In the tiny mountain village of Cloud's Rest, where the mist clung to the pines like a jealous lover and the rain never quite stopped, Lin Qiu was considered useless.
Not lazy. Not stupid. Just… empty.
While other children his age could already draw wisps of qi from the air and make a candle flame dance with a thought, Lin Qiu's meridians were silent as stone. Twelve years old, and still at the first layer of Body Tempering—no, not even that. He hadn't broken through the first gate at all. The village elders shook their heads whenever he passed. His own grandmother, the only family he had left, would sigh and mutter prayers to long-dead ancestors.
On the night of the Thunder Monarch Festival, when every child in the Azure Cloud Continent hoped to feel the heavens stir inside their bones, Lin Qiu sat alone on the broken stone steps behind the ancestral hall. Rain hissed on the tiles above him. Far below, the village lanterns glowed like scattered embers, and he could hear the laughter of those who had awakened even a sliver of spiritual root that day.
He pressed his thin palms together and tried, one more useless time, to cycle breath the way the manuals described.
Nothing.
Not a spark. Not a warmth. Just the cold mountain air sliding through his lungs and out again.
Lin Qiu lowered his head until his forehead touched knees.
"I really am trash," he whispered to no one.
Thunder answered.
It came without warning—a single violet bolt that split the night in half, striking the ancient pine at the peak directly above the ancestral hall. The explosion flung Lin Qiu backward. Splinters of burning wood rained down. For a heartbeat the world was nothing but white fire and the smell of scorched resin.
When his vision returned, the great pine was gone. Only a blackened stump remained, smoking in the rain. And in the center of that stump, half-buried in cracked heartwood, floated a bead the size of a dragon's eye.
It was black. Not shiny black—absence black. The kind of darkness that seemed to drink the stormlight around it. Violet lightning crawled over its surface like living veins.
Lin Qiu's heart hammered so loudly he was sure the village would hear. He should run. He should tell the elders. Spirit treasures that fell with heavenly tribulation were never meant for mortals, let alone cripples.
But his legs carried him forward instead.
Rain steamed when it touched the bead. The closer he came, the more the storm seemed to quiet, as though the heavens themselves held their breath. When his trembling fingers closed around it, the bead was warm—not hot, but warm like blood.
The moment skin met surface, the world inverted.
Lightning poured into him.
Not a metaphor. Actual lightning—raw, violet-white, furious—flooded his meridians like molten iron seeking every crack. Lin Qiu screamed, but no sound left his throat. His body arched off the ground. Veins lit beneath his skin, glowing the same imperial purple as the bead. Bones creaked. Flesh tore and re-knit in the space between heartbeats.
Twelve years of silence inside him shattered all at once.
The bead melted—or perhaps became—liquid starlight and bored straight through his palm into the center of his chest. There it settled, spinning slowly, a miniature thunderstorm compressed into a single point behind his heart.
Then came the voice.
Not sound, but meaning hammered directly into his soul.
"Child of no root, you have swallowed the Heart of the Thunder Monarch. From this night forward, your dao shall fear you, and the heavens shall gnaw their own tongue in regret."
Lin Qiu collapsed.
When he woke, dawn bled pale gold across the mountain ridges. The storm had passed. The ruined pine still smoked, but the bead was gone—replaced by a faint violet sigil branded over his heart, shaped like a nine-petaled lightning flower.
He sat up slowly.
Inside his dantian, where once there had been only hollow darkness, now spun a tiny violet star, crackling with power so dense it made his teeth ache.
Lin Qiu raised one shaking hand.
A ribbon of pure violet lightning danced between his fingers, obedient as a tamed dragon.
For the first time in his life, he laughed—sharp, wild, and terrified all at once.
Far away in the Nine Heavens, something ancient opened a single crimson eye and looked down.
The boy who had been trash stood up in the ashes of the sacred pine, wiped rain and tears from his face.
"Grandmother," he said to the empty morning, voice hoarse but steady, "I think I'm late for breakfast."
Behind him, the blackened stump split down the middle with a sound like breaking fate.
And somewhere deep in his chest, thunder laughed with him.
To be continued…