The Soul Lantern above Nanshan Town shivered.
Its golden runes dimmed. The ward over the town, once thick as jade, thinned to paper.Clouds rolled in like black iron. Thunder stitched the sky.
Then the Lantern drank.
From every house, every alley, thin threads of pale light—years—rose and poured into the Lantern's belly. Old men sagged at their doors. Mothers clutched their children and felt winter crawl into their bones. The Lantern drank, and the darkness pressed back for one more breath.
Xu Pingsheng ran uphill into the wind.
The hill shrine's steps were slick with ash. Below, roofs caved without fire. A cow lowed once and fell. He did not look down. He ran toward the only thing that had ever kept this town alive: the Lantern that ate their tomorrow so they could live today.
At the last step he slipped. A hand caught him.
"Don't stop." His mother's voice. Her palms were warm, though the air bit like knives."Mother—""Keep going. Don't look back. Don't ever look back."
The wind snatched her words and threw them into the storm.
He climbed. At the shrine's heart, the great glass bulb burned the color of old honey. Inside floated a flame, thin as a needle, jerking in fear. Around the pedestal lay offerings: rice, salt, last year's peach pits, the first tooth he'd lost as a child, wrapped in red cloth for luck.
Luck had run out.
A bolt split the heavens. The Lantern's flame winked. Its light faltered—then died.
For one heartbeat, the world made no sound.
Then the dark fell.
It fell the way a sea falls when the dam breaks. It fell with weight and teeth. It chewed stone and time and breath. The shrine groaned. The hill shook. Pingsheng's knees buckled. He saw his mother below, face lifted to the dead light, and his father beside her, both of them small under a sky too big.
He reached for the Lantern. He had nothing to give. He had no years to pour, no prayers left that could be heard. He pressed both hands to the cold glass and willed it to burn.
A whisper answered from somewhere that was not the sky:
If Heaven decrees your death before thirty, will you bow?
"No." The word scraped his throat. "I will not."
If Heaven asks your name and writes it in ash, will you accept?
"No."
Then defy.
Something broke. Not in the shrine, not in the storm—inside him.
Chains he had never seen snapped. A wheel he had never touched turned. In his chest, behind his heart, a ring of steel and light began to spin—slow at first, then faster—shedding sparks that were not fire and not snow. It carved a path through the dark, and the dark recoiled like a beast put to the brand.
The glass under his palms went hot. The dead flame bled a thread of pale blue.The storm hissed. A Nether Thread—a hair-thin line no eye should see—ran from the Lantern into his hands, then into the ring inside him. He knew its name without being told. He knew, too, the brand at the base of his skull that he had always pretended was a birthmark—the Death Mark that said he would not live past twenty-nine.
"Pingsheng!" His father's voice below, raw. "Come down!"
He looked back.
The shrine roof tore like paper. Black rain scissored through where his parents stood. They did not move. They were holding the town behind them with the only thing they had left: their bodies. The rain cut through their shoulders, their arms. They were already falling when he screamed.
The Lantern flared.
It flared because he pulled. The ring behind his heart—his Soulwheel—caught the Thread and drew, not years, but order. It took the Lantern's right to drink and turned it back on the storm. For a breath, the darkness stumbled.
"Live," his mother mouthed. He saw her lips shape the word. "Live, Pingsheng."
The hill cracked. The shrine's pillars folded. The Lantern burst into a thousand shards. Every shard held a piece of flame; a thousand shards meant a thousand chances. He threw himself down the stairs through a rain of glass and light that did not cut him.
He found his parents in the rubble. He found their hands. He did not find their breath.
The storm moved on.
When the town's survivors dragged him from the shrine at dawn, they found him clutching two shattered glass shards that still smoldered with blue. His eyes were open. He did not blink.
Someone whispered, "The Lantern chose him."Someone else spat, "No. Heaven cursed him."
By nightfall, riders in cloud-gray robes came from the mountains—Taiching Sect—their sleeves heavy with dust, their eyes weighing, counting. They looked at the ruin on the hill and then at the boy who had lived under a dead Lantern.
"Bring him," the eldest said. "Quickly."
The shards in Xu Pingsheng's hands went cold.He did not let them go.
If Heaven decrees my death, he thought, and felt the wheel behind his heart turn once more, then I'll destroy Heaven itself.