The Return of the Mad Mortal
What does a man with nothing do in a world that measures everything?
Hao Tian did not choose exile. He chose something far harder than that — he chose not to kill an innocent man when ordered to do so, at the age of ten. And the family he once belonged to never forgave him for it. They shut the door behind him in the dead of night and erased his name from every record they kept, as though he had never existed.
Four years alone in the wilderness did not break him. But they left him with a question he could not stop turning over in his mind.
Fire holds no inner energy. It follows no path that anyone charted centuries ago. Yet it burns everything it touches. Where does its power come from?
That question led Hao Tian, at the age of fourteen, to something no one had ever named before him. Not inner energy. Not inherited technique. Something older than all of that — something bound to nature itself, to the laws that were already at work long before any man arrived to give them a name and build authority upon them.
But the world did not pause in his absence.
The family that cast him out still stands.
And the man he refused to kill — Hao Tian still does not know, to this day, whether he is still breathing.
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