Before the first breath of cultivation,
Six stars align in silent conversation.
One for the throne, where will is cast,
One crown above, to hold and last.
Four pillars stand at the compass points,
To bear the weight of heaven's joints.
Yet in the script of cosmic law,
A line may break, a soul may flaw.
For what is writ by fading hands,
The unwritten will, the soul demands.
The poem was older than any sect.
Older than any kingdom.
Older than the lands that still remembered their names.
No one knew who had written it. Only that it predated the systems that now governed cultivation—the doctrines that divided power into ranks, paths, and permissions. Some believed it was a fragment of an ancient manual. Others dismissed it as metaphor, a relic from an era when cultivators still romanticized the Dao.
Yet the poem endured.
Passed quietly from master to disciple, hidden in marginal notes, etched into forgotten stone, whispered in places where oaths were sworn and futures quietly traded away. It spoke of six foundations, of balance, of design.
And of failure.
Most chose not to dwell on that part.
The world preferred certainty. It preferred structure. It preferred a Dao that could be cataloged, measured, and enforced. Over time, cultivation became less about understanding and more about compliance about selecting approved paths, binding oneself to immutable arts, and advancing only when sanctioned.
The heavens did not object.
They did not intervene.
They simply watched.
Two million years had passed since the last true unifier of laws walked the world. Since then, borders had sealed, doctrines had ossified, and power had learned to disguise itself as order. Authority no longer descended from above it circulated through institutions, contracts, and carefully written rules.
What had once been living law became inheritance.
And inheritance, when left unexamined, decays.
In a land cut off from the greater world, where ambition was rationed and futures decided early, a child would one day encounter the meaning buried beneath that old poem not as philosophy, but as inevitability.
That the six stars were never equal.
That balance was assumed, not guaranteed.
And that a system built by fading hands could not anticipate every will it would one day attempt to bind.
The Dao was not broken.
It was incomplete.
And somewhere within that incompleteness,
an authority waited
not written into law,
not granted by heaven,
but claimed.