The night Kai was born, the sky wept crimson.
Village elders would later whisper that blood moons were omens—harbingers of calamity or the birth of something that should not exist. But on that night, as Kai's mother screamed through her labor in the village leader's manor, no one thought of ancient prophecies. They were too busy trying to keep both mother and child alive.
"It's a boy!" the midwife's trembling voice announced.
Kai's father, Chen Wei, burst into the room, his weathered face breaking into a smile that vanished the moment he saw his son. The infant's skin was pale as moonlight, but that wasn't what made the midwife step back, her hands shaking. On the child's chest, directly over his heart, was a mark—intricate, dark as spilled ink, resembling a lotus flower with six petals surrounding what looked like a vertical eye.
"What is that?" Chen Wei breathed.
The midwife swallowed hard. "I... I don't know, my lord. I've never seen such a birthmark."
Chen Wei's wife, Lin Mei, exhausted from the ordeal, reached weakly for her son. "Let me see him."
As Kai was placed in her arms, the mark seemed to pulse once, so subtly that everyone thought it a trick of the candlelight. The baby didn't cry. He simply stared upward with eyes too focused for a newborn, as if seeing something beyond the thatched roof, beyond the blood-red sky.
"He's beautiful," Lin Mei whispered, and that was the end of it.
The mark was noted, examined by the village physician, and ultimately dismissed as a peculiar birthmark. Within weeks, as Kai grew into a healthy infant, the mark faded—not entirely, but enough that it became just another feature, easily forgotten beneath his clothes.
The blood moon passed. Life in Willow Creek Village continued as it always had.
Kai's childhood was unremarkable in the way that suited his station. As the son of the village leader, he learned to read and write, studied basic arithmetic and history, and trained in the fundamental martial arts that every respectable family taught their children. Willow Creek Village was small, home to perhaps three hundred souls, but it was prosperous enough. The village paid tribute to the Verdant Peak Sect, which in turn owed allegiance to the Orthodox Alliance—the great confederation of righteous sects that had maintained peace in the cultivation world for over two centuries.
Kai was seven years old when he first witnessed death.
It started with Old Man Zhao, the village's most skilled carpenter. One morning, he complained of fever. By evening, dark veins had spread across his skin like cracks in pottery. By midnight, he was dead, blood seeping from his eyes and mouth.
"Plague," the physician whispered, and the word spread through Willow Creek like wildfire.
Kai watched from the manor's second-floor window as his father organized quarantines, as families were separated, as the healthy fled and the sick were abandoned. The Verdant Peak Sect sent no aid. A single outer disciple arrived, assessed the situation with cold eyes, and declared the village "unsuitable for intervention." The sect's resources, he explained, could not be wasted on common folk when cultivators' lives were at stake.
Then he left.
Kai watched his neighbors die. He watched children younger than him cough up black blood. He watched the physician work himself to exhaustion trying to save people, only to succumb to the plague himself. He watched his mother weep silently as she distributed what little medicine they had, knowing it wasn't enough.
He watched his father stand alone in the village square, looking up at the distant peaks where the Verdant Peak Sect made its home, his hands clenched into fists.
"Why?" young Kai asked his father that night. "Why won't they help us?"
Chen Wei looked at his son with eyes that had aged years in mere weeks. "Because we don't matter to them, Kai. We are ants beneath the boots of giants. They cultivate to transcend mortality, to reach for the heavens, but they forget..." His voice cracked. "They forget that they were once mortal too."
By the time the plague burned itself out, a third of Willow Creek was dead.
Kai was eight years old, and he had learned his first real lesson: the strong decided who lived and who died. Everything else was just pretty words.
The years passed. Kai grew from a quiet child into a quieter youth. He was fifteen when he began his own cultivation in earnest, studying the basic techniques his father had learned from the sect during his own youth—back when Chen Wei had been ambitious enough to attempt the outer disciple trials and failed.
Kai was not talented. His meridians were sluggish, his qi cultivation painfully slow. While others his age who had been accepted as outer disciples in various sects were already at the third or fourth stage of Qi Condensation Realm, Kai struggled to maintain even the first stage.
"Some are born to reach the heavens," his father told him gently. "Others are born to live good lives here on the earth. There's no shame in it, son."
But Kai remembered the plague. He remembered watching people die while those with power looked away. He remembered the fear in his mother's eyes, the helplessness in his father's stance.
There was shame in it. There was shame in being weak.
It was on the night of his sixteenth birthday—another blood moon, though no one remembered the significance—that everything changed.
Kai sat in meditation in his room, circulating what little qi he could gather, feeling it crawl through his meridians like a tired snake. Frustration built in his chest. At this rate, he would never even reach the Meridian Opening Realm, much less the legendary heights where cultivators could extend their lives for centuries.
I need more time, he thought desperately. I need to be stronger.
That's when the mark on his chest burned.
Kai gasped, his eyes flying open. The mark, forgotten for so many years it might as well have never existed, blazed with heat. Not painful, but intense, undeniable. He tore open his robe and stared at his chest.
The lotus pattern writhed. The eye at its center opened.
And something looked back.
"Finally," a voice echoed in his mind, ancient and hungry and terrible. "Finally, you call to me."
Kai couldn't move. Couldn't breathe. The presence in his mind was vast, pressed against the boundaries of his consciousness like an ocean against a dam.
"What... what are you?" Kai managed to think.
"I am older than your cultivation sects. Older than your Orthodox Alliance. I am from a time when the barrier between realms was thin, when demons walked freely among mortals." The voice paused, and Kai felt something like amusement. "I am your inheritance, boy. The lineage mark of the Blood Moon. You are the first to be born with it in ten thousand years."
"That's impossible. The demon realm was sealed after the Great War."
"Sealed, yes. But seals can have... cracks. And you, little mortal, are one such crack."
Kai's mind raced. Demons. The ancient enemy. The Orthodox Alliance had been founded on the principle of destroying demonic cultivation. If anyone knew—
"They will kill you," the demon confirmed, reading his thoughts. "Or they will try. That mark on your chest? It is proof of lineage, of blood connection to the demon realm. To them, you are an abomination to be purged."
"Then why haven't you possessed me? Why wait sixteen years?"
The demon laughed, a sound like grinding stone. "Because I cannot. The mark is not possession—it is covenant. I can only offer. You must accept."
"Offer what?"
"Power, little mortal. I can open all your meridians, every channel that runs through your flesh. Your qi will flow like a river instead of dripping like water from a cracked cup. You will cultivate faster than any so-called genius in your pathetic sects. You will live long enough to see mountains crumble and empires fall."
It was everything Kai wanted. Everything he'd despaired of achieving.
"What do you want in return?"
"Your positive emotions."
Kai blinked. "What?"
"Joy. Love. Hope. Compassion. All the pretty feelings that make humans so tediously noble. I will feed on them. In time, they will fade, and you will become what you must become to survive in this world—cold, calculating, willing to do what others will not. But you will have your power. You will have your time."
"You want to turn me into a monster."
"I want to turn you into someone who survives. Who thrives. Who achieves what he desires instead of dying a mediocre, forgettable death in this mediocre, forgettable village." The demon's presence pressed closer. "I offer you the chance to matter, boy. What do you offer me? Refusal, and a return to your slow, painful crawl toward inevitable mediocrity?"
Kai sat in the darkness of his room. Outside, the blood moon painted everything crimson. He thought of the plague. Of the dead. Of his father's helpless rage. Of all the years stretching ahead where he would be nothing, no one, powerless to change anything.
He thought of the Verdant Peak Sect, looking down from their mountain, and seeing ants.
"If I accept," Kai said slowly, "I want more than just opened meridians. I want to know everything you know. I want to reach immortality. I want to never age, never die, never be weak again."
"Ambitious," the demon purred. "Good. Yes, I can guide you there. But understand, boy—the path to immortality is paved with sacrifice. Not just your emotions. Blood. Lives. Choices that will damn you in the eyes of heaven. Can you walk such a path?"
Kai remembered Old Man Zhao, coughing blood. Remembered children dying. Remembered the sect disciple's cold dismissal.
Heaven had already damned him. What did he have to lose?
"Yes," Kai whispered. "I accept."
The mark on his chest exploded with light.
Pain—exquisite, terrible—raced through his body as invisible hands tore open channels that had been closed since birth. His meridians expanded, widened, cleared. Qi that had trickled now roared. His dantian, the core of his cultivation, burned like a newborn star.
Kai bit down on his sleeve to keep from screaming, tasting blood, feeling tears stream down his face—though already, the tears felt distant, as if they belonged to someone else.
When it was done, when the pain faded, Kai sat gasping in the darkness.
He could feel it. The change. Power thrumming through his body like never before. He had jumped from the first stage of Qi Condensation to the sixth in a single night. His cultivation speed would only accelerate from here.
"There," the demon said, satisfaction rich in its voice. "Now we begin. Your first lesson, little mortal: the world belongs to the strong. Everything else is prey."
Kai stood on shaking legs and walked to his window. Below, Willow Creek Village slept peacefully, unaware that in the manor, something had changed. Something had been born—or reborn.
He felt different already. When he thought of his parents sleeping in the next room, the warm affection that should have filled him felt... muted. Distant. Like watching himself feel rather than feeling directly.
So it begins, Kai thought.
Outside, the blood moon watched.
And in his chest, beneath the skin, the demon smiled.