The funeral pyres still smoldered when the rain began to fall.
Liang Feng stood at the edge of the village square, the smoke stinging his eyes. His clan—once proud, once strong—was gone, reduced to ash and memory. Bandits had descended at dawn, and by dusk nothing remained but ruin.
He had survived only because he was weak. Too weak to fight. Too weak to protect. They had left him half-buried under corpses, not even worth the trouble of a killing blow.
As the storm broke above, lightning lanced across the heavens, and for a moment he saw it—beyond the veil of falling rain, a massive shadow in the sky. It was not a bird, nor a beast, but a gate: black stone, rimmed with chains of light, suspended in the void. And from it came a sound like thousands of voices whispering at once.
Come.
Liang Feng staggered, clutching his chest. His bloodied body should have been collapsing, yet something burned within him—an ember refusing to die.
He limped away from the pyres, guided by instinct alone, until he reached the ruins of the ancestral hall. There, half-buried in rubble, he found it: a broken tablet etched with strange runes, pulsing faintly with a rhythm that matched his own heartbeat.
When his hand touched the stone, the world shifted. The hall dissolved into mist, the cries of the dead silenced. He stood instead before the colossal gate he had glimpsed in the storm. Its surface writhed with carvings that seemed to breathe, and the chains rattled as if eager to break.
The whispers grew deafening.
All that you lost can be reclaimed. Power waits beyond. But a price must be paid.
Liang Feng trembled, not with fear, but with hunger. His family, his honor, his very name had been stolen. If cultivation required sacrifice, then let it be so.
"I accept," he said hoarsely.
The gate cracked open, and a torrent of energy crashed down upon him. Pain split his bones, burned his marrow, and yet he did not scream. He welcomed it. Through agony, he felt his meridians tear open, his dantian ignite, and for the first time in his wretched life, the path of cultivation was before him.
And in the silence that followed, a single voice remained:
Welcome, Gatekeeper