The sky above the Wraithbone Ridge had long been broken.
Rifts—thin, jagged tears—spanned the heavens like ancient scars. Pale violet lightning surged silently across them, casting eerie shadows on the forgotten land below. Here, no birds sang, no beasts roamed. Only dust and wind whispered of things long buried.
At the edge of the ridge, beneath a twisted dead tree, a boy knelt in silence. Thin, barefoot, draped in a tattered grey robe, his hands were raw from digging—his nails cracked, his knuckles bleeding. He had been working since before dawn, yet not a single word had passed his lips.
His name was Lin Xuan, the orphan that even beggars pitied.
"Almost… there..." he whispered hoarsely, pushing aside a rock.
Beneath it, hidden for who knew how long, lay a stone tablet. It pulsed faintly in the dim light, inscribed with ancient symbols that crawled and shimmered like living shadows.
As he reached for it, pain stabbed through his head—blinding, searing. Visions surged into his mind: a throne drifting in a sea of stars… a man cloaked in darkness, unmoving as galaxies spun around him… a voice that shook his soul.
"You have found what should not be found… yet the void remembers."
Lin Xuan collapsed, body twitching. Blood streamed from his eyes, his ears. But somewhere in that agony… something changed.
Within his dantian, where once there was only stillness, a single mote of nothingness flickered—small, dark, and hungry.
When he awoke, the stars had shifted.
He sat up slowly, his breathing steady despite the pain. The stone tablet was gone. Only its imprint remained. But he didn't panic. He could feel it now—inside him. The knowledge. The presence. The void.
A single phrase echoed in his mind.
"To ascend, you must become the absence."
He looked up at the sky. At the rifts. At the heavens that had never acknowledged him.
His voice was quiet, but unyielding.
"Then I will force them to."