Night in the Star-Severing Pavilion was a tapestry of shadows and mocking stars. The ancient halls, once alive with the laughter of prodigies, now echoed only with the bitter wind. At the edge of the crumbling courtyard, Aetherion Vale knelt beneath the fading heavens—blood staining his robe, dust clinging to his hands.
He waited for pain to subside. It never did.
The other disciples had left him there—another lesson for the "veinless trash" too daring to gaze at the stars. He stared upward anyway, searching for meaning in constellations he could never touch.
Above him, clouds churned unnaturally. Thunder rolled. The celestial storm—a rare, cosmic trial sent from the Will of the Universe itself—arrived with furious light. Bolts of energy rained down, shattering pillars and carving rifts into the ground.
Aetherion felt something break within his soul. Not despair—something deeper. A silent, ancient mark in the core of his being pulsed for the first time.
The world froze, the wind fell silent. Every star, every cosmic thread, seemed to peer down and bear witness.
From within, the Ancestral Will Fragment awakened.
He doubled over as a surge of force erupted from his heart, invisible yet absolute. Veins of energy, luminous and foreign, spread through his body—not like golden rivers of Qi, but threads of pure cosmic Will. For a moment, Aetherion sensed the structure beneath all creation—the dance of laws, the melody of existence itself snarled into harmony and chaos.
The pavilion's ancestral array cracked open, flooding the land with ancient symbols. Disciples and elders rushed out, faces pale with terror. Divine sects in distant realms felt the tremor and turned their gaze toward this forgotten orphan.
Aetherion's eyes reflected the storm—blinding, infinite, unyielding.
He heard a distant voice:
"To defy Heaven is to become its enemy. To touch the Will is to become its prey."
Pain sharpened into clarity. Fear stilled into awe.
In that moment, the Star-Severing Pavilion was no longer silent. The universe itself listened as the Veinless One took his first step along a path no other soul had walked.
Beneath the dying stars, Aetherion Vale awakened—not as mortal, not as immortal, but as the first echo of a new Will.