No drums greeted his birth.
No silk-robed elders chanting mantras, no candles flickering beside jade cradles. Only wind — cold, dry — sighing through the skeletal limbs of the Wilting Dao Tree, the once-sacred sentinel of a sect that had forgotten how to pray.
Beneath that dying tree, a cracked stone cradle held a boy no one wanted — a child whose marrow hummed with a flaw so deep that even Heaven's cycle had failed to seal it shut.
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On Earth, Li Tianyin had been a man of dead iron and oil. A forge worker with marrow that leaked life — a syndrome they called it. Marrow fissure. Doctors named it a curse. They told him he would never lift more than a hammer's weight. So he did exactly that — lifted hammer after hammer, day after day, pounding rusted steel until the heat made his brittle bones ache like a forgotten anvil.
When death came for him in the smoke and sparks, it found his bones cracked, his lungs scarred — but his will unbroken.
So when Heaven's cycle found a flaw wide enough, it poured him through.
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He did not scream when he slipped into this world.
He breathed iron dust. He tasted the bark's rot above him. He felt the cold marrow inside him leaking again — but this time, instead of draining him dry, it drank. It drank the damp qi that wept from the rotting Dao Tree's core, it drank the forgotten chants lingering in cracked stones, it drank the dead sect's sighs.
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A single flake of bark, loosened by wind and age, drifted down.
It brushed his cheek, stuck to his tiny, clenched fist. In the next heartbeat, it pulsed — a vein of flickering silver. Something older than Heaven's law stirred in that speck of dead wood.
The boy did not know how to weep. On Earth, he'd spent his last breath whispering: If there is Dao, let me forge it with my own hands. Now, marrow cracked, he whispered again — though no midwife heard, no sect elder leaned close enough to catch the words that slipped from his newborn mouth:
> "Forge… flaw…"
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Beneath the cradle, under the Wilting Dao Tree's twisted roots, something ancient sighed awake. A hidden forge, sealed a thousand lifetimes ago when the sect turned its back on flame and hammer. Old runes shimmered like embers on dead iron.
In the cradle above, the boy's tiny hand closed tighter around the bark flake.
And the cracked stone beneath him began to hum — a note so faint only the dead tree heard it.
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A flaw had slipped through.
Heaven shivered.
The bark fell.
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End of Chapter 1
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