This story contains:
Explicit sexual content, including male/male encounters.
Non-consensual scenes and dark themes of possession and control.
Violence, blood, and psychological intensity.
Supernatural transformations and fantasy horror elements.
Reader discretion is strongly advised.
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PROLOGUE : The Shadow of the Fallen Sun
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In the ancient annals of the Great Li Dynasty, it is written that the heavens grant power to those who can carry its weight, but they grant a cruel, twisting curse to those who dare to outshine the sun. Three centuries ago, the Kunlun Mountains did not howl with the voices of ghosts; they sang with the glory of the Li Clan. At the center of this radiance stood Li Zheyuan, the First Prince, a man whose sword-light could sever the morning mist and whose arrogance was as vast as the northern plains. He was a general of iron and jade, a man who believed that even the gods owed him tribute.
The fall began during the campaign against the heretical Black Altar. Amidst the smoke of burning incense and the screams of the defeated, Zheyuan struck down the High Priest, treading upon the sacred relics with mud-stained boots.
"The heavens are silent," Zheyuan had declared, his voice a cold peal of thunder. "Why should a Prince of the Earth fear a phantom of the sky?"
With his final breath, the Priest gripped Zheyuan's wrist, his fingers searing the flesh like white-hot iron. "You who seek to be above all men shall fall beneath the beast. Your pride shall be your pelt; your rage shall be your bone. You shall remain a pillar of your house, Li Zheyuan, but only to hold up the darkness."
The transformation was not a sudden death, but a slow rotting of the soul. It began with a heat in his blood that turned his veins into rivers of molten lead. During the Autumn Moon Festival, before the eyes of his terrified kin, the Prince's aristocratic frame distorted. His screams curdled into a guttural roar that shook the foundations of the palace. Hair as black as a moonless night erupted from his skin, and his eyes ignited with a violet flame that spoke only of slaughter.
In that single night of madness, Zheyuan laid waste to his own honor guard. To preserve the clan's name, the elders drugged the monster with spirit-numbing draughts and dragged him to the Abyss of Nine Heavens. He was no longer a Prince; he was the Black Qilin, a god of destruction bound by bronze and blood.
For three hundred years, the Li Clan withered. They became a house of shadows, guarding a secret that consumed their wealth and their honor. They built a manor of jade and obsidian over the abyss, living in a state of high-class decay. As the centuries turned like the wheels of a heavy carriage, the clan's glory faded into a ghost-story whispered by the common folk.
By the three-hundredth year, the seals—the ancient, spiritual locks that kept the Beast's mind from shattering—began to fail. The "Pure Yang" energy of the Prince's human soul was being swallowed by the "Dark Yin" of the curse. If a new anchor was not found—a human soul of such intense, solar purity that it could tether the Beast back to reality—the Black Qilin would break free.
The hunt for the anchor had begun, not out of love for a fallen Prince, but out of the desperate, greedy need for a clan to survive its own shadow.