Dawn in the Eternal Flame Sect came like a breath held too long. Mist rolled down from the mountain peaks, heavy and pale, coating the stone courtyards in dew. The world awoke not with the clamor of the city but with silence — the kind that felt ancient, patient, alive.
The newborn once called Tiek Drayden had become a child now, though he carried the stillness of a man who'd already lived and died. His eyes didn't wander like other children's did. They watched. Measured. Remembered.
Monks and disciples whispered about him. The boy who didn't cry. The child whose aura was fractured. The soul that hums in two tones.
He grew fast — too fast. By his seventh year, he was already reading cultivation texts meant for initiates twice his age. But while the others trained to refine Qi through stillness and breath, Tiek's energy refused to follow rules. It twisted, pulsed, lashed. Sometimes it felt like a second heartbeat beneath his skin, not of this world.
The elders called it corruption. He called it home.
[...]
As the sect's elders prepared the next great ritual — the Trial of the Lotus Flame — rumors spread that the boy from nowhere would be tested. Some said it was a purification rite. Others whispered it was an execution wrapped in ceremony.
But when dawn came and Tiek stepped into the temple's glowing circle, the world itself seemed to lean closer.
His Qi pulsed in two colors: white and shadow. The lotus petals carved into the floor began to twist, bending against the natural flow of energy.
"This is no mere reincarnation," Elder Wun murmured. "This is a bridge between existences."
As the ritual began, the flames around Tiek turned black — the color of memory, not death.
And in the smoke, a voice rose again:
"You were never meant to survive. But you were never meant to end, either."
Tiek opened his eyes, now glowing faintly with both worlds' light.
He smiled, weary and aware. "Then I suppose I'll keep walking… until both worlds forget me."
(End of Chapter 2 — "The Blood of Two Worlds")