The world did not end with a bang. It ended with silence… and rain.
Blood-colored rain.
Raizen Drayke stood motionless beneath the ancient sycamore tree, soaked in crimson. Not a drop touched the earth. Every splatter was caught mid-air—frozen by the thin, invisible aura swirling around him. His fingers twitched slightly, aching with power he didn't understand.
He should've died today.
"Why… am I still alive?" he whispered.
The battlefield lay in ruin. Broken bodies, shattered swords, a sea of ash where once stood the city of Drevharn. The city of his birth. The city that burned in the name of cultivation.
And it was all for a lie.
Raizen took a shaky step forward, his left boot crunching over charred bone. The sky above was still a violent shade of dusk-red, as if heaven itself had gone mad. The clouds were thick, swirling unnaturally—as if something above was still watching him.
Still waiting.
His hand drifted to the chain hanging from his neck. A single black fang dangled from it, warm against his skin. The only thing left from his father… or the man who claimed to be.
He closed his eyes.
Then the whispers returned.
"Feed the spark, child of the Hollow Flame…"
"The Chains remember. The Sky will kneel."
"But beware… even gods bleed."
Raizen flinched. Not from fear—he'd heard voices since the age of ten. But tonight, they were louder. Clearer. Hungrier.
A gust of wind blew across the battlefield, lifting the ash into a spiral dance. And with it came the scent of scorched memories—old metal, cracked skin, the sharp tang of betrayal. His knuckles whitened.
They left him behind. The sect that took him in when he was just a child. The Silver Fang Cultivation Sect. They used him. They trained him. And the moment he failed to awaken his core in time… they abandoned him as a decoy in the war.
Thirteen years of servitude, gone in a heartbeat.
He should be dead. A failed cultivator. Trash.
But something awoke instead.
A faint pulse throbbed in his chest again—deep, ancient, painful. His spiritual sea, long believed to be hollow, now surged with a black mist that coiled and twisted like a living shadow.
His cultivation... had begun.
But it wasn't normal. This wasn't Qi from the Five Celestial Paths. This was something else. Something older.
Something forbidden.
He raised his hand.
The red rain around him twisted and shot upward in a spiral column, swirling faster with every heartbeat. Thunder cracked above.
And then he heard footsteps behind him.
"You survived?"
Raizen turned, slowly. A figure emerged through the haze. A young man in silver robes, his right hand dripping blood. Eyes sharp like daggers. Elric Vane, once his senior in the sect. The same one who slit Raizen's tendon to slow him down during their escape.
Raizen's eyes narrowed. "Unfortunate for you."
Elric smirked. "You always were a little too stubborn to die. But you're not a cultivator, Raizen. You're empty inside."
Raizen's lips curled.
"Maybe I was," he whispered, voice calm. "But something filled me. And now... I hear the Chains."
Elric's smirk faded.
Raizen stepped forward. The air shimmered. The blood rain around him solidified into jagged crimson blades, hovering like ghostly fangs. His aura pulsed dark and heavy—an unnatural pressure, unlike any cultivation realm known.
"I'm not here to survive anymore," Raizen said, voice echoing like distant thunder. "I'm here to rise."
The chains around his neck began to rattle. His eyes burned with a flicker of black flame.
And as the wind roared, and the sky howled, Raizen Drayke—marked by betrayal, born of silence, and forged beneath crimson rain—took his first step into cultivation.
But not the kind they teach in sects.
No, his was the Path of the Hollow Flame.
And it would consume the heavens.