Children of the Hall were taught early to sleep with a soft light in the mind. It was a discipline: let the soul breathe and tune like a string. Most did so by their tenth year. Liu Feng's string sang when he was six.
It happened during a morning lesson in the Chamber of Quiet, where students learned to fold their intentions into simple shapes: focus, restraint, recall. The room smelled of old paper and resin. BiBi Dong had stationed herself at the front of the circle with an unreadable face.
Liu Feng sat cross-legged, knees thin as a lamb's. He closed his eyes because he had been taught to close them, but the mind does not always follow training. He felt—first as a warmth under the ribs—then as a soft knocking from a cavernous distance. Something large breathed under his breastbone. He kept breathing to match its pace.
The stone image of the Phoenix above the altar fluttered as though a breeze had passed through it. The candles twitched. In the corner of the chamber, one elder let out a low noise, half-suppressed.
Then the voice came, not in his ears but across the rooms of being: a gentle modulation, layered and feminine. [Genesis System online. Bond established.]
At once, the world sharpened. Light bit at edges of shadows. A new register opened inside Liu Feng: he saw the fine filaments of other spirits—the old woman at the low-hut of the groundskeeper who had a star's sorrow in her spine; the baby sparrow with a half-broken wing; a memory of a boy who had died in the Hall three decades earlier. Each filament sang with a tone he could not yet name.
BiBi Dong's fingers went cold against the slide of the prayer bead in her hand. There are many awakenings a Saint can see and the weight of a system-fusion is one she will remember for a long, long time. She had felt it once, in a distant youth not wholly her own.
The system's female voice—Eith er—spoke in the soft steel of machinery braided with the cadence of an old god. [Liu Feng. Initial bond successful. Spirit template: Phoenix of Genesis. Birth-grade: innate twenty. Primary node: fire (seeded). Mission path established.]
Children around him stirred; some threw curious glances. The elders' faces altered like clouds. An assessment ran through the Hall like the tremor of a drum. Level twenty: such a rating was not a merit, it was a problem. It marked the child as an axis point, and axes attract weight.
Liu Feng opened his eyes, and for the first time he saw the system interface that would be his secret companion: a ring of subtle glyphs, a soft, humming notice. He felt the slow uncoiling of possibility. A single line of text arrived within his own throat like something being read aloud in his blood:
[Mission queued: First Soul Trial—Eternal Flame: Acquire the Primordial Flame Phoenix's Ring. Reward: Sacred Fire Node.]
He looked at BiBi Dong. She had always taught him, "Power is the breath of consequences. Never take it until you can answer not just how to use it—but why."
"I'm ready," he said aloud, though he felt no magnificent surge of bravery. It was quiet determination—less the roar of a warrior than the steady pull of a tide.
The Hall prepared the trial the way it prepared others: with caution, with ritual, and with the watchful eyes of those who had outlived fewer storms. The path to the Star-Fire Wood—a sacred grove where the primordial embers were said to sleep—was barricaded with wards and seals. Only those deemed ready were allowed to pass the outer rim. It was as much a lesson of restraint as of power.
When the day arrived, the elders floated through their liturgy and the students watched in a hush. Liu Feng walked to the grove barefoot, his clothes catching small sparks that soothed instead of burned. He felt the new ring of knowledge in him, the system's low song—a metronome for patience.
At the grove's rim the air tasted like old gold. Flames braided together into pillars of light, but they did not behave like common fire. They seemed to whisper in old languages: names of summers and names of deaths, the kind of memory that keeps track of the world's first mistakes and first mercies.
In the center of the grove, perched like a small constellation of feathers, the Primordial Flame Phoenix watched with an intelligence not confined to the animal world. Its body was layered with seven strata of flame, each a different hue: ruby, amber, copper, blue, white, violet, and one that seemed to drink the darkness between stars.
It flew down on the soft legs of a dream and studied the boy.
"Why do you stir me, small one?" it asked, not cruel but with that patient gravity that ancient beings afford.
Liu Feng's reply was not a litany of wants. "So I can learn how to burn what should burn, and nurture what should bloom."
The Phoenix tilted its head, a creature that has seen empires birthed on a whim. Then it spoke the test plainly. "If I gave you a flame that would burn everything, would you hold it until the world required erasure?"
Liu Feng thought of BiBi Dong's hand on his chest that first night—the pressing anchor. He thought of the Hall's cracked histories and the hungry mouths outside the walls. "I would not hold it for wanton ruin," he said. "I would hold it to purge rot and carve a place for fresh growth. If the world does not need burning, I will not burn it."
Silence. The Phoenix exhaled and placed into his palm a single feather of living flame. It felt warm and old and bright like a memory. The ring—an actual small, spinning loop of fire—coalesced and slid into his spirit-space. The Primordial Flame spoke again: "Remember, child: fire remembers what you make it remember."
When he emerged from the grove, the Hall erupted in noise—some in praise, some in the low fear that great change can create. Liu Feng carried in him something that was not only power but the first true piece of an identity that would later define an age. He was still small; his voice still fit inside a child's throat. Yet in him the world had placed a gear.
That night, BiBi Dong sat before him as he slept and traced the faint glow that pulsed under the boy's skin. She felt a parent's fierce, nervous devotion. "There will be a storm," she whispered to the sleeping child, and the child in his dream answered by folding his hand around the ember, cradling it like a second heart.
From six to seven, the world had rearran
ged itself just enough to make space for destiny.