It didn't rain that night, but fire did.
The sky in Qinghe Village was a dull red, not from dusk, but from the flames.
The wooden houses burned one by one, like candles deliberately allowed to melt to the end. There were no cries for help—only the sound of splintering wood, the hissing of flames, and the occasional short laugh of the cultivators.
They came not as an army, but as executioners, certain they would not face punishment.
In one of the houses on the edge of the village, a twelve-year-old boy hid under the floorboards.
His body trembled, not from the cold, but because he recognized the voices overhead.
He had heard them before in the sect hall—when his name was ridiculed, when his talent was called fake, when his family's blood was reviled as "impure."
Now, the same voices laughed as they killed cruelly.
His mother screamed once. His father didn't have time to scream at all.
The boy bit his own arm to keep himself quiet.
He smelled blood seeping through the cracks in the boards, the smell of warm iron, a smell he would remember for the rest of his life.
No sect came to help. No laws of the world moved.
The heavens simply watched.
As the knife pierced his father's chest, something inside the boy collapsed completely.
And beneath the rubble, something much older—something that should have been dead—opened its eyes.
To be continued...