This world have three kinds of people.
Humans lived quick, bright lives, burned with want, hungry for power for more years for a single of glory before the dark took them.
There were the Yúnmèi. The Cloud-Dreamers they did not live, They just simply were. Time slid off them like water off stone. They remembered what others forgot. They watched the mountains wear down to dust and yet they were still and ageless.
And there were the Mó Xuè. The Demon-Blooded cursed by the pacts of their ancestors, their power was a debt that demanded payment from their ancestor sins. Marked all over their bodies with horn. Their strength was violent did not burn with want like Humans. They ached with it. A deep ache for something just out of reach.
The Mó Xuè hated the Yúnmèi.
It wasn't a hot hate more like a cold bedrock thing. Yúnmèi possessed the one thing the Mó Xuè's power could not seize, immortality. The Mó Xuè looked at the ageless faces of the Cloud-Dreamers and saw an insult. A waste of usage to have what they craved so deeply, and to do nothing with it but watch.
So, they start it…. cleansing.
They called it a sacred duty to shatter that stillness, to break the vase just to see if the pieces could cut. To take that agelessness and finally put it to use.
It was the oldest reason for war. The reason that needs no other.
They hated them because they are immortal. Hate that festered for centuries, a slow poison in the heart of the world.
Then Mó Xuè fell upon the Cloud-Dreamers, a war of cleanse the immortal. The Yúnmèi were still and the world was violent. They were ageless, and the world was hungry. Their serenity was no shield against a blade fueled by envy.
They were swept away gone from this world.They had never practiced the martial arts. Violence was a language they had refused to learn.
But there was one. One who had walked a different path. He was born Yúnmèi, yet he had left the stillness of his kin. He walked among the Humans of the Red Bird Continent, in the Scarlet Peak Sect. He enrolled as the oldest, most patient disciple they had ever known. For a hundred years, he learned. He was not a prodigy. He failed.
Again and again.
His forms were clumsy, his progress glacial. The other disciples laughed.
What was the point of an immortal who could not fight?
That what they said.
He learned anyway. For a hundred years, he practiced the basics. A single punch. A single step. He practiced them until the movements were not techniques, but instincts older than hate.
When the war came, he was in a distant valley, meditating on a simple palm strike. He felt the silence of his people break.
He ran, faster than the wind, but he was a single man crossing a continent.
He arrived at the fields of his people place to find only silence. The stillness was gone. The world was quiet because everyone was dead.
The Mó Xuè saw him, turned from their victory and came for him, their auras screaming with triumphant power.
He did not move. He did not assume a stance. He simply looked at them, and in his eyes was the weight of a hundred years of failure, and a thousand years of loss.
The first demon raised a blade wreathed in shadow and fell, collapsing into dust. Then the next. And the next. They did not explode. They did not cry out. They simply… stopped. Their energy, their violence, their very lives were met with a absolute stillness.
It was the silence after a great sound. It was the peace at the end until the dawn.
They just died.
In the years that followed, the survivors told the story.
They called him The Last Cloud They said he dwelled atop the highest peak of the Hua Mountains, near the city of Xiūshì, which was now governed by the cautious remnants of the Scarlet Peak Sect.
Some of the ambitious, the greedy, the truly desperate, still climbed the mountain. They sought his power. They sought his secret.
They found a man, still as stone, who would not even look at them. And if they pleaded long enough, he would speak a single sentence every single time.
"Seek the cave. Every single one of it. Then drink the water. If you are lucky, you are immortal."
Then he would say no more.
To Be Continued.