The ocean spread forever beneath him, an endless, rolling field of blue glass, shards of light scattering where the wind's hand brushed the waves. He hovered above it, silent, still, the roar of the world dimmed to a low pulse somewhere behind his heartbeat.
Salt hung heavy in the air. The horizon curved so far it almost seemed to fall away.
He looked upward.
For a long breath, he simply stared at the pale, cloudless firmament stretching above the world. The instinct rose in him again, the same one that had saved him hours earlier, the same one that had always whispered higher.
He could feel the pull, that distant thinning of gravity's leash. His body knew it could climb, knew that with a single thought, the sky would open.
But the moment his gaze tilted higher, a shiver passed through him. A tremor deep in the bones, older than reason.
He remembered.
The first time he had truly flown had been practice, awkward, uncertain, the learning of balance and breath. The second was control: measuring acceleration, the way air pressed and yielded, how his body cut through resistance like stone through water.
But the third time…
That had been curiosity.
That had been arrogance.
He had wanted to see the world the way no one else could.
The valley slept under a sheet of mist, the roofs of his village no more than faint smudges between the trees. He had woken before dawn, restless with power he barely understood. He didn't yet know what it meant to fear the sky.
He remembered crouching at the cliff's edge, the whole world sleeping below, his pulse echoing in his ears. He took a breath and rose.
The air folded around him. The mountain fell away.
At first, everything was clarity. Clouds like silver silk, dawn washing the ridges in gold. He climbed fast, laughing once under his breath at the sheer ease of it, the air thinning but never choking him, the world shrinking to a child's toy beneath his feet.
Ten kilometers.
Twenty.
Thirty.
The air grew colder, sharper. His ears filled with the hum of rushing wind. He grinned into it, arms folded behind him, and tilted higher.
Fifty.
Seventy.
The clouds below began to look like islands. His eyes watered. He felt weightless, infinite, a god born of morning.
He passed ninety kilometers, and the color of the sky began to change, no longer blue, but a deepening indigo. The light sharpened until every edge burned silver.
Then, at around a hundred and eight kilometers, the world changed.
The sky turned black,not the black of night, but the absolute, airless dark of absence. The temperature plummeted. A shudder rolled through his body as static whispered across his skin. His instincts screamed, every cell in him tightening.
He ignored it.
The first lightning bolt came sideways.
It wasn't natural lightning, not the thin spears that split storms. This was a column, a pillar of pure white fury dropping from the void above, so bright it burned color from the world. It struck his left side before he could even brace.
There was no sound, just impact.
Pain followed like thunder. His body twisted, half his robe disintegrating in the flash. Flesh blistered. He tumbled once, twice, control shredded, every nerve in his body seared open. For a few blind seconds, he couldn't tell up from down. The sky became a whirl of black and violet; the earth, a rumor far below.
He fell.
The wind screamed. The air thickened. Fire streaked from the edges of his vision as friction lit his descent. The only thought that pierced the static in his mind was simple, primal:
Not here. Not yet.
He angled one arm, forcing balance through muscle memory and instinct, forcing the air to slow him. The descent turned into a barely-controlled crash. He saw the forest canopy open beneath him,too fast, too close and then the world went white again.
When he woke, he was half buried in dirt.
The crater around him was no bigger than a fishing pond, the surrounding trees stripped and smoking. His left side throbbed in agony. The flesh was charred in uneven patterns, the burns already knitting themselves slowly under the lazy insistence of his strange biology. The ground smelled of ozone and blood.
He sat up, dazed, looking at his hand. The skin was split, dark and flaking. Beneath, new tissue was already pushing through, pale and raw.
He laughed once, hoarse, disbelieving.
"Stupid."
The sound of his own voice was almost enough to break him. It had been arrogance, nothing more. The sky wasn't just empty space, it was something alive. It had punished him for trespassing.
He stayed in that crater for two days.
By the end of the first, the burns had scabbed and peeled; by the second, the new skin was smooth, faintly pink. Only a faint redness remained across his ribs and arm, a ghost of the lesson he'd learned.
When he finally started the walk home, the sun was setting. Each step back through the forest felt heavier than the one before. The trees whispered like they knew what he had done.
His house sat at the edge of the village, smoke curling from the chimney, a single oil lamp glowing through the window. It looked smaller than he remembered.
He hadn't expected anyone to be awake, but before he even reached the gate, the door slid open.
His father stood there.
Yan Bao was a solid man, built like the plows he'd used his entire life, shoulders broad, face weathered from sun and wind. He didn't speak immediately. He just looked at his son, the ragged robe, the faint burn marks, the exhaustion in every line of his posture.
Then his jaw clenched.
"You made us worry," he said, voice low but sharp. "Three days, Shen. Three days, and no word."
Yan Shen lowered his gaze. "I.. im sorry."
"Sorry?" His father's hand tightened on the doorframe. "Do you think the world bends to your whims? That you can disappear into the mountains and return when it suits you?"
"I didn't..." he started, but the words withered. There was nothing he could say that wouldn't sound like pride.
His father sighed. "The whole village was ready to search the ravine. Your mother hasn't slept."
As if summoned, she appeared behind him.
Yan Meylin was smaller, her hands calloused from years of weaving, her eyes red from worry. She pushed past her husband without a word, grabbed her son by the collar, and pulled him into a crushing embrace.
"You reckless, stubborn fool," she said, half sobbing, half scolding. Her fingers brushed the faint burn on his arm, and she froze, horror flickering across her face. "You're hurt..!"
"It's nothing," he murmured. "I'm fine now."
"Nothing?" She smacked his shoulder lightly, the gesture more affection than anger. "You vanish for three days and come back scorched like a roasted duck, and it's nothing?"
Behind her, his father's expression softened slightly. The anger drained into tired relief.
Then came the sound of small feet pounding on the wooden floorboards.
"Brother!"
Yan Xue burst from the doorway, her braid flying behind her. She couldn't have been more than four, but her voice cracked with raw fear and joy. She collided with him, wrapping thin arms around his thigh and burying her face against him. He felt the wetness of her tears through the fabric.
"Brother brother why did you leave me" she whispered.
For a long moment, he just stood there, caught between the warmth of his sister's embrace and the cold memory of the storm above the clouds. Then he crouched, resting a hand on her head.
"I'm here," he said softly. "I'm not going anywhere."
It wasn't a promise he could truly keep, but at that moment it was all he had.
They stayed like that until his mother pulled them both inside, bustling to set food on the table, muttering about "boys who think they can wrestle the wind." His father sat in silence by the fire, watching the flames climb the wood, his eyes distant.
Later that night, when the house was quiet and his family finally slept, Yan Shen stepped outside again. The stars glittered faintly between drifting clouds. His burns no longer hurt, but when he flexed his left hand, he could still feel the echo of lightning deep beneath the skin.
He looked up at the night sky and whispered, almost as a vow: "Next time… I'll be ready."
Now, floating above an endless ocean almost a year later, that memory burned behind his eyelids as vividly as the lightning that had branded it there.
He could still smell the ozone, still hear his sister's sob in the doorway. He had left that home behind, left them believing he had gone to serve the sect and learn cultivation. They could not have imagined what he had become.
The sky above him was calm now, clear, innocent, endless.
He knew better.
He exhaled slowly. The urge to rise higher receded. Not from fear, but from respect. Whatever force had struck him that day wasn't random weather. It was boundary. Warning. The world itself marking its limits.
And perhaps, he thought, some limits were meant to be understood before they were broken.
He turned his gaze downward again. The ocean rolled on forever, indifferent to his thoughts. The horizon shimmered with heat, the faint promise of land lost somewhere beyond sight.
He flexed his fingers once, the faint memory of lightning dancing in the joints and then angled forward, gliding low over the waves. His reflection flashed across the water for an instant: not the boy who had fallen from the sky, not the man who had shattered a sect, but something suspended between both.
Somewhere far away, thunder rumbled, distant, harmless.
He didn't look back.
For now, the earth, even drowned in water, was enough.