The rain didn't fall gently in Thunder Vein Village it punched the earth like a god slapping a drum.
Jiang Yunfan sat shirtless on the village shrine's crumbling roof, soaked and humming off-tune while plucking the broken strings of an old zither with a chopstick. The villagers below didn't bother to look up. They'd seen this fool's antics too many times.
"Hey! Yunfan!" A merchant yelled as he trudged past. "If lightning splits your head open tonight, do us a favor and leave your shoes to someone useful!"
Jiang Yunfan grinned, still strumming, "If I get struck, old Wu, tell the heavens I said thank you. At least someone finally noticed me."
The merchant spat and moved on.
In this corner of the world, everyone cultivated children trained body techniques by five, meridian awakening by ten, and joined sects by fifteen. Yunfan? Seventeen years old. Still couldn't circulate Qi. Still considered trash.
Worse, he acted like trash. Carefree, always laughing, telling dumb stories about "ascending through flirting" or "inscription arrays made of poetry." The elders called him cursed. The kids called him Cloud brain.
But Yunfan wasn't as clueless as he looked.
Tonight, for the third month in a row, he'd sat directly beneath the eye of the thunderclouds, begging the sky for something.
And tonight, the sky answered.
A lightning bolt screamed down not white, not blue, but violet, coiling like a dragon's spine. It struck him full in the chest.
The zither snapped. Yunfan didn't.
Instead, he laughed.
It started as a chuckle dry, confused. Then his body arched backward, mouth wide, as the laughter turned into something alive. Thunder rolled through his bones, and every nerve lit with fire.
He couldn't breathe. He couldn't think. He could only laugh.
He woke up in the mud at dawn. Naked. Smoking.
"Holy sh—" he muttered, then coughed up black mist. The soil around him was cracked. The shrine was gone. In his palm sat a single, glowing sigil—spiraling like a laughing mouth and pulsing with quiet thunder.
He blinked at it. "Well... either I ascended," he said, "or I pissed off an immortal with a sense of humor."
He stumbled back to the village half-fried, half-naked, and fully grinning. As expected, they called him mad. As expected, he let them.
Two days later, a guest arrived at Thunder Vein Village.
He was old, thin, and walked with a crooked cane made of black lightning wood. His robes bore a faded crest: a thunderbolt splitting a mountain.
He found Jiang Yunfan playing with a half-fixed zither on a tree stump.
"You there," the old man croaked, eyes narrowing. "You've touched tribulation lightning."
"Touched? No. Hugged. It hugged back." Yunfan smiled, fingers still plucking casually.
The man didn't laugh. "You're either cursed or chosen. Which are you?"
"Can't I be both?"
The elder squinted harder, then finally nodded. "I am Elder Thunderpeak of the Heaven-Splitting Thunder Sect. I've come to see if the lightning left you anything worth salvaging."
"I've got fried ribs, and a ruined zither. Oh, and a mark that glows when I hum."
"…You'll do."
And so, two days later, Jiang Yunfan left the village that mocked him for a place most cultivators had forgotten: a remote mountain range where thunder never slept, home to a crumbling sect on the edge of extinction.
He joined not as a disciple, but as a servant.
Mopping floors. Feeding birds. Scrubbing thunder-forged stone tiles with a toothbrush.
But at night, under the open sky, Jiang Yunfan sat with his broken sword and cracked zither. And as lightning curled between his fingers and laughter echoed across the cliffs, something ancient began to stir.