The world Hei Long left behind fell quiet at last.The seas calmed. The masters' fleet sank to silt. Hearths turned to cities, cities to nations, and his name to myth. The Origin's pulse faded into the rhythm of the planet itself — a buried heartbeat.
For a thousand years, the light slept.
Until something else stirred.
Deep beneath a foreign sky, in a world that had never known his fire, a storm gathered over a black plain. Lightning crawled through the clouds like veins of molten glass. The ground was scorched, cracked — not by war, but by hunger. The people here spoke of Eclipses instead of hearths, and of gods that devoured their own light.
And in the heart of that dying land, a single ember flared.
The Birth
A child gasped his first breath under a violet sky. No midwife lit incense — there was nothing left to burn. But as the newborn cried, a pulse of white fire rippled through the dust, etching faint glyphs into the floorboards.
