Night had fallen upon the mortal world.
The air was thick with mist, the kind that silenced forests and swallowed sound. In the mountains of the eastern frontier, a storm gathered quietly above a nameless valley. The rain never came, yet thunder rolled within the clouds, and flashes of distant light turned the sky a bruised shade of red.
Beneath that sky stood a small village, half-buried in the wilderness. Lanterns flickered behind cracked shutters. Dogs whimpered. The air carried a weight no mortal could name — the faint pressure of a will vast enough to make the soul tremble.
Inside a hut at the valley's edge, a woman labored upon a straw mat.
The midwife's face was pale; sweat slicked her hands as she pressed down repeatedly, whispering broken prayers under her breath.
"Quick, bring more hot water!" she barked at a young girl.
The child ran out into the cold night, where a fire crackled beside an iron cauldron. Next to it stood a man in a patched shirt, shoulders broad but stooped by years of hardship. His face might once have been handsome, but life's wear had long since carved it hollow.
"How is it?" he demanded as the girl approached. His voice cracked with worry. "Why hasn't it ended yet? It's been nearly two days!"
"It's close, Uncle Shen!" she gasped, ladling water into a basin. "Just a little more — I need to hurry!"
She vanished back inside.
The man stared after her, then toward the hut, his fists clenching helplessly. Each muffled cry from within twisted something inside him. His name was Shen Liang, a man of humble birth — a farmer, once strong, now weary — and the woman inside was his wife, the only warmth in his long, cold years.
Her labor had begun at sunset the day before and had not ceased. The midwife had run out of herbs and prayers, muttering trembling sutras as the walls shuddered with every gust of wind. Yet through all her pain, the woman refused to relent. She clung to the straw mat, her breath ragged, her eyes fixed on the dim glow of the lamp beside her.
Then the air changed.
A low hum filled the valley — a resonance deep enough to make the bones ache. The air itself pressed down inside the hut, thick and heavy as storm clouds. Each breath the mother drew came against a weight vast and unseen.
Outside, the wind howled. The clouds split.
A thunderclap rolled through the mountains, and a crimson streak tore across the heavens — a falling star burning through the clouds like a divine wound.
And the child was born.
His first cry shattered the silence like a sword drawn from its sheath.
The moment his voice rose, the fire in the sky seemed to answer. The falling star flared once more; thunder boomed though no rain fell. The midwife stumbled back, her hands trembling. The lamp flames bent toward the new born, bowing as though in reverence or fear.
The child's skin was pale as frost. His eyes, though newly opened, gleamed faintly — not with the softness of infancy, but with a strange, unblinking calm.
For a heartbeat, the midwife swore she saw something behind those eyes: a world of lightning, a thousand swords buried in silence, a lone figure standing beneath a broken sky.
Then it was gone.
The new born wailed again, and the crimson light faded. The night returned to stillness.
The woman, weak but smiling faintly, reached out.
"Yuxuan," she whispered. "You'll pierce the heavens one day… won't you?"
The midwife froze. That name, spoken without thought, carried a strange weight that made her blood run cold.
Outside, the crimson star burned out beyond the horizon, leaving only drifting ash and the scent of rain that never came.
High above the mortal sky, the laws of Heaven trembled — ever so slightly — as if something it thought destroyed had escaped its reach.
Years passed.
The village remembered the night of the red star. They whispered that the heavens had bled because something unholy had been born. They called Shen Liang's son the child of calamity — a bad omen. No one would lend tools to his father or buy their crops without muttered curses.
Shen Liang said nothing. He worked harder.
He mended roofs, dug ditches, and bartered for grain. His wife, frail since the birth, rarely left the house. When she walked through the village, mothers pulled their children away.
The boy grew quietly in their shadow.
He was not strange — merely too quiet. He rarely laughed, spoke very little, and seemed content with silence. He followed his father to the fields as soon as he could walk, barefoot in the mud, mimicking every motion with solemn precision. When others his age cried or played, he worked beside the plough.
Sometimes, when storms rolled through the valley, he would stop to watch the sky — his gaze distant, unreadable. Shen Liang once caught him standing under the rain, palms open as if feeling for something that wasn't there.
"Yuxuan, come inside," he called. "You'll catch cold."
The boy blinked and nodded. "The thunder feels lonely," he murmured under his breath.
Shen Liang didn't understand, but he didn't press. His son was odd, yes — but he was his son.
When Shen Yuxuan turned seven, his mother's illness worsened.
The herbs no longer helped. Each day she grew paler, her breath thinner. Shen Liang worked until his hands bled, trading what little they had for medicines that did nothing. The villagers watched but offered no help. "Heaven is collecting its debt," they whispered. "Best not to interfere."
One night, the wind outside moaned like a spirit. Yuxuan sat by her bedside, small hands clutching hers. Her lips moved soundlessly; tears welled in her eyes.
"Don't cry, Mother," he whispered. "I'll take care of you."
Her hand trembled once, then went still.
He sat there until dawn, unmoving.
When the midwife arrived the next morning, she found the boy kneeling beside her body, silent, eyes swollen from crying. Frost had formed on the windowpanes, though the hearth still smoldered with warmth.
They buried her beneath the peach tree behind the house.
Yuxuan did not speak for days. When he finally returned to the fields, his father saw something different in his eyes — still gentle, but older, like a light dimmed by loss.
Life went on.
Father and son worked side by side, tending the same plot of tired soil. The other villagers avoided them still, but some came to respect Shen Liang's quiet endurance. Yuxuan grew into a thin, wiry youth — polite, diligent, and uncomplaining.
He learned to till, to mend, to survive. But sometimes, Shen Liang would wake in the night to find him sitting outside, watching the moon. His lips moved faintly, murmuring words too soft to hear.
"Praying?" Shen Liang would ask.
"Listening," Yuxuan would say.
Though he couldn't explain what he was listening for.
He grew slowly, deliberately — not a prodigy, not a cursed child. Just different. His mind wandered far, but his hands stayed steady.
And yet, Heaven has a long memory
By his fifteenth year, Shen Liang had grown sickly. The winters had eaten into his lungs, and the fields no longer yielded enough to feed them both.
When word came that the Azure Orchid Sect was recruiting in the nearby province, the old man made his choice.
A small trade caravan visited the valley every few months — merchants who bartered salt and cloth for grain and herbs, bringing with them the only news the villagers ever heard of the world beyond the mountains. This time, they carried word of the sect's selection trials in the city of Liufeng.
Shen Liang sold the ox, then the last of their grain, and pressed a small pouch of silver into his son's hand.
"You've always been different, Yuxuan," he said, voice rough but steady. "This world won't give you much here. Maybe out there, it will."
Yuxuan shook his head. "Father, you can barely stand. I can't leave you like this."
"You can," Shen Liang replied, coughing into his sleeve and forcing a smile. "The merchants pass through tomorrow at dawn. Go with them. If I stay, my bones will rest beside your mother's. If you stay, you'll rot beside me. Go — see the world she wanted you to see."
That night, Yuxuan packed little: a spare tunic, a wooden comb that had belonged to his mother, and the pouch of silver. Sleep never came. He sat outside the hut until the stars began to fade, listening to the soft rasp of his father's breath inside.
When the caravan's bells rang through the morning mist, Shen Liang stood outside the gate, leaning on a cane.
"Don't waste your heart on Heaven," he said quietly. "Men like us have to carve our own place beneath it."
Yuxuan bowed deeply. His chest burned, but he did not cry. He turned, joined the line of wagons, and began to walk beside them as they wound down the narrow mountain path.
From the ridge, the village was a scatter of smoke and frost. His father's figure was small in the distance, growing fainter with every step until it was gone.
The caravan creaked onward, the bells fading into the forest. Ahead lay the roads to Liufeng City — the heart of the Azure Orchid Sect's domain — where fate, and Heaven's long-forgotten game, waited.
Above the valley, clouds drifted apart, revealing a faint crimson hue bleeding through the dawn.