In the Void, there is no such thing as a scream.
For one thousand years—measured not by suns or moons, but by the agonizingly slow decay of his own memories—he had been a flicker of consciousness in a sea of absolute nothingness.
There was no light to see, no air to breathe, and no floor to stand upon. He had forgotten the sound of his own name within the first decade. By the fifth century, he had forgotten what it felt like to have skin. He was simply an "I," a solitary point of awareness held together by nothing but a stubborn, pathological refusal to vanish.
He had counted. He had counted the pulses of his thoughts until the numbers became meaningless, then he counted them again. He had mapped the geometry of silence. He had stared into the throat of non-existence until the non-existence blinked first.
Then, the Silence broke.It didn't shatter; it tore. A jagged rift of violet and gold light lanced through the darkness, screaming with a frequency that would have vaporized a lesser soul. For the first time in a millennium, he felt pressure. It was as if the universe had suddenly remembered he existed and was trying to squeeze him back into a shape he no longer recognized.
"Gravity."
The word flickered in his mind like a dying ember. Then came the pain.
It was a tidal wave of agony. Every nerve ending—billions of them, brand new and raw—fired at once. He was no longer a point of light; he was a mass of wet, heavy meat. He felt the cold bite of air entering lungs that had never expanded, a sensation like swallowing broken glass.
"Push, My Lady! His Qi is stagnating! You must guide him out!"
The voice was like a hammer against his new eardrums. He tried to recoil, but his limbs were trapped in a warm, constricting darkness. He was being forced through a narrow passage, his soft skull compressing, his spirit being anchored into a vessel of bone and blood.
With a final, violent heave of the universe, he was out.The light was blinding. It was a physical assault. He tried to shut his eyes, but his muscles were weak and uncoordinated. He felt hands—massive, warm, and trembling—lift him into the air.
"A son," a woman's voice whispered.It was the most beautiful sound he had ever heard. It was thick with exhaustion, humming with a power that made the air around her shimmer like a heat haze. He felt himself being pressed against a chest that beat with a rhythmic thunder.
"He... he isn't crying," the woman breathed. Her face came into his blurry field of vision. She looked like a goddess carved from starlight, her hair a cascading river of midnight, but her eyes were bloodshot and wide with terror.
"He does not cry because he has forgotten how," a man's voice rumbled.A shadow fell over him. A man stood over the bed, draped in robes the color of a bruised sky. He radiated an aura so dense it felt like standing near a sun; the very walls of the room—carved from white jade and inscribed with glowing runes—seemed to groan under his presence.The man placed a finger on the infant's forehead. A surge of golden crystalline energy flowed into the baby's brow, racing through his "Meridians"—channels the man from the void instinctively recognized as the pathways of life.
"His soul," the man whispered, his voice trembling with a mixture of awe and dread.
"It is not the soul of a babe. It is ancient. It is tempered. It carries the chill of the Great Outer Emptiness."
"The Void-Seed," the woman gasped, clutching the child tighter. "Lin Tian, if the High Heavens sense this... if the Immortal Courts realize what has crawled back from the Silence..."
"I know," the man said sharply. Outside the jade-walled room, a thunderclap shook the foundations of the world. It wasn't a storm of rain, but a storm of will. The sky was screaming.The man, Lin Tian, turned toward the window. Far above, the clouds were swirling into a giant, golden eye that peered down at the mortal realm, searching for the ripple in reality that had just occurred.
"They are already here," Lin Tian said, his face hardening into a mask of grim resolve. "The Forbidden Seal didn't hold. We have minutes, at most."
The woman looked down at her son. Her tears fell onto his cheeks, warm and salty. The infant didn't blink. He watched her with deep, dark eyes that held the stillness of a graveyard. He was recording her. He was etching the curve of her jaw and the scent of her skin into the core of his being. He had lost everything once; he would not lose this memory.
"My little star," she whispered. "My silent wanderer. You must live. You must grow until the stars themselves are but pebbles in your path."She reached into her robes and pulled out a pendant. A heavy jade pendant was pressed into the infant's swaddling clothes—a dragon coiled around a broken star.," cold and pulsing with a rhythmic, purple light. "This is the Void-Anchor," she whispered. "It will shroud your spirit. To the world, you will appear as a commoner with broken meridians. To the Heavens, you will be invisible. Do not seek us, child. Not until you have reached the Peak of the Nine Realms. Not until you can kill a god with a flick of your sleeve."
"They are at the gates!" Lin Tian roared. He threw his hand outward, and a sword made of condensed starlight appeared in his grip. With a single strike, he tore a hole in the very fabric of the room—a swirling vortex of blue energy.
"Go!" the man commanded.A figure stepped from the shadows—an old woman, her face hidden behind a porcelain mask. She took the infant from the mother's arms. For a moment, the mother's fingers lingered, unwilling to let go of the silk.
"Take him to the Southern Desolation," Lin Tian ordered the masked woman. "Hide him in the dirt. Let him grow as a weed, unnoticed and unbothered."
"Wait!" the mother cried out. She leaned forward, pressing her lips to the infant's forehead.
"Your name... your name is Lin Shen."
Remember it. Even when the world forgets you, remember you are ours."The masked woman stepped into the blue vortex.
The infant felt a sudden, sickening sensation of falling. He looked back through the closing rift. He saw his father, Lin Tian, leaping toward the ceiling as it exploded in a shower of golden fire. He saw his mother standing in the center of the room, her hands weaving a complex seal of forbidden power, her eyes fixed on the spot where he had just been.Then, the rift snapped shut.
The air was different here. It was thin, dusty, and smelled of dry grass.The masked woman didn't speak. She ran with a speed that blurred the landscape, crossing mountains and rivers in single bounds. Finally, she reached a small, dilapidated village nestled in the crook of a barren mountain range.She placed the wicker basket on the steps of a small, run-down orphanage run by a local monastery. She lingered for a second, her hand hovering over the child."May the Dao have mercy on you, little one," she whispered. "For your parents have given you a gift that is also a curse. You are the only thing in this world that knows what it is like to be nothing. I hope, for all our sakes, you become everything."
She vanished into a puff of mist.A few minutes later, an old monk with a tattered saffron robe opened the door. He looked down, squinting through the morning fog."Another mouth to feed?" the monk sighed, looking at the silent baby. "Well, at least you're a quiet one. Most of them scream like the world is ending. You... you look like you've already seen it end."The monk lifted the basket and carried it inside.
The infant, Han Jue, looked up at the rafters of the old building. He felt the heavy jade pendant against his chest. He felt the tiny, flickering flame of his new life.
He was weak. He was tiny. He was alone.But as he closed his eyes, he began to do the only thing he knew how to do. He began to count. But this time, he wasn't counting the seconds of his imprisonment.He was counting the days until he would return to the sky and demand an answer from the stars.One.