By age ten, Lee Wunshin had begun to disappear from the world — at least in the way people recognized him. The quiet, thoughtful village boy with a polite bow and a faint smile still existed, yes. But those who watched closely would feel it — a subtle thinning of presence, like he cast less weight on the world than others. Like he was there, and not.
He had learned to mute his spiritual pressure.
To ghosts, he now felt like one of them.
The technique came from Xaion, naturally.
"Power is not presence," the spirit had whispered in the void. "It is control of presence. The dead do not scream. They exist where others forget to look."
Lee meditated for days to understand it — learning to compress his fear aura into a needle-thin thread rather than a wave. To cast it sideways, into insects, into the wind. Eventually, he could walk through the village with nothing trailing behind him. No signature. No echo.
He was no longer just a student of fear.
He had become a shadow engineer.
That spring, he isolated himself further from the boys who once followed him into the woods.
Not out of disdain.
Out of strategy.
He had begun work on what he called The Threading Chamber — a hidden grove past a rocky ridge, nestled inside a hollowed hill between ancient trees and buried bones.
There, he carved a spiritual nexus — not just a place to meditate, but a refinement forge.
He drew over thirty binding circles across the dirt, stones, and walls, each etched with symbols taken from elder scrolls, folk tales, and dream-fragments whispered to him by Xaion. Some were meant to contain. Others — to split, dilute, rebind.
And in the center: a singular ring of obsidian shards pointing inward like teeth.
That was where the unwilling would go.
The first test was a mid-level dusk-gnawer spirit — serpentine, fog-wrapped, prone to stalking prey that wandered near water. Lee baited it with the essence of a lesser rodent spirit, then triggered the trap.
The spirit howled — not in pain, but in confusion. It didn't understand how it had been caught.
Lee observed it like a doctor studying disease.
"This," he murmured, "is what the world never sees. The anatomy of fear."
The dissection took four hours.
He didn't absorb it.
Not fully.
Instead, he unspooled it. Studied how its instincts wrapped around its energy core. How its memories were stitched to sound and temperature, not words. He drew diagrams in charcoal. Sealed parts of it into different jars with glyphs.
When he was done, the spirit no longer existed. Just data.
And from that data, he began building techniques.
By mid-year, Lee had integrated a method of selective aura pulses — short, silent waves of dread tuned to specific emotional weaknesses. Guilt. Panic. Shame. He began testing it on travelers in the nearby village: a merchant who couldn't make eye contact, a hunter who suddenly missed every shot, a dog that wouldn't stop barking until Lee smiled at it.
They didn't know why they felt cold.
Why their limbs grew heavy.
But Lee did.
He could design fear now.
At night, under the reflection of twin moons, he theorized.
"How do I extract abilities from stronger spirits without full fusion?"
Xaion's voice sometimes answered.
"You'll need to crush them into fragments. Make them beg to escape. Then offer your core as sanctuary."
"Refuge absorption," Lee wrote in his notebook. "Use fear, illusion, disorientation. Break their cohesion. Offer temporary shelter — then compress. Make the prison feel like home."
It was cruel.
It was elegant.
He began developing spirit-bound totems — tiny objects infused with emotional residue. One was a shard of burned wood that always felt warm. Another was a carved mask that gave off a scent of rotting fruit, unnerving most animals. These were his lures — bait for future hunts.
And one day, he made a mistake.
He absorbed a wailing whisper-spirit too quickly, skipping the threading step.
It didn't kill him.
But it flooded him with grief — pure, unfiltered sorrow that wasn't his. For three hours he couldn't move. Just cried. Felt abandonment. Betrayal. The sense of being forgotten.
When it passed, he wrote only one thing in his notebook:
Some spirits rot for a reason.
He never skipped the threading step again.
As he approached the last months of age ten, Xaion's appearances became less frequent.
"Are you leaving?" Lee asked once, mid-meditation.
"You no longer need me," Xaion answered. "But I will watch. From a distance. To see what kind of god you become."
"Not god," Lee murmured.
"Then monster?"
Lee opened his eyes.
"No. Architect."
Xaion laughed for the final time and disappeared into the wind.
From the outside, Lee was still the same — polite, kind-eyed, soft-voiced. He helped his parents haul rice. Nodded to elders. Spoke little.
But inside?
Inside, he had become a cathedral of stolen echoes.
Each spirit's fragment was a stained-glass window.
Each seal a hymn.
And soon, he would begin building bodies.
Vessels.
Golems.
Not of clay or stone — but of emotion and concept. Sentient constructs.
Because knowledge was no longer enough.
It was time to create.
To sculpt fear itself into form.
To teach the world to worship what they feared most.
Ashen Hellflame.
Age ten.
Still smiling. Always smiling.
But the boy inside?
Was long gone.