Tan Na Yu moved like a shadow skimming across the mortal realm.
Cities rose and vanished beneath her feet – walled prefectures swollen with refugees, trade hubs choked by soldiers, river towns half-burned and half-rebuilt. She passed through them openly when it suited her, invisibly when it did not. Rain gave way to dust, dust to smoke, smoke to incense, but the child in her arms remained unchanged – warm, calm, sleeping or cooing so soundly that it felt profoundly out of place.
Information came easily.
Too easily.
She listened in tea houses where desperate merchants spoke of vanished heirs. She entered clan and sect archives sealed to mortals and skimmed through blood records, genealogies, inheritance ledgers. She traced reports of annihilated households, wiped villages, massacres blamed on demonic cultivators, conflicts, feuds, revenges, or conscript armies gone feral. She even followed rumors – nonsense most of the time – of infants stolen by monsters or taken by wandering immortals.
Nothing connected.
No karmic thread pulled taut when she passed through these places. No echo stirred in the child's soul. No ancestral resonance, no lingering bloodline call, not even the faint ache of loss that usually clung to orphaned fate.
It was as if the boy had never belonged anywhere.
Tan Na Yu stood atop a city tower at dusk, watching smoke curl upward from a refugee quarter beyond the walls. The child slept against her shoulder, one small fist still tangled in her sleeve. She let a strand of divine sense brush his soul again, slow and careful.
Still nothing.
That was wrong.
Every being left traces. Even abandoned children carried echoes – of parents, of land, of the moment they were first held. These echoes shaped karma, and karma shaped cultivation. This boy had none in this realm.
As if he had materialized from nothingness.
The thought made her still.
That was impossible.
There were only three recorded instances in all of existence where a being had appeared without karmic origin – creatures that had manifested directly into reality, complete and divine. The First Creator. And the two Peach-Born Twins.
And they emerged already standing at the peak.
Her gaze sharpened.
Then the only remaining explanation was a forbidden one.
The child had fallen. From a higher plane into a lower one, bypassing the natural order. Such accidents were vanishingly rare and usually lethal. Spatial pressure alone should have torn a mortal body apart.
Yet this child lived.
Tan Na Yu exhaled softly.
Tracing the exact origin would require searching countless planes, fractured ascension routes, and broken spatial scars left behind by the War in Heavens. It would take centuries. Perhaps millennia.
She had no desire to waste eternity doing that.
But one truth remained unavoidable.
If the boy did not know where he came from, his Dao would eventually turn on him.
Every institution that raised cultivators from childhood kept records.
Not casual ones.
Vast halls existed in sects and courts alike – entire pavilions whose shelves groaned under jade slips and soul-etched mirrors, each bearing witness to beginnings. Names. Birthplaces. Parents. Bloodlines. Even fragments of temperament, recorded through soul impressions taken with the consent of mortals who did not truly understand what was being preserved.
For children purchased from poverty, the details were simple and brutally clear.
For those taken from ruined clans or annihilated sects, the records became obsessive – chronologies reconstructed down to the final scream, causes traced, responsibility assigned. Not for justice. For stability.
The reason was simple and straightforward.
At Soul Ignition stage, a cultivator was forced to confront not only what they had become, but what they might have been. The most treacherous path was always the same:
Who would I have been if I had remained mortal?
A cultivator without an answer fractured. Heart demons bloomed from that absence like mold in a sealed room. With talent like this child's, that moment was not a possibility – it was an inevitability.
And this child had no past.
Which meant one had to be made.
She looked down at him again.
"…Very well," she murmured.
If the past would not reveal itself – then it would be rewritten.
She would conduct a Ritual of Parental Bonding.
And Heaven and Earth would have to accept the result.
The ritual itself was not gentle.
It was not performed in sanctuaries or beneath auspicious skies. It was practical, old, and rooted in a truth Heaven enforced: nothing could be created from nothing.
Qi transformed. Fate transferred. Bonds moved hands.
The Great Law of Qi Conservation did not bend, even for immortals.
Wood fed Fire. Fire birthed Earth. Earth yielded Metal. Metal gathered Water. Water nourished Wood.
Everything paid for something.
Tan Na Yu descended into the city's lower quarters as night fell, her presence veiled. The slave market was loud and crude – exactly as such places always were. She did not linger. She selected ten pregnant women, all near term, their souls already wrapped tight around unborn life.
Gold changed hands.
The slavers did not look at her face.
The ritual was conducted far from the city, in a valley full of broken stones. She prepared the formation herself, inscribing sigils that glowed faintly with peach-hued light. The women were unconscious when it began.
What was taken was not life.
It was the bond.
The maternal thread was drawn out gently, then gathered and refined. The unborn children's fates unraveled with it, dispersing back into the cycle where they would be reborn elsewhere, unburdened by what had been stolen.
When it ended, ten bodies lay still.
She did not apologize.
This ritual was common. All cultivators among both orthodox and demonic practiced some variation of it. In her youth, she had once found it grotesque – had wondered how ancient monsters could dote so fiercely on incompetent heirs, shielding them from consequences like fragile porcelain.
Only later had she understood.
In a life that spanned centuries, a child was the rarest treasure of all.
Cultivators changed their bodies in pursuit of power. They refined flesh into weapons, meridians into conduits, souls into furnaces. Fertility often withered as a side effect. To produce even a single offspring at high realms required astronomical resources – or rituals such as this.
That was why powerful men chased women with such unseemly hunger. It was not pure lust. It was desperation.
Tan Na Yu returned to the child and completed the final seal.
The bonds settled. Heaven did not object. Fate did not resist. Something deep within her shifted.
A warmth bloomed in her lower abdomen. A pressure in her chest. Her body responded. Qi rearranged itself along forgotten pathways. Glands awakened. Essence flowed.
Milk formed.
Tan Na Yu froze.
Then she laughed softly, breath fogging the air.
"At my tender age," she murmured, looking down at the sleeping infant, "Among Immortals of course, I become a young mother."
The ritual had succeeded. In the eyes of Heaven and fate alike, this child had always been hers.
Tan Na Yu gathered him into her arms. She straightened, lightning responding faintly beneath her skin, and stepped out of the valley.