Dusk had surrendered.
The heavens were veiled in heavy clouds, draped like a funerary shroud, and a peculiar chill permeated the air—the kind of cold that only clings to the threshold of death.
This was the place where the village returned its dead to the earth—a silent, abyssal cemetery. The ground was a jagged landscape of uneven mounds, each rising like an unhealed wound. Rotting wooden planks served as headstones, their names long since devoured by the relentless teeth of time and rain.
Whenever the wind surged, the skeletal branches of the withered trees would collide, producing a dry, rhythmic "krrr… krrr…"—the sound of old bones snapping in the dark.
Amidst this desolation, a young boy sat alone.
His small frame shivered against the cold and the creeping dread. His eyes held more than mere tears; they held an agonizing, abyssal grief. They were crimson and swollen, as if he had been weeping for centuries.
He was draped in a tunic of coarse, cheap fabric—a tattered rag held together by jagged patches. His pants were worn through at the knees, exposing skin scraped raw by the earth. His messy black hair fell in greasy tangles over his face, but he didn't bother to push them away.
He sat motionless before a fresh mound of earth.
The wind grew violent, clawing at his tattered clothes as if an invisible, spectral hand were trying to drag him into the grave. From the distance, the harsh caw of a raven echoed, punctuating the oppressive atmosphere with an omen of doom.
Ayan slowly lifted his head, his gaze anchoring onto the dirt. His lips trembled, but the words died in his throat, choked by the weight of the silence. In this gloom, the cemetery felt less like a resting place for the dead and more like a sanctuary for something ancient and malevolent.
In that darkness, the child was utterly alone.
"Ayan... where will you go now?"
Su Wan'er's voice was a fragile tremor, each word a stone cast into a deep well of sorrow.
"You sold your very home just to afford your mother's funeral. You have nothing left."
She watched him with eyes clouded by a desperate, helpless anxiety. The wind swept between them, carrying her voice away until it was a mere rasp.
"How will you survive this alone? If you have no other choice... you can stay at my home. You are like a son to me... and Mo Yan regards you as a brother."
"No, Aunt Su Wan'er... do not trouble yourself for my sake."
Ayan's voice was a jagged shard of glass. He bowed his head, trying to cage the tears that refused to be quelled.
"I... I will find a way. I will find a place. You have already sacrificed too much for my mother and me."
The final words were a mere sibilance in the air. He clenched his fists until his knuckles turned white and his nails bit into his palms, drawing blood. He sought to project strength, but his swollen eyes betrayed the raw, agonizing reality of his soul.
Su Wan'er eventually turned away. Her footsteps were heavy, echoing the rhythm of a heart burdened by a thousand regrets. The cemetery's silence began to press against her, a physical weight that made it hard to breathe.
She stopped and looked back one last time.
Her eyes were not just wet; they held a profound, unspoken agony. Her face was a map of exhaustion, etched with deep, abyssal shadows born of a life without sleep. She pulled her worn, frayed shawl tighter around her, as if trying to keep her own crumbling spirit from shattering.
She wanted to raise Ayan as her own, but her life was a cage of thorns. At home, her son would never accept him. He already bled her dry, squandering every coin of her hard-earned labor on hollow pleasures and vice.
And then there was her husband—not a partner, but a sentence. He treated her as something less than a servant. If she failed to work for even a single day, her only reward was the lash and the sting of venomous insults.
The wind roared, the dry branches clashing in that mocking "krrr… krrr…" sound, as if the cemetery were laughing at her helplessness.
Her lips moved, a silent plea lost to the gale. "I wish I didn't have to leave you alone..."
But the words remained buried in her chest. A single tear escaped, tracing a path down her weathered cheek before she turned and vanished into the devouring gloom.
The cemetery returned to its tomb-like silence, leaving behind only the biting wind and the stories sleeping beneath the soil.
Night had fully swallowed the village. The moon was a pale, sickly disc, casting a dim light over the ruins of huts and the dry fields. Ayan walked alone, his every step heavy, as if the very stones beneath his feet were groaning under the weight of his despair.
His tunic was a tragedy of mud and dust. His pants rasped against his skin with every movement. His hair shielded his face like a mask, and his eyes... his eyes were swollen pits of red. Every blink was a sharp, agonizing reminder of his loss.
He moved through the shadows like a ghost, a small, fragile body adrift in a cold, merciless world.
Suddenly, a figure emerged from the murk—a shape even more wretched and tattered than Ayan himself. A beggar. In this darkness, he looked like a waking nightmare, his face a landscape of filth and ancient scars. His eyes were sharp, glinting with a predatory cunning.
The beggar blocked Ayan's path. His skeletal fingers and yellowed nails looked like the roots of a dead tree. He offered a crooked, malevolent grin.
"Give me... money!" he demanded, his voice a rasping growl.
Ayan shivered, his voice a hollow whisper. "I... I have no money."
The beggar erupted in a harsh, grating laughter. He scanned Ayan's pathetic state—the gaunt frame, the filth, the 15-year-old body already broken by life. To the beggar, Ayan was a joke, a cosmic punchline.
"No money? No power?" the beggar spat, leaning closer until Ayan could smell the rot. "In this world, boy, you are lower than a worm."
He reached into his rags and pulled out a handful of copper coins, shaking them before Ayan's eyes.
"Look. I have coins. But I have no power. That is why this money never stays with me. It flows in, but I lack the strength to stop it from flowing out. That is why I am still a beggar!"
His laughter tore through the night's silence. Ayan stared at the coins, and the dying echoes of his mother's voice resurfaced in his mind: "You must become the most powerful... so powerful that even Death asks your permission."
A Cold Light ignited in Ayan's eyes. The mourning died.
His fists clenched so tightly the blood flow stopped, leaving his palms a ghostly white.
"This is not enough," Ayan's voice cut through the dark, cold and sharp. "I want more!"
The beggar's lips curled into a sinister line. He reached out and grabbed a passerby—a middle man—by the throat. Terrified, the man emptied his pockets, dropping every coin into the beggar's filth-stained hand. The beggar shoved the coins toward Ayan.
"See this, boy? In this merciless world of powerful cultivators, money flows from fear. But it takes power to keep it!"
Ayan looked at the beggar, his voice now steel. "Where do I find this power?"
The beggar laughed again. "You want power? In this world, power comes only from Cultivation. And to cultivate, you must first become an Echo Master."
"I... I will become an Echo Master," Ayan declared, the words an oath to the abyss.
The beggar's tone shifted, becoming a cold, abyssal warning.
"Every man can dream, boy. But to live those dreams, you must first murder the weakness within yourself... or the visions of the night will shatter before the cold reality of the dawn."
Ayan's eyes were no longer those of a child. There was no complaint in them, no fear. Only a cold, ossified determination—a will so absolute it had turned his very soul to stone.