The storm that night was not a storm by the ordinary measure. Lightning threaded silk across the moon and rain hissed on the great copper roof of the Hall of Spirit. In the inner court, where incense and stone met, BiBi Dong stood with a robe tucked, palms clasped as if holding a sleeping thing.
She had watched domes and dynasties break and mend. She had seen novices become saints and saints become shadows. The Hall had given her the title of Saint, but the title never filled the hollowness she kept like a private clock. Tonight that hollow beat like a living thing.
A shaft of blue-gold split the dome above the Hall and fell through the architecture like a question. The air blew warm and strange. From the center of the light, a child coalesced—no more than a wisp, wrapped in fire that did not burn, forehead high and brow ancient as ruins.
Silence fell, a physical pressure like the hush that hugs the final syllable of a great name.
BiBi Dong walked forward before any elder could blink. When she lifted the child into her arms, there was a collision that was far more than flesh meeting cloth: it was two spirits recognizing the shape of one another. The child's tiny eyes opened and held a twilight—the fierce gold of dawn, the peripheral cool of night.
"You feel it, don't you?" she whispered, and the child's small fingers tightened around her hand as if to say yes.
The senior sage at her side muttered a breathless assessment that fluttered across the courtyard: "A spirit-wake at six… innate power of twenty. Impossible."
BiBi Dong only smiled—a line warmer than relief; it had the sharpness of a blade that finds the right place to cut. She spoke the name before the Hall could argue. "Liu Feng," she said, savoring the syllables like a prophecy. "Liu—flow. Feng—phoenix."
They wrapped him in a blanket of spirit-cloth, and the Hall's murmurs continued: a child of prophecy, born under a sky that had been struck by a star, brought by a saint with eyes like purple dusk. But for BiBi Dong the sound of the murmurs barely reached the seam of her thought. She pressed the infant to her chest and felt a small, steady drumbeat—not a child's heartbeat but the pulse of something older, lying quiet and waiting.
By morning, the Hall's pathways were full of people asking what this would mean. Liu Feng listened with the patient, clear attention of one who accepted being seen and weighed. Even as a child, when elders tested him with games of memory and mimicry, he returned answers not as parrots but as answers that solved the question the elder had not yet asked.
BiBi Dong took him from the main wards and into her own wing—quiet chambers of practice, rooms for silence and focus. There he would live, learn, and be watched like the sprouting of a precious sapling. The Hall consented, as halls do when they feel destiny is arranging itself.
That first week, when the young boys shouted in the training yard and the girls practised rings of energy, Liu Feng stood in the doorway like a small calm center. He watched, he listened, and when he spoke, young voices tilted in the direction of his single-syllable logics. Even then, in a child's mouth, there was the architecture of command.
In the end, BiBi Dong would tell her attendants, not as a boast but as a plain thing: "He is not simply ours. The world has given him a script. We will read alongside him."
And so the Hall began the first lines