The village woke to the smell of burnt pine and something sharper, like the air itself had been flayed open.
Lin Qiu walked down the muddy path with his head high for the first time in twelve years. His straw sandals squelched. His patched gray robe clung to him, soaked through, but the cold no longer touched his skin. Inside his chest, the violet star spun lazily, sending warm pulses through veins that had never known warmth before.
Children stared from doorways. A dog barked once and then fled, tail between its legs.
Old Lady Meng, who sold steamed buns by the well, dropped her basket when she saw him. Flour exploded across the stones like snow.
"Qiu-er… your eyes," she whispered.
He hadn't noticed. When he passed the rain barrel and caught his reflection, he froze.
His irises were no longer brown. They glowed the same imperial violet as the lightning that had remade him, ringed with faint silver cracks like shattered porcelain. When he blinked, tiny sparks danced across his lashes.
He forced a smile. "Morning, Auntie Meng."
She took one step back, made the sign against evil, then hurried inside.
Lin Qiu kept walking.
Grandmother's hut sat at the very edge of the village, half swallowed by bamboo. The door creaked open before he reached it.
Grandmother Lan stood there, small and bent, leaning on her cane carved from spirit peach wood. Her white hair was tied in a severe bun. The lines on her face looked deeper than yesterday.
She studied him for a long time.
"You smell like a tribulation that missed its mark," she said at last.
Lin Qiu's throat closed. He had planned a hundred explanations, a thousand lies. None of them survived her gaze.
He knelt in the mud.
"I'm sorry," he rasped. "The pine on the peak… it's gone. There was a bead. I—"
Grandmother Lan struck the ground with her cane. The sound cracked like a whip.
"Inside," she ordered. "Now."
The single room smelled of medicinal herbs and old grief. A portrait of a handsome man in sect robes hung on the wall—Lin Qiu's grandfather, dead these forty years, once an inner disciple of the Violet Heaven Palace before he fell protecting the village from a demon beast.
Grandmother closed the door, drew every protective talisman she owned, and only then allowed herself to tremble.
"Show me," she said.
Lin Qiu unfastened his robe just enough to bare his chest. The nine-petaled lightning flower pulsed softly, each petal a living arc of electricity.
Grandmother Lan's cane slipped from her fingers and clattered to the floor.
"Ancestors preserve us," she breathed. "The Thunder Monarch's Sigil. The one from the forbidden records."
"You know what it is?"
"I know your grandfather died trying to keep something exactly like it from falling into the wrong hands." Her voice shook. "Child, you have swallowed a calamity."
Lin Qiu swallowed. "Does that mean… I can cultivate now?"
She laughed once, a cracked sound between sorrow and wonder. "Cultivate? Boy, you have skipped ten thousand steps and landed on the throat of heaven itself. But the heavens do not forgive trespassers."
A knock rattled the door. Hard. Angry.
"Lin Qiu of Cloud's Rest!" a voice barked. "By order of Elder Hu, come out at once!"
Grandmother's face hardened. She snatched up her cane again.
"Stay behind me."
She opened the door to reveal three men in the dark blue robes of the village guard. The leader, Captain Zhao, had a scar across his lip and the early condensation of qi at the fifth layer of Body Tempering—a towering realm for a remote village.
His eyes fixed on Lin Qiu's glowing ones and widened.
"Demon," he spat, hand going to his sword. "You destroyed the sacred pine."
"It was struck by lightning," Lin Qiu said.
"Lightning doesn't leave demonic brands on little cripples." Captain Zhao drew steel. The other two followed. "Elder Hu wants him bound and brought to the ancestral hall for judgment. Interference will be treated as collusion with evil."
Grandmother Lan stepped forward. Despite her age, the air around her rippled faintly—she had once reached Foundation Establishment before her meridians were ruined saving Grandfather.
"Touch my grandson," she said quietly, "and I will remind this village why the demons still fear the name Lan."
Captain Zhao hesitated. Everyone knew the stories.
Lin Qiu felt the violet star in his dantian flare, eager, hungry.
He stepped past his grandmother.
"Let me handle this."
The moment his foot crossed the threshold, thunder growled overhead though the morning sky was clear.
Captain Zhao attacked first—a straightforward slash meant to disable, not kill. Village rules were strict about shedding blood without elder approval.
Lin Qiu didn't dodge.
He raised one hand.
Violet lightning exploded from his palm in a perfect circle. The blade met it and shattered into a hundred glowing fragments. The shockwave flung all three guards backward into the mud.
Silence.
Captain Zhao stared at his empty, smoking hilt as though it had betrayed him.
Lin Qiu looked at his own hand in wonder. The lightning had answered before he even formed the thought.
From the back of the crowd gathering in the lane, a new voice rose—thin, venomous, familiar.
"See? I told you! He's possessed! He'll bring heavenly tribulation down on all of us!"
Chen Wei, the village head's grandson, fifteen years old and proudly at the third layer of Body Tempering thanks to spirit pills his father bought from passing merchants. He had bullied Lin Qiu since they were small, secure in the knowledge that the cripple could never fight back.
Now his face was pale with fear and envy both.
Lin Qiu met his eyes.
The violet star spun faster.
Chen Wei took an involuntary step back.
Grandmother Lan's hand settled on Lin Qiu's shoulder, firm.
"Enough," she said. "You've made your point. Come."
She turned to the stunned crowd. "Tell Elder Hu that if he wants my grandson, he can come fetch him himself. And he had better bring the sect token my husband died earning, because only the Violet Heaven Palace has authority over a Thunder Monarch successor."
Gasps rippled through the villagers. The name Violet Heaven Palace had not been spoken aloud in Cloud's Rest for two generations.
Captain Zhao scrambled to his feet, bowed stiffly, and fled with his men.
Lin Qiu let his grandmother pull him back inside. The door shut. The talismans flared briefly, sealing them in.
Only then did his legs give out.
Grandmother caught him before he hit the floor.
"Easy, child. The first taste of power is always drunkness."
He clung to her thin frame, shaking.
"They're going to come for me."
"Yes."
"I don't want to hurt anyone."
"You won't have a choice if they force your hand." She stroked his hair like when he was small. "But you listen carefully. Tonight, when the moon is highest, you will leave this village."
Lin Qiu's heart cracked. "But you—"
"I am old, and my meridians are ash. They will not waste time on me once you are gone." She pressed something into his hand—a jade slip, warm from her skin. "This contains the route your grandfather took to the Violet Heaven Palace, and the basic Thunder Arts he managed to copy before he was expelled for loving a mortal woman. It is all I have left of him."
Tears blurred his strange new eyes.
"Where will I go?"
"North. Beyond the Jade Mist Mountains lies Qingyun City. Every ten years the four great sects hold joint recruitment there. The next one begins in twenty-seven days." She cupped his face. "With the Heart of the Thunder Monarch beating in your chest, they will fight to claim you—or to destroy you. Either way, you will no longer be helpless."
A distant bell began to toll from the ancestral hall—nine somber strokes. Elder Hu calling the village to assembly.
Grandmother kissed his forehead.
"Pack nothing but this slip and the clothes on your back. Too much weight slows the lightning. When night falls, climb to the burned pine. From its roots runs a hidden spirit vein straight down the mountain. Follow it. Do not look back."
Lin Qiu nodded, throat too tight for words.
Outside, the crowd was growing louder, angrier.
Inside the tiny hut, grandmother and grandson held each other while thunder rumbled in a clear sky, as if the heavens themselves were already mourning what came next.
Twenty-seven days to Qingyun City.
Twenty-seven days to become strong enough that no one could ever make him kneel again.
Lin Qiu closed his glowing eyes and felt the violet star laugh inside his heart, eager for the storm to come.
To be continued…