Eighteen millennia ago, in the fabled Era of Desires, a child came into the world bearing a mysterious birthmark.
The night groaned beneath smoke and silence. The air quivered, heavy with the crackle of flames and the bitter tang of burning wood. Shadows bent and twisted across the walls, as if the darkness itself were weeping for what it was forced to witness.
Once, the mansion had been a palace of pride – white stone pillars carved with golden dragons, gardens laid out like living mazes, fertile fields and flowing canals, sacred cultivation halls where generations honed their spirits, ancestral platforms where elders had spoken blessings over the bloodline. Now, all of it perished in the same breath of ruin.
Spiritual chambers collapsed under a hail of fire arrows; the agricultural lands were drenched in the blood of faithful servants; pillars melted like wax in an unseen furnace; ancestral platforms became nothing but graves for the children and grandchildren who had once prayed there.
There was no one left to cry for the fallen. No one heard their screams. Heads rolled, severed from bodies like livestock in a slaughterhouse. The only thing that remained in the fading eyes of the dying was fear – raw, pitiful, and unanswered.
Still, in the midst of that hellscape, a single couple stood watching, their silence louder than any scream. Their eyes trembled, their bodies shivered with the weight of helplessness. Even the grass beneath their feet seemed to forget the instinct of life, bowing limp as if it too had given up its will to cry.
The air was not merely hot – it was suffocating, thick with the cries of the dying. The night sky, usually bright with stars, dimmed as though even the heavens could not bear to look down upon this massacre.
And at the heart of it all, in a cradle of ash and flame, a single infant wailed – the only sound of life amidst a symphony of death. On that night, the fire of sacrifice consumed his entire family, leaving him to the world’s cruelty before he even had a chance to speak their names.
All of this devastation – all of this blood – had been spilled for one child.