cries can be heard from a room.
The daughter is sitting on the floor, crying uncontrollably. Tears stream down her face as she holds her hands in pain.
Hearing the cries, the mother rushes into the room.
When she arrives, she immediately notices something terrible — the palms of the girl's hands are badly burned, as if they had been pressed against something extremely hot, like a heated piece of iron.
The mother kneels beside her.
"What happened?" she asks in panic.
But the girl cannot answer. She keeps crying and only looks toward another room.
Following the direction of her daughter's gaze, the mother slowly turns her head.
Her expression hardens.
Just then, a man walks out of that room.
Annoyed and irritated, he says,
"Why is this idiot girl still crying? We are trying to sleep here."
He waves his hand dismissively.
"Take this useless garbage somewhere else. Let us sleep in peace."
The mother lowers her eyes and nods silently.
Without saying a word, she lifts her daughter and carries her back to their small house nearby.
Although she stays quiet, anger burns in her eyes.
That night, the mother gently cleans the girl's wounds.
She carefully wraps bandages around the burned palms and applies some lotion.
After finishing, she reaches into a drawer and takes out a small knife.
She places it in the girl's hands.
"Keep this with you when you sleep," the mother says softly.
"And when you go near that house… it might be useful."
The girl nods quietly.
Soon, exhausted from crying, she falls asleep.
The mother sits beside her, watching her daughter sleep.
Tears slowly roll down her face.
She looks up toward the ceiling and whispers,
"Why did you have to leave so early?"
"Why did you leave us alone like this?"
She wipes her eyes and continues speaking as if her husband could hear her.
"Now look at what your brother is doing to us."
"He has taken everything… the house, the land… everything."
"All we have left is a small stall."
"And now we even have to pay rent for this place."
Her voice trembles.
"I don't know how long I can keep going like this…"
Next morning
The woman opened her stall as she did every morning.
She arranged her goods with practiced efficiency, her movements automatic after years of the same routine. The street was still quiet, the village only beginning to stir.
That was when she noticed the boy.
He was sleeping in the corner of the footpath beside her stall, curled directly on the bare ground.
No mat,
no blanket,
no clothing of any kind.
The woman stopped.
She stood there for a moment, looking at him.
Something in his face was peaceful, unbothered—as if sleeping naked on a dirt road was perfectly ordinary.
She felt a quiet pity stir inside her.
She reached behind the stall and pulled out an old grain sack, emptied and worn from long use. She walked over and tossed it across the boy's body.
He woke instantly.
His eyes snapped open with an alertness that surprised her
"Keep it," she said simply. "It will at least cover something." Motions with her hand
The boy looked down at the sack, then back at her. A brief flicker of awkwardness crossed his face.
"Where are you from?" she asked.
"The jungle," he said.
"Why are you naked?"
"There was no cloth in the jungle."
She studied him carefully. "Where are your parents?"
they are in the jungle.
The woman blinked.
"Then why are you here alone?"
"There were no humans in the jungle,"
the boy said. "So I came to find some."
She stared at him for a long moment.
The boy returned her gaze with calm, patient eyes.
She decided he was either simple-minded or had suffered some great ordeal out in the wilderness.
Either way, he was thin, and clearly hungry, and sleeping on dirt roads without clothes.
"Are you hungry?" she asked.
"Yes."
"Then help me around the stall for the day," she said. "Work hard and I will feed you."
The boy agreed immediately, without hesitation or negotiation. He wrapped the grain sack around his waist as best he could and began working alongside her with a focused, efficient energy that surprised her.
He was strange. He touched objects with unusual curiosity, turning them over in his hands before using them. He watched people passing through the market with an intensity that bordered on unsettling. But he worked hard and caused no trouble.
By afternoon, she set out a bowl of food for him.
He sat at the edge of the stall and ate in thoughtful silence.
That was when a girl came running through the market lane, spotted the stall, and stopped short at the sight of the strange boy sitting there eating.
"Where is my mom?"
she demanded, looking around with wide eyes.
"In the back," the boy said, nodding toward the storeroom. "Making arrangements for something."
The girl squinted at him.
"Who are you? Why are you sitting here?"
"I am Huang shing," the boy said simply. "Your mother promised me food if I helped her. So I am sitting here."
The girl crossed her arms. "Can you call her for me?"
The boy turned toward the storeroom. "Your daughter is here," he called out.
The woman emerged a moment later, wiping her hands on her cloth. She looked between the boy and her daughter, then smiled tiredly at the girl.
"Don't be frightened of him," she said. "I found him sleeping on the road this morning. I decided to help him."
I was telling him that you should be running here any time
The girl looked at the boy again—at the grain sack wrapped around his waist, at his calm and curious eyes, at the way he watched everything around him as if cataloguing it all for some invisible record.
She wasn't sure what to make of him.
But the boy simply looked back at her with quiet, patient attention.
The boy's eyes dropped to the girl's hands the moment she arrived.
The bandaging was fresh, but crude. Done quickly, with whatever materials were available. He could see the edges of the burn marks peeking out from beneath the cloth wrapping.
"What happened to your hands?"
he asked.
The girl's expression closed immediately. She looked down at the ground and said nothing.
"Haven't you eaten yet?" the woman said sharply, stepping between them. "Back to work."
She took her daughter gently by the shoulder and guided her into the storeroom, pulling the curtain closed behind them.
The boy returned to his tasks at the stall.
But his ears did not stop working.
His implants had been calibrated for exactly this kind of environment. Enhanced hearing, precise enough to isolate individual conversations through walls, through background noise, through the ambient sounds of a busy village market. He had not intended to listen. But the words came to him anyway, clear and sharp as if spoken directly into his ear.
The mother's voice, low and careful, trying not to be overheard.
The girl's quiet wincing as the lotion was applied.
The soft sound of bandaging being unwrapped and replaced with fresh cloth.
He pieced together what had happened quickly. The burn marks on the girl's hands were not accidental. Someone had done this deliberately. The same person who had done it before, if the mother's tone was anything to judge by—the resigned, practiced patience of someone who had accepted a situation they could not yet escape.
The boy's mind turned the problem over systematically.
Burns. Medieval environment. Available materials.
He stepped toward the stall's storage shelves and scanned the goods arranged there. His eyes stopped on a clay jar near the back.
Honey.
Raw, unprocessed honey—a natural antibacterial agent with remarkable wound-healing properties. Combined with clean cloth and kept dry, it would do far more for burned skin than whatever lotion the mother had been using.
He waited until the curtain shifted and the woman stepped back out, and then he spoke.
"The honey in your storage," he said. "Apply it directly to the burn. Keep it wrapped in clean cloth and change it twice a day. It will heal faster than the lotion."
The woman went very still.
She stared at him.
"How do you know about the burn?" Her voice was quiet, but the edge in it was sharp. "I was speaking softly. No one should have been able to hear that conversation."
The boy said nothing.
But the girl had followed her mother out of the storeroom. She was looking at the boy with entirely different eyes now—wide, suddenly alert, the earlier suspicion replaced by something that looked like cautious wonder.
"Are you a disciple of an immortal?" she asked.
The boy blinked. "Why would you think that?"
"Because I know someone with abilities like yours," the girl said carefully. "Enhanced hearing. Strength beyond ordinary people. He is a disciple of a cultivator—an immortal master. That is why he has power. That is why no one in the village can stand against him."
The boy was quiet for a moment.
Behind his calm expression, his mind was moving quickly.
A cultivator. An immortal master with disciples. This was exactly the thread he had come to find. A direct connection to the world of cultivation, handed to him through the burned hands of a small girl.
"Yes," the boy said slowly. "I am."
The girl's breath caught.
"I am searching," he continued. "And I can help you—if you tell me what I need to know."
He looked at her steadily.
"Tell me who that person is."
The girl held his gaze for a long moment. Something passed across her face—the careful calculation of someone who had been disappointed before, weighing the cost of hoping again.
Then she spoke.
"It is my uncle," she said quietly. "He has taken everything from us. Our house, our father's business, everything. He tortures us and no one in the village will stand against him." Her voice dropped even lower.
"Because there is an immortal cultivator standing behind him."
The boy nodded slowly.
Inside, the excitement was already building—contained, disciplined, but undeniable.
He had found his entrance into the world of cultivation.
It had come wrapped in the suffering of a small girl with burned hands.
And he intended to use it very carefully.
Huang shing spent the rest of that afternoon thinking.
Not idly—with the precise, systematic calculation of someone running probability assessments.
He needed to meet the cultivator.
The uncle was the bridge.
The question was how to cross that bridge in a way that maximized his chances of a useful introduction rather than a hostile one.
He needed leverage.
He needed to demonstrate power without revealing what he truly was.
By the time evening settled over the village, he had his answer.
He slipped away from the stall quietly and spent the remaining hours of daylight gathering materials.
Charcoal from cooking fires.
Sulfur from the mineral deposits he had noticed near the village well.
Saltpeter from the dried residue along the stone walls where moisture had evaporated over years.
He worked through the night by feel and memory, grinding and mixing with careful, practiced hands. The proportions were precise.
They had to be.
By morning, he had enough gunpowder to make his point several times over.
He returned to the woman's stall before she had finished opening for the day.
"I need to borrow some clay jars," he said.
The woman looked at him with tired skepticism.
"I told you I can help get rid of your problem," he said. "I meant it."
The woman shook her head slowly. "You are one boy. He has a cultivator behind him."
Without a word, Huang Xing cupped a small amount of powder in his palm, produced a spark from two stones, and let a brief controlled flame burst from his hand and vanish in an instant.
The woman stumbled backward.
Her daughter grabbed her sleeve.
They both stared at the boy with wide, stunned eyes.
He waited patiently while they recovered.
The woman gave him the jars.
He walked to the uncle's house alone, carrying the clay jars under one arm with the casual ease of someone delivering market goods.
The village noticed immediately. Word traveled faster than his footsteps. By the time he reached the uncle's door, there were already people watching from doorways and windows—silent, tense, the way people watch something they expect will end badly.
"Come out," Huang shing called.
A long pause.
Then the door opened.
The uncle was a broad man with the permanent scowl of someone accustomed to having his moods respected.
He looked at the boy in front of him—thin, wearing a grain sack, holding clay jars—and the scowl deepened into genuine contempt.
"Who the hell are you?" he said. "I haven't seen you before. Are you a spy from another village?" His eyes narrowed. "Tell me how you want to die. If your explanation doesn't interest me, I'll choose for you."
Huang shing smiled.
Then he threw one jar directly at the uncle's feet.
The explosion was small—deliberate, controlled, designed to injure rather than kill. Shards of clay peppered the uncle's legs. He staggered backward with a shout of pain and shock, nearly losing his footing.
The watching villagers went absolutely silent.
They had expected the uncle to simply crush this strange boy. They had expected it to be over in seconds. Instead they were watching the uncle bleed from a dozen small cuts while a boy in a grain sack stood calmly holding two more jars.
The uncle recovered his footing and straightened.
His expression had changed entirely. The contempt was gone.
In its place was something more careful—the focused attention of a man reassessing a situation.
He had served his cultivator master for years.
Long enough to understand, at least partially, how the cultivation world worked.
He knew the difference between a cultivator and a mortal. The boy in front of him showed no signs of spiritual energy, no aura, no cultivation base that he could detect.
But he had just produced an explosion from a clay jar.
A artifact maker, perhaps.
Dangerous in a different way entirely.
"What do you want?" the uncle said, his voice stripped of its earlier mockery.
"I want to meet the cultivator behind you," Huang shing said simply.
The uncle laughed—a short, sharp sound.
"You are not worthy of that."
Huang shing threw two more jars.
The uncle moved with surprising speed, his limited cultivation allowing him to dodge the one aimed at himself.
But the second jar struck the wall of the house. Fire bloomed across the wooden frame instantly.
The uncle spun, summoned what wind technique he possessed, and extinguished the flames before they could spread. Then he turned back, breathing harder now, his composure fraying at the edges.
"I will not take this lying down," he said tightly. "I have techniques of my own. Don't think you are the only one with cards to play."
"You can show them," Huang shing said pleasantly, adjusting the bag under his arm.
"But I have enough of these to damage a great deal more than you can repair.
And when your master asks why his disciple's home is rubble, it will be better for you if you were the one who made the introduction." He tilted his head slightly. "That might even count as a merit."
The uncle stared at him.
The fire crackled softly against the scorched wall behind him.
For a long moment, the only sound was the wind moving between the houses and the distant, breathless murmuring of the watching villagers.
Then the uncle's jaw tightened.
And Huang shing could see the calculation happening behind his eyes—pride wrestling with practicality, stubbornness wrestling with self-preservation.