Ren Wu died at 11:42 PM on a Tuesday.
He didn't see it coming.
He was too busy staring at a calculus problem about the conservation of energy, his pencil tapping against his desk in the rhythm of rain hitting his bedroom window.
*Energy cannot be created or destroyed,* the textbook said. *Only transformed.*
The words blurred together. He'd been staring at the same equation for twenty minutes, but his mind kept wandering. His parents had been gone for three months now. No calls. No emails. Just radio silence from their archaeological dig site in Shaanxi Province.
His grandmother kept saying they were fine. That radio silence was normal for their work.
But she'd started burning sage again.
"REN!"
His grandmother's voice didn't drift up the stairs like it usually did when dinner was ready.
It cracked through the house like a whip.
Sharp. Urgent. Terrified.
Ren dropped his pencil. It rolled off his desk and hit the hardwood floor with a small plastic click that seemed too loud in the sudden silence.
He ran.
Down the stairs, taking them two at a time, his socks sliding on the polished wood.
He knew that tone.
It wasn't her *dinner is ready* voice. It wasn't her *come help with the groceries* voice.
It was her *something is in the house* voice.
The one she'd used the night she found a dead bird on the doorstep with its wings arranged in a perfect circle.
The air downstairs tasted wrong.
Bitter. Smoky.
Like incense, but darker.
Burning sage.
His grandmother stood pressed against the front door, her back flat against the wood like she was trying to melt through it. Her knuckles were white around her prayer beads—the black jade ones she only wore to funerals.
She'd stopped burning sage years ago. After his parents disappeared into their research, she said some doors were better left closed. Some things were better left undisturbed.
But the sage was burning now. Thick smoke curled from a small brass bowl on the hall table, making the air hazy.
Between them sat a crate.
Wet from the rain outside. Heavy-looking. Made of dark wood that seemed to absorb the hallway light.
Water dripped from its edges in slow, steady drops that sounded too loud in the silence. But the water looked wrong. Too dark to be rainwater. Too thick.
Almost black.
"The return address..." His grandmother's voice shook so badly the words came out fragmented. "Site 404, Shaanxi Province. Ren. Do not touch it."
Ren stared at the box.
His parents were archaeologists. They sent weird gifts all the time—broken pottery that needed special handling, ancient coins wrapped in tissue paper, samples of dirt that had to be stored in temperature-controlled containers.
But this one felt different.
It hadn't come through the university's courier service like the others. No official stamps. No documentation.
Just his father's personal encryption seal pressed into red wax. The dragon symbol he only used for family emergencies.
The one that meant *urgent.*
The one that meant *dangerous.*
"It's probably just another replica, Grandma. You know how Dad gets excited about his finds. Remember when he sent us that fake burial mask?"
"It is not a replica."
Her hands were shaking so badly the prayer beads rattled against each other like tiny wind chimes in a storm.
"I can feel it, Ren. Whatever's in that box... it's not dead."
Ren looked at her. Really looked.
His grandmother was seventy-three years old. She'd survived the Cultural Revolution. She'd raised him alone after his parents got obsessed with their work. She'd never been afraid of anything.
But now she looked terrified.
No—not terrified.
*Hunted.*
Ren grabbed the crowbar from the hall closet, the one they used for home repairs and stubborn pickle jars.
He was eighteen.
A senior in high school.
He believed in physics and chemistry and things that made sense.
He believed in thermodynamics, not ghosts.
He wedged the iron bar under the crate's lid, feeling the wood resist.
"Ren, please—"
**CRACK.**
The wood splintered with a sound like breaking bones. Like something that had been sealed for a very long time finally giving way.
The smell hit him immediately.
Old air. Stale. Like opening a tomb.
Inside the wooden crate lay a second container.
Not wood this time.
Not metal.
Obsidian.
Black volcanic glass polished to a mirror finish, so dark it seemed to create its own shadows. The hallway lights reflected off its surface, but the reflections looked wrong. Distorted. Like looking into dark water.
It wasn't rectangular like a shipping box.
It was coffin-shaped.
Small. Maybe the size of a jewelry box.
But definitely a coffin.
Complete with tiny hinges and a miniature latch that looked like it was made of bone.
"Ren, no—"
His grandmother's voice came from very far away.
Logic told him it was just polished stone. Just another archaeological curiosity his father had found and wanted to share.
But instinct—something deeper and older than logic—screamed at him to run.
To get out of the house.
To burn the box without opening it.
Ren reached out anyway.
His finger brushed the cold black surface.
The obsidian was smooth. Perfect.
And warm.
It shouldn't have been warm.
**ZAP.**
---
The moment his skin touched obsidian—
The universe didn't blink.
It *tore.*
Like fabric ripping down the middle.
Ren was pulled out of his body—not gently, not like fainting or falling asleep—but Like being yanked through a hole the size of a pinprick, his entire existence compressed into something that shouldn't be able to contain it.
The hallway—the smell of sage, the sound of rain on the windows, his calculus textbook sitting open upstairs—
They didn't vanish.
They just stopped mattering.
Became background noise. Static on a radio tuned to the wrong frequency.
His grandmother's scream stretched out, becoming a low, endless moan that seemed to last forever.
A fraction of a second later—
Time broke.
One second stretched like taffy.
And stretched.
And stretched.
Became a minute. An hour. A century.
Ren stood on a platform of white jade floating in empty air above a world that was burning.
Not regular fire.
Spiritual fire. Green and gold flames that burned cold and consumed things that shouldn't have been flammable.
Hope. Memory. The spaces between thoughts.
The air tasted like copper pennies and the moment after lightning strikes.Like the taste of a spell that had just killed a million men.
He tried to breathe.
But the lungs he was using weren't his.
They were vast. Ancient. Scarred by centuries of breathing air that mortals couldn't survive.
Packed with the dust of empires that had risen and fallen before history began keeping records.
He looked down at his hands gripping a jade railing.
Wrong hands.
Pale where his were tanned from summer. Scarred in deliberate patterns—ritual scars that looked like they'd been carved with ceremony and precision.
Long fingers wrapped in black silk sleeves embroidered with dragons that seemed to writhe and shift when he wasn't looking directly at them.
Adult hands. Powerful hands.
Hands that had held weapons. Signed death warrants. Commanded armies.
*Where am I?* Ren screamed inside his own mind.
**Home,** something whispered back.
The voice came from inside his skull, but it wasn't his voice. It was older. Deeper. Heavy with the weight of authority that had never been questioned.
*As if you ever left. As if you could ever really leave.*
Then the memories came.
Memories hit him like artillery shells.
Not in chronological order. Not gently. Not like remembering a dream.
They detonated inside his consciousness like bombs going off in a sequence designed for maximum destruction.
He felt the weight of a crown made of black iron, fused directly to a skull through rituals that had killed the craftsmen who performed them. Felt the phantom pain of a thousand betrayals—political, personal, spiritual.
Felt the pressure—intoxicating and terrifying—of holding a Jade Seal that could command the sun itself to stop rising, the rivers to flow backward, the dead to get up and march.
He remembered being worshipped.
He remembered being feared.
He remembered the exact moment when fear had become more important than worship.
He wasn't Ren Wu, eighteen-year-old high school student who was bad at calculus and worried about college applications.
He was—
The Grand Shaman of the Western Mountains.
The Man Who Buried the Gods.
A sea of soldiers knelt before his platform.
Not hundreds.
Not thousands.
*Millions.*
Endless ranks stretching to the horizon, their armor glinting in the light of the burning sky. Terracotta warriors with hollow eyes that burned with cold blue fire—the fire of souls bound to service beyond death.
Even the dead refused to meet his gaze directly.
Because even the dead could still feel fear.
Through the kneeling sea of soldiers, someone stepped forward.
A man stepped forward from the kneeling masses.
Scholar's robes in pristine white. A ceremonial fan carved from human bone—the thighbone of a king, if Ren's inherited memories were correct.
His face was calm. Respectful. The expression of a man delivering news he took no pleasure in.
"Your Excellence," the scholar said, his voice carrying clearly across the vast space. "The Son of Heaven has submitted your existence for administrative termination. The Imperial Council has voted. The ritual preparations are complete."
He bowed slightly. Precisely the correct depth for addressing a condemned minister.
"You have become too dangerous to permit continued existence. The Empire apologizes for this necessity."
*Run.*
Ren's modern mind—the small, terrified part that was still eighteen years old and understood that this was all completely insane—screamed at him to run.
To jump off the platform. To hide. To negotiate. To beg.
To do anything except stand there looking bored.
But the Shaman didn't run.
The Shaman felt—
*Amused.*
Ren tried to scream. He couldn't.
Ren tried to clamp his mouth shut, to keep the words inside.
It didn't work.
The Shaman's will was like a mountain falling on his consciousness. It crushed Ren's modern identity into a corner of his own skull like an insect being pinned to a board.
The mouth opened without his permission.
"You think a mortal decree can dismiss me?"
The voice wasn't sound.
It was *Authority.*
Pure, undiluted power given voice. The kind of command that rewrote reality to make itself true.
The jade platform cracked under his feet. Hair-thin fractures spread out in perfect geometric patterns.
The sky split down the middle like torn fabric, revealing something vast and dark moving behind it.
Ren felt his ribs crack from the internal vibration alone. Felt his organs shift inside his chest as the sound waves passed through him.
The kneeling soldiers pressed their faces to the ground. Even the dead ones looked afraid.
The scholar lifted his fan.
The scholar's respectful expression never changed.
He'd expected this response. Had planned for it.
He pointed his bone fan upward, toward the tear in the sky.
"Then perish with appropriate ceremony, Your Excellence."
The clouds peeled away like old paint.
What came through wasn't a hand.
It was a judgment construct.
A skeletal claw the size of a mountain, wrapped in lightning that didn't just burn—it *annihilated.* Where the electricity passed, existence itself peeled away like old wallpaper, revealing empty void underneath.
This wasn't execution.
This was *erasure.*
Complete removal from the fundamental structure of reality.
*We're going to die!* Ren screamed inside his shared skull. *We're going to be unmade!*
The Shaman looked up at the descending claw.
His expression didn't change.
He looked back at the scholar.
"I will remember this," he said quietly.
For the first time, Ren felt the Entity's true emotion.
Not fear.
Not anger.
*Hunger.*
Vast hunger.
Patient hunger.
The claw descended.
**IMPACT.**
Not darkness.
*White.*
Pure, absolute white that burned worse than looking directly into the sun. White that erased color, erased thought, erased the possibility of existence.
Ren felt every bone in his body turn to powder. Felt his soul—*something* inside him that was more fundamental than consciousness—get ripped out like a weed being pulled from the ground.
Shredded into component pieces. Compressed beyond any reasonable limit.
Stuffed into a space barely large enough to contain a single heartbeat.
The obsidian coffin.
Then—
Nothing.
Claustrophobic nothing that pressed against his consciousness from all sides.
Endless nothing that stretched for—
*Two thousand years.*
Two thousand years of imprisonment in a box the size of his fist, unable to sleep, dream, or forget.
Just... waiting.
---
**GASSSSP.**
Ren arched off the hallway rug like he'd been electrocuted.
His back hit the hardwood floor so hard it knocked the wind out of him and made his teeth click together.
He wasn't on the jade platform.
He wasn't dead.
But the echo of a shattered divine spine still rang in his ears like tinnitus that would never stop. The phantom pain of bones turning to powder still burned through his nervous system.
He clawed at his chest, his fingers scrabbling at the fabric, trying to rip off silk robes that weren't there.
Found only his damp t-shirt and the rapid hammering of his very mortal, very human heart.
His eyes burned.
Not with tears.
With something green and cold and older than civilization.
Without thinking, he grabbed his grandmother's wrist.
He didn't see a seventy-three-year-old woman who made him soup when he was sick and helped him with his homework.
He saw a *civilian.*
A *subject.*
Something to be commanded. Protected. Ruled.
He opened his mouth to ask for help, to ask her what was happening to him.
What came out was—
"**ZHAO HUAN!**"
The word erupted from his throat like a command that had been building pressure for two millennia.
It didn't sound like speech.
It sounded like an order from something that had forgotten how to be human.
The hallway lightbulb exploded.
**POP.**
Glass rained down, tinkling against the floor like deadly snow. The sage smoke swirled in the sudden darkness.
Ren blinked.
The green fire in his eyes faded back to normal brown.
He slumped forward, coughing like he'd swallowed hot coals and broken glass.
"What—" He wheezed, his voice raw and strange in his own ears. "What did I just say? What was that word?"
His grandmother pulled her wrist free from his grip.
She was shaking.
Not like a woman looking at her confused grandson.
Like prey that had just realized a predator had opened its eyes and was now looking directly at her.
Like someone who had just heard a name that should never be spoken aloud.
"That name..." Her voice barely worked.
"You shouldn't know that name. No one alive should know that name."
Her eyes flicked to the coffin.
"Not unless the stories were true."
She backed away from him, still clutching her prayer beads.
"Where did you hear it, Ren? Where could you possibly have heard it?"
Ren stared at his trembling hands in the dim light filtering in from the street.
They looked normal again.
Eighteen-year-old hands. Slightly too thin. A small scar on his thumb from when he'd tried to whittle a stick in Boy Scouts.
Human hands.
Upstairs, his calculus textbook sat open on his desk, waiting for him to solve problems about the conservation of energy.
*Energy cannot be created or destroyed. Only transformed.*
A cold draft brushed the back of his neck.
From the shadows of the open obsidian coffin, something that felt ancient and patient and infinitely dangerous looked back at him.
Something that had always been there, sleeping in the back of his mind.
Waiting for the right moment to wake up.
And now it was awake.
And it was hungry.
---
[END CHAPTER 1]