The night wind howled like a grieving spirit.
Lu Chan knelt at the edge of the broken altar, his robes torn, blood trickling down his cheek, mingling with the dirt. Around him, the shattered emblems of the Cloudspirit Sect lay scattered, glowing faintly in the dark. His spirit root—declared fragmented and useless—had just been severed by his own master.
"You are unworthy of the Dao," the elder had said coldly, voice echoing in the halls of the sect like a death sentence. "Leave, or be crushed beneath our feet."
No cultivation. No home. No future.
He was four.
But the boy did not cry.Instead, he sat beneath the dead plum tree on the mountainside, where the wind always smelled of frost and forgotten things. Hours passed. Days. Hunger gnawed at him, yet he remained motionless, eyes staring into the void between the stars.
Until the night the ground trembled.
The tree cracked open.
From its hollow core, a flicker of crimson-black flame slithered out—like a breath from some ancient ruin buried in the roots of the world. It danced toward him, cold and soundless.
Lu Chan did not run.He opened his palm.
And the flame did not burn him.
Instead, it seeped into his flesh, his bones, and his shattered spirit root. It consumed his weakness. It devoured his fate.And in that moment, the boy with no future became the vessel of something ancient—a flame older than the heavens, a power that remembered wars long before men knew how to name gods.
From that night forth, Lu Chan was no longer merely a castaway.
He was the bearer of the Hollow Flame.And Heaven had made a mistake letting him live.