dreams are the currency of fools and poets," he said, and pushed his staff to the ground. "And yet… the world likes to repay those who borrow its threads. Come — to the hearth."
They walked in the quiet, the town's roofs humped like sleeping beetles, smoke staining the evening. The shard throbbed in Bai Lian's pocket like a small living thing. He thought of the ruins at the hilltop where his father, before he had become a name lost to debts and to decayed honour, used to speak of the Nine Ascendant Heavens as if they were old neighbours who sent postcards. Everyone in the Vale had a story about the Heavens; that did not mean any of it was true. Men who had never left the valley could be very convincing when they named cosmic things and treated them like weather.
At the hearth, Old Mu washed his hands in a black bowl and set it between them. The room smelled of dried herbs and iron. "Tell me everything," he said.
Bai Lian told. He told of the dream, of the voice, of the shard itself. He did not show the shard; the old man could sense little enough and too much. There was a rule in the village: show a thing and it might be believed; hide it and the world would conspire to prove you a liar. Old Mu listened like soil — silent and not hostile.
"It could be a broken talisman," Mu said at last. "Or it could be nothing. Or —" His eyes narrowed, and the room seemed to lean in "it could be a bloodline trace."
The phrase landed like a cold coin. Bai Lian tasted metal in his mouth. "My mother died when I was five," he said. The past was a belt of faded parchments; he had never asked what color her name had been. "She said something about lineage and shame and the old mountain. She taught me a song once, a small chant about roots. I thought it was a lullaby."
Old Mu did not answer at once. Finally, he said, "Bloodline traces are not toys. They sing of origins. They are the echo of one's ancestors' choices pressed into the marrow of the world. Those who inherit them inherit debts and melodies both."
Outside, lanterns blinked awake like slow fireflies. The Vale, for all its smallness, had teeth. Bands of raiders roamed the lower passes, and occasionally a wandering cultivator with too many scars and a strict moral code would cross the bridge and disrupt the peace for a week. Cultivators, Old Mu had taught Bai Lian in fragments, were like the wind: sometimes helpful, sometimes dangerous, always eager to move something heavy.
Bai Lian wanted to be a cultivator as much as one wants to breathe under water: instinctive, without thought of the risk. His hands had been calloused in the field, pruning the gourds for the market and towing at nets in the rain. He had an appetite for stories of the Heavens; he could repeat the names of three of them, though he didn't know if any signified true place or merely spectacular cruelty. He wanted — he had wanted for so long — a path that would lift him beyond the Vale's low, soft ceilings.
"Show me," Old Mu said finally.
Bai Lian hesitated. A rule, set in a different village long ago, hovered: never show the elders a secret you were not willing to lose. He felt, in that instant, both like a man who had discovered a treasure chest and a child who had stolen a bowl. He drew the shard from the pocket. In the hearth-light it was more than a shard: veins shimmered with a faint inner glow, and when Bai Lian turned it, the pattern rearranged as if recalibrating itself to his heartbeat.
Old Mu's skin wrinkled like a dried map. He took the shard with fingers that had known better thievery than Bai Lian's. He did not test it with flame or song. He simply pressed it to his forehead. For a breath the room shivered, and the old man's pupils pinwheeled.
"You carry a thin song," he murmured. "Not of bastard lineages, not of petty spirits. This is keyed somewhere far. It is a summon. If you are of the Vale, child, the shard will wake your roots. If you are not—" he let the sentence hang like a knife.
Bai Lian felt, for the first time, the shape of his life as compromise or as promise. He wanted to ask why the world had chosen him — he wanted to ask whether the shard would make him great — but the old man's next words struck him dumb.
"There is a price. The shard does not give without taking. It will open a thread to the Nine Ascendant Heavens — perhaps. But those threads are knotted with bargains. Ancestors speak through them and the past is seldom benevolent."
Bai Lian swore to himself that he would not be a boy forever. He would go beyond the Vale and take what belonged to him: honor, color, a name that sang in other towns. The shard hummed against the old man's palm and, though he could not tell whether it was saving him or unraveling him, Bai Lian placed his hand over the shard too. He felt warmth, then a tide of music. Not heard, not with ears, but felt: an ancient cadence that seemed to arrange the marrow in his hands into a new order.
For a moment, the room dissolved. He saw, as if looking through the skin of the world, the small patchwork of the Myriad Creation: continents like moth wings, inland seas the color of old coins, and a thin needle of a town that somehow insisted on being both insignificant and stubborn. Beyond those maps, at the edges that logic could not name, a blackness gathered like a sleeping ocean: the First Heaven — not shining so much as patient. It did not notice him. It only made his chest feel colder, as if boredom had weight.
He was pulled back with a jolt — Old Mu's palm on his shoulder like a mooring rope. The old man's gaze was gone, replaced by the look of someone who had studied star-changes and found them wrong. "We have work to do," he said.
Night in the Vale thickened into the kind of dark that collects thoughts and sells them back at a higher price. Bai Lian found that he could not sleep. He sat on the ridge above the fields and held the shard up to the moonlight. The lattice glowed like frost. He sang, as his mother had taught him — the small chant, the lullaby that had tasted of long-cold tea — and the melody replied in the stone with a faint resonance, as if it recognized kinship. He did not know whether recognition was blessing or trap.
Footsteps on the path startled him. A girl, perhaps a year older, with hair braided in a way that marked her as of the Lin family, slid down beside him with the silent ease of someone who had been training their body since childhood. Her name was Lin Yue; she had the air of one who moved as if the world were a challenge to a game she liked.
"You should not be out here alone," she said. Her voice was a sliver of wind. "The raiders have been worse this season."
Bai Lian placed the shard into his palm and closed his fingers like a lid. "I found this at the spring," he said. "Do you think… can such things be dangerous?"
Lin Yue glanced at the stone and then at him. "Everything you carry is dangerous," she said. "But that doesn't mean you should drop it. If it sings to you, follow the song carefully. Legends are a kind of road; they can lead you where you should go — or into a hole."
They spoke like children stealing a market's forbidden spice. Lin Yue's presence steadied him. When she laughed, the Vale seemed less like a cage and more like a prologue.
They did not know then — how could they? — that the shard was not merely a relic but a key stamped with the pattern of an old Dao; that the thin song Old Mu had felt was a tug from a lineage that wished to be heard. The world was patient. It had time to set its stages. Yet the shard had begun to call; doors have little patience for those who loiter on the threshold.
Early in the morning, before the sun had fully unrolled its gold, a rider came to the Vale. He was not the sort of man who carried news of distant markets or of marriageable daughters; he wore the long coat of the imperial road — the road that stitched provinces and power — and across his back was a banner with an embroidered sigil Bai Lian had only seen in his father's old tales: a spear intersecting a crescent. The rider moved like someone who had been taught to measure his breath.
He stopped outside Old Mu's home and asked for the owner by name. Old Mu came to the door with the shard wrapped in cloth beneath his shirt. The rider's eyes flicked to the hearth. He said, "I seek those who have met with a trace of Heaven-marked stone."
Bai Lian's hand clenched in his pocket. The rider's words came like weather. He stood, a small animal who realized that the trapdoor had already closed.
Old Mu nodded. "A boy found a piece of old glass," he said. The old man's truth was a rope. "We will bring him."
The rider's face did not change. He said, "Then the imperial envoy must take him for assessment. The Heavens' traces are not local business."
Bai Lian tasted iron again. He caught Lin Yue's eye across the yard; she mouthed something that might have been a promise or a curse. He had to decide — to stay, to run, to accept that a shard could redefine his future. The shard pulsed inside his palm, answering nothing and everything.
He thought of his mother's lullaby and the small, stubborn hope that had lived in him like a coal in ash. The Vale, with its thin streets and stubborn roofs, had been a map he knew by touch. Beyond it lay the wide writing of other cities and other fates. The world — or the piece of it that a shard could rattle — had made its choice.
Bai Lian set his jaw. He pushed his fingers into his pocket and let the shard lie against his palm. When they led him out, the sky had the hard clarity of a page about to be written on. He walked as if his feet were the ink.
If the shard was a key, then tonight the latch would be tested. If it was a blade, then something in his life was about to be cut away. Either way, the path forward began at the small spring where he had bent and found more than he expected. Above him, unseen by all but the cool stars, a distant patience unfurled: the First Heaven watching like a mind folding its hands.
Old Mu walked with him a short while, sandals whispering on the path. "Speak small truths," he said quietly. "Big truths invite listeners with empty hands." The rider's banner snapped above them; stallkeepers glanced up, children pressed closer to fences, and the Vale hummed its habitual suspicion.
At the envoy's mount the assessor unwrapped the cloth. He held the shard like an oath. "Heaven-marked," he murmured. "A lineage trace. Not common to this region." His voice was flat with the weight of office.
"If they claim him," Old Mu said, "they will call for service and debt. Lineage is a contract more than a blessing."
"Observation," the assessor decided. "One week at the provincial outpost. Longer if rites or records demand." He folded the shard away and looked at Bai Lian with an official softness. "You will be fed and kept from harm. If the trace sings deeper, we will notify the proper halls."
They bound him into a cart and the Vale receded. Lin Yue rode with them to the first bend and pressed a narrow strip of cloth into his hand — a knot meant to keep small promises. "If they bind you," she said, eyes steady, "remember the song."
At the outpost gate a clerk read terms aloud: observation agreed; tutors assigned if rites required. Old Mu's hand closed over Bai Lian's shoulder. "Keep your lullaby," he said. "There are places where a song is armor."
Inside a small room, the shard lay on the table like a sleeping thing. Bai Lian sang his mother's lullaby and the stone answered with a thin chord. For the first time the idea of the Nine Ascendant Heavens felt less like gossip and more like doors — patient, indifferent doors that might open for reasons older than his hunger.
He pictured the First Heaven as a distance folded into the sky, patient as stone. It did not yet name him; it only shifted the space around his breath, tightening it into purpose. He did not yet know whether the shard would make him greater or poorer, saint or slave. He knew only that a path had begun, and that to stand still was to let the world decide for him.
He closed his fingers over the shard and felt its faint warmth. Outside, the road kept its steady rhythm. He drew a slow breath and, for the first time since his mother's death, felt that the lullaby might be enough to keep him from losing himself.
In the morning he would be called for assessment; tonight he would learn how much courage could weigh.