Three centuries past, the sect's founder was nothing more than a village boy with impossible dreams. Feng Tianyang, they called him—a name that meant "Heavenly Sun," though his parents were rice farmers who'd never seen the inside of a cultivation manual.
The summer he turned sixteen, Feng Tianyang made a habit of meditating at dawn, facing the rising sun. The village elders called it foolishness. His father called it laziness. But the boy persisted, convinced that immortality lay somewhere in that golden light.
Then came the morning that changed everything.
A shadow crossed the sun—massive, impossible. Feng Tianyang's eyes snapped open just in time to see a creature of legend soar across the solar disc. A phoenix. Its wingspan stretched wider than the valley itself, each feather drinking sunlight until the bird seemed made of pure radiance.
"It cultivates the sun's breath," the boy whispered, understanding blooming like dawn. "The phoenix bathes in light itself."
From that single moment of revelation, Feng Tianyang developed the Solar Vein Cultivation system. He taught disciples to breathe with the sun's rhythm, to draw life from light. He built a sect and named it the Sunlight Phoenix Sect (陽光鳳凰宗, Yángguāng Fènghuáng Zōng), declaring his students would one day soar as high as the legendary bird he'd witnessed.
Three hundred years later, those ambitions had crashed to earth.
The Sunlight Phoenix Sect clung to the remote Misty Jade Mountains like moss on a forgotten stone. Third-rate at best. Their strongest elder had barely touched the seventh step of Vein Awakener realm—impressive for a village, pathetic by any real standard.
But the statue remained. In the main courtyard, the stone phoenix spread its wings wide, forever frozen mid-flight across an eternal sun. A monument to dreams that had dimmed but never quite died.