The village I was born in had no name worth remembering.
Those who lived there called it home, and those who passed through never asked. It rested at the edge of a cracked plain where the soil turned pale and brittle during summer, and dark and clotted when the rains came. A single dirt road cut through it, worn smooth by ox carts and wandering traders who rarely stayed the night. When the wind blew, it carried dust instead of sound. When rain fell, the water vanished into the earth as if the ground itself were thirsty.
I was born there, and for most of my life, I believed I would die there too.
Life followed a narrow, predictable pattern. I woke before the sun, not because discipline demanded it, but because hunger did. I ate what there was, worked until the light softened, and rested when my body could no longer be persuaded to continue. Days blurred into seasons. Seasons passed without ceremony. No one announced change; it arrived quietly and settled in.
I did not think of myself as unhappy. That would have required a wider world for comparison. My life was small enough that dissatisfaction had no room to grow. I learned early that wanting more without knowing how to obtain it only sharpened suffering, so I trained myself to be content with enough.
Enough food.
Enough rest.
Enough time to see another year.
Most days, I repaired tools for the farmers. Handles cracked. Blades dulled. Metal bent out of shape. My hands learned the limits of materials—how much strain something could take before it failed. There was honesty in that kind of work. Objects did not pretend to be more than they were.
People were different.
At night, I lay beneath a low roof of packed straw and wood, listening to the wind slide along the walls. The sky above the village always seemed vast but empty, stretched wide without intention. Stars scattered across it carelessly, brilliant but distant. I never wondered what lay beyond them. Such thoughts belonged to storytellers, to drunkards, to people with time and imagination to spare.
That was my life.
It might have remained so if not for the man who fell from the sky.
I did not see him fall. There was no thunder, no flash of light, no roar from the heavens. Only a dull impact beyond the eastern road, the sound of something heavy striking the earth without ceremony. I noticed it only because the chickens scattered, their sharp cries cutting through the quiet evening.
Curiosity overcame caution. It often did in a place where novelty was rare.
I found him half-buried in dust beside the road, his body twisted unnaturally, as though the ground itself had rejected him. His robes were torn, the fabric unfamiliar—too fine, too intricate for a traveler. Strange symbols were embroidered along the cloth, their shapes faintly visible even beneath dirt and blood. I did not recognize the patterns, but something about them unsettled me.
My first instinct was to step back.
Everyone had heard stories. Wandering immortals. Cultivators who walked between realms unseen. People who brushed against such beings and paid the price in misfortune, madness, or death. The wise thing would have been to leave him where he lay, to pretend I had seen nothing.
I hesitated.
Then he coughed.
It was a wet, rattling sound that tore itself from his chest, and it made my skin prickle. His eyes opened slowly.
They were not divine.
They were bloodshot and unfocused, filled with pain and something dangerously close to fear.
"Water," he whispered. The word scraped out of him as if it had edges.
I do not know why I listened.
I fetched water from my flask and knelt beside him, careful not to touch him more than necessary. His breathing was shallow. Each rise of his chest looked like effort. As he drank, his hands trembled violently, and I realized how cold he was despite the warmth of the evening.
"You shouldn't be here," I said, though the words sounded foolish even to me.
A faint, broken smile crossed his lips. "Neither should you," he replied.
That was when I noticed the wounds properly.
They were not cuts or breaks I could understand. His flesh was torn in places where nothing had struck him, burned where no fire had touched. Faint lines of light pulsed beneath his skin, flickering weakly like dying embers. Whatever had injured him did not belong to the mortal world I knew.
Fear settled into my chest.
"You are a cultivator," I said quietly.
He laughed, a thin sound that dissolved into coughing. "What's left of one."
The stories I had heard rushed back to me then, no longer distant or amusing. Cultivators who soared through the sky. Immortals who crushed mountains with a thought. Beings who treated mortal lives as incidental.
I stood up, meaning to leave.
His hand shot out and gripped my wrist.
The strength of it startled me. For a dying man, his grasp was iron.
"Listen," he said, urgency sharpening his voice. "I don't have long."
"I can't help you," I said. "I don't know anything—"
"You don't need to." He pressed something into my palm. "Just take this."
It was a jade slip, cracked down the middle and warm to the touch. The moment my fingers closed around it, the world shifted.
Not visibly. Not violently.
But unmistakably.
The air grew heavier, layered, as though something unseen pressed down upon it. My skin prickled. My breath caught. The sky above me felt suddenly distant, receding upward, revealing depth where there had been none before.
"You live beneath it," the cultivator said softly. "The true world. The world of the Dao."
My heart hammered in my chest.
"What are you saying?" I asked.
He did not answer immediately. His gaze drifted past me, toward the horizon, toward something I could not see.
"Mortals think the sky is empty," he said. "It isn't. It's crowded. Full of paths and corpses and people who forgot what it meant to be human."
His grip weakened.
"Why me?" I asked. "Why give this to me?"
His eyes focused on mine one last time. "Because you stopped."
Before I could ask what he meant, his body shuddered.
Light spilled from him, faint at first, then brighter, breaking apart into countless motes that drifted upward and scattered like dust in sunlight. His flesh dissolved. His bones followed. Within moments, there was nothing left but disturbed earth and silence.
I stood alone on the road, my hand still clenched around the jade slip.
The night felt different.
Heavier.
As though something had shifted its attention toward me.
I returned home in a daze. I lay beneath my roof and stared at the darkness, the jade slip resting against my chest. I could feel it there, warm and faintly pulsing, like a living thing.
When I closed my eyes, I saw unfamiliar images—mountains floating in empty space, figures seated beneath endless skies, cities carved into cliffs that touched the clouds. I heard fragments of words I did not understand, concepts that brushed against my thoughts and slipped away.
I did not sleep.
By morning, I knew something irreversible had begun.
The sky above the village no longer looked empty to me.
It looked occupied.
And for the first time in my life, the smallness I had carefully cultivated felt unbearable.
I did not yet understand cultivation. I did not know what immortality truly demanded. I still believed, foolishly, that I could walk this path without losing everything I was.
I would learn otherwise.