The sky did not thunder. It split.
Green lightning tore through the clouds above Handan, sharp and silent, as though the heavens themselves had inhaled and forgotten how to exhale. The palace midwives screamed, dropping bowls and bedding in terror, but no sound escaped the rupture of light. Candles snuffed themselves out, their flames extinguished by a presence older than fire.
In the midst of the chaos, a child cried. Or perhaps he did not. His voice was wrong—too calm, too certain for a newborn. For a single breath, Ying Zheng opened his eyes, and the world unraveled beneath the green fracture.
Threads of color, unspeakable and impossible, bled into the palace chamber: pain, hope, fear, ambition, sorrow. The midwives shrieked, clutching their chests as memories that were not their own tore through their minds. One collapsed, eyes wide with terror, her lungs trembling as though she had inhaled a storm.
Master Ru, the ancient court mystic, arrived too late to prevent the opening. Trembling, he ripped silk from his own robes and bound the infant's eyes with shaking hands. "Blind him," he whispered through tears streaking his face. "Or the world will kill him before he can learn to rule it."
Even as silk covered his gaze, Zheng did not weep. Pain entered him anyway—every fear, every death, every wound of the living and the dying pressing into his chest. His mind, even as a child, measured suffering and endurance in equal measure. Those who would teach him, those who would guide him, began to understand the truth that would define his life: he would see everything, even if no eye could behold it.
The court watched, fearful, as the boy slept, his small fists clenched, breathing not in the rhythm of a child, but in the heartbeat of the empire. Nights passed with whispers of prophecy and superstition, but Zheng endured. When tutors struck him for failing lessons, he endured. When generals mocked his silence, he endured. And when a servant, quietly dying of illness in the middle of the night, passed from the world, he wept once—and only once—feeling a pain that was not his own, yet became the foundation of his will.
It was in that silent, fractured chamber that the first truth of the King of the Beginning was forged: to rule was not to command armies or to sit upon a throne. To rule was to endure the pain of the world so that none beneath one's protection would have to.
Years passed like storms over barren hills. The boy grew into a prince whose reputation traveled faster than messengers or market rumors. By the time he was twelve, neighboring lords thought to test him with war, believing a blindfolded child could not command, could not protect, could not strike. They were wrong.
When the army of Chu advanced, expecting a boy they could intimidate, Ying Zheng met them alone atop the hills. The wind carried not a child's cry but the measured calm of inevitability. He moved without hesitation, silent as a shadow, striking not at flesh, but at the chi that bound ambition, fear, and hatred into the enemy. Soldiers fell mid-step, generals froze in the air, and banners collapsed as if unseen hands had unmade them. By the zenith of the sun, Chu's army lay in surrender, not because they were defeated, but because survival had become impossible.
And in that moment, whispers began. Beyond the palace walls, beyond the reach of soldiers and ministers, the world began speaking his name: Ying Zheng, the boy who bore all pain, the one who could see without eyes, the king who had not yet begun to reign.
Yet even as armies bowed and empires watched, a greater world waited. Beneath the mountains of the west, in stone coffins older than dynasties, the Tuktan slept. Immortals forged in a time when gods still bled, they had abandoned reincarnation in exchange for eternal service. Their silence stretched across centuries, waiting for a sovereign strong enough to command—not with fear, not with will, but with endurance.
The boy would find them. He would descend alone. Blindfolded. Unarmed. He would speak not with words, but with the chi that bound life itself, and they would rise—not in submission, but in recognition.
For even the immortals could tell a king when they felt one. And Ying Zheng had already begun to carry the weight of the world.