The rain fell in slow, silent sheets over the village of Qingshui, washing blood and ash into the muddy streets. Every house had its doors shut. Every window was dark. Inside the huts lay the dead.
A terrible Corpse Plague had come from the northern burial grounds. It killed within hours, turning flesh gray and veins black. Even cultivators were not spared. By sunset, Qingshui had become a village of ghosts.
Six-year-old Lin Mo lay on a straw bed, his chest unmoving. His mother clutched his cold hand, whispering prayers that Heaven did not answer.
By dawn, he was burned with the others.
The villagers piled the bodies high outside the village and set them alight, afraid the plague would spread. Flames roared into the sky, carrying with them smoke, screams, and the last traces of human warmth.
Lin Mo's body burned.
But something inside him did not.
Beneath the fire, deep within his bones, a strange energy stirred.
It was not Life Qi.
It was Grave Essence.
Three days later, the earth above the pyre cracked.
A small, blackened hand pushed through the ash.
Lin Mo opened his eyes.
They glowed a soft, unnatural green.
He was no longer breathing.
His heart did not beat.
Yet he stood.
He felt no pain, no hunger, no fear—only a strange, hollow pull, like the world itself was whispering to him from beneath the soil.
Around him lay hundreds of corpses.
And Lin Mo knew, without knowing how, that they were his.