By the time the Crimson Comet faded from memory for most of the Yunlai range, its echo still lingered in Lingtian Village like incense that refuses to disperse. The villagers learned to keep their distance when the child with the golden eyes toddled past. Chickens went quiet, dogs tucked their tails, and old men paused mid-gossip as if fearful that a single careless word might disturb a coiled dragon.
Qi Shan Wei learned the air before he learned letters. He learned that fear had a scent—wet straw and stale oil—when adults pulled their children behind their robes. He learned that wonder had a sound—the click of tongue against teeth—as farmers marked his height on gateposts and muttered about omens. He learned that loneliness is a room that does not answer back.
His father, Qi Duan, tried to fold the world into gentler shapes. He brought home fresh pears, a shallow bronze mirror, a kite patched with reed paper that painted the wind in fish-scale patterns. His mother hummed lullabies and tied his hair with a simple silk cord. In the early mornings, when the fog pooled between terraces and the mountains floated like islands, Qi Duan drew lines in the dirt with a bamboo rod.
"These are the nine breaths," his father said, tapping circles around the stick figure of a body. "Every life a bellows, drawing the world in and out."
Shan Wei imitated, chest swelling, trying to pull in the smell of wet earth and distant pine. The first breath came shallow and ragged. The second steadied. By the third, the fog above the terrace lifted in a single sheet, revealing a slice of the sky as if the village's roof had been peeled back.
Qi Duan's rod paused mid-air. "Again," he said softly. "Gentler."
They kept the lessons simple—breaths and balance, listening for the tremor beneath silence—because anything else made the house shiver. When excitement seized Shan Wei, the little clay stove would gutter, then flare. When he laughed too boldly, the candle flames leaned toward him as if gossiping. When he cried, the wooden beams creaked in sympathy.
The midwife who had witnessed his birth—Old Matron Yue—visited often, carrying a lacquered box of bitter herbs and a history older than the village. She told him the names of stars and the secret of wrists: how a healer reads the river of a life beneath the skin. She did not bow as others did. She tilted his chin with two fingers and peered into his eyes until he squirmed.
"Gold," she said, clicking her tongue. "Like coins fashioned straight from a god's furnace. And what do I see swimming there? The rest of your fate, playing coy." She cuffed him, gently. "Do not let it make you proud. Pride eats first and pays last."
When Shan Wei was five, the first rival found him. Not a villain in a black cloak, not a sect elder come to do harvest with a blade, but a boy of eight with a mouth full of clever rocks.
Lin Zhao came from the next hamlet over, where the paddies were lush and the roofs lacquered to a shine. He had a father who wore a sect token at his waist—a copper disc stamped with the chrysanthemum of the Green Spring Pavilion. The Pavilion was not great—not the Celestial Sect whose bells could be heard on clear mornings from a mountain three ridges away—but it had teachers, a gate, a rulebook. It had meaning. Lin Zhao wore that meaning like a second shirt.
He found Shan Wei sitting on the old stump behind the shrine, carving a dragon with a dull knife onto a flat piece of shale.
"Is it true," Lin Zhao said, hands on hips, "that when you sneeze, lightning comes out?"
Shan Wei looked up, nose smudged with stone dust, and shrugged. "Sometimes my hair stands up."
"That's the same thing," Lin Zhao declared. "My father says omens make people stupid. He says a comet only means the sky is old and sighing. He says children born beneath a comet grow crooked unless you beat them straight."
Shan Wei squinted at the slate. He scraped an arc into the stone—tail flick. "Does your father know I am here?"
"He knows everything," Lin Zhao said grandly, then hesitated. "Except why your eyes look like that."
"Ask him," Shan Wei said.
Lin Zhao shifted. "What are you carving?"
"A dragon," Shan Wei said. "Like the one that looked at me when I was born."
"You were a baby," the older boy scoffed. "You didn't see anything."
"Not with eyes," Shan Wei said, and smiled because he liked saying things that set people off balance.
Lin Zhao took the slate, studied the notched ridges, the way Shan Wei had scored stars into the dragon's spine. He set it down with a careful little clack.
"I can beat you at running," Lin Zhao said. "At stones. At kite-flying. At anything."
Shan Wei rose, dusting his knees. The stump's rings counted years beneath his palm. "Not at breathing."
"Everyone is good at breathing."
"Not like this."
They raced to the rice terrace's edge. A wind moved up-valley, combing the seedlings. Lin Zhao puffed out his chest and sprinted; his heels tore curls from the damp bank. Shan Wei simply—stood. In, out. In again. He let the mountain unhitch its weight from his shoulders and slide into his feet. He let the ridge-line's long spine settle into his back. Breath four. He lifted one foot and placed it where the world wanted.
By the time Lin Zhao circled back, panting, sweat shining at his temple, Shan Wei had walked the narrow berm to the far pylon without wavering. The villagers hawked and spat in disbelief. A bamboo pole tapped three times from an upper window—good fortune knocking.
"Trick," Lin Zhao said. His face went a complicated red.
"It's only breath," Shan Wei said. "Yours goes out sideways. Mine goes down."
Later, Lin Zhao came again—this time with two boys at his shoulder—and threw pebbles at Shan Wei's roof until Qi Duan called them vultures and chased them off. The world had found its first shape for the child of an omen: if he could not be ignored, he would be tested. If he could not be beaten, he would be blamed.
At the start of autumn, where the maple leaves were a formal red, Green Spring Pavilion sent a recruiter—Elder Lu, with a neatly combed beard and a smile like a lacquered box—with instructions to take promising children to the mountain school. He set up a screen in the shrine yard, hung a bronze bell, and painted eight characters on rice paper.
Steadfastness. Clarity. Restraint. Harmony. Courage. Patience. Filial Devotion. Trust.
"Step forward," said Elder Lu. "Touch the word you vow to practice. We will see what answers you."
Villagers pushed their children forward with hopeful palms. One girl touched Clarity and the bell trembled with a small, precise hum. A boy touched Courage and the bell clanged so eagerly that Elder Lu's eyebrows climbed toward his hairline.
When it was Shan Wei's turn, the yard held its breath. He did not look at the words first. He looked at the bell. Copper rim. Fine thrumming line along its lip where dozens of hands had made a path.
He reached—toward Restraint. The air thickened. The ink on the paper turned damp as if it remembered being water. The bell made no sound.
Elder Lu's smile tensed for half a heartbeat, then resumed being a polite bridge. "Again," he said.
Shan Wei glanced at his mother. She nodded, just once. He touched Harmony. The bell tolled with a deep, strange chord—the kind one feels in the ribs before hearing. Then, for an instant, the bronze did not ring so much as flare. A petal of golden light fanned from its curve—there and gone—a lightning-bud that refused to bloom.
The elder's pupils pinpricked. He folded his hands to hide how his fingers trembled.
"Remarkable," he said softly.
That night, while the village snored and the crickets tried to sew darkness back together, Elder Lu visited the Qi household with tea and cautious flattery. He praised the boy's balance, his instinct for Harmony. He did not mention the flare. He entertained the notion of Green Spring Pavilion "refining" such potential within the safety of a gate and the benevolence of rules.
Qi Duan listened with the face of a man measuring wheat against winter. "My son is barely six summers," he said. "Your walls would keep him too well. A seed in a clay jar grows pale. He belongs to fog and ridge-lines."
Elder Lu nodded as if he had anticipated that guileless stubbornness. "Our jar," he said, "is made from the same mountain. Consider a trial month. The Pavilion is humble. We do not pretend to be the Celestial Sect. But we know the value of a talent that hums like a struck bell."
After he left, Qi Duan sat a long time at the table, rubbing the smooth worn place where his elbows knew to rest. His wife set her hand over his.
"His path is a bridge we cannot cross for him," she said. "We can sweep it. We can teach him how to step."
In the weeks that followed, word of the boy and the bell slid farther than the river: to a banner-house at the valley's mouth; to a wandering talismancer who slept under the eaves and painted his dreams onto paper; to ears that did not belong to any sect at all. With interest came pressure. The headman of Lingtian asked Qi Duan to keep the child indoors for a time. The baker refused to sell them sweet buns, then apologized with tears and a discount because his sister-in-law had insisted and he lacked a sword to resist her.
Shan Wei learned a new lesson: that talent draws tribute and taxes alike.
On the morning of the harvest festival, the village built a dragon of reed and silk. Boys lined up to carry its ribs, girls to shake paper bells that sounded like distant rain. Lin Zhao, blooming in a vest too bright for his shoulders, smirked as he took his place at the dragon's head. Elder Lu stood on the shrine's steps, hands folded, gaze polite and unreachable.
"Let him," Qi Duan murmured when Shan Wei bristled.
So Shan Wei took the tail. He listened to the drum—dum, dum-dum—and matched his steps to the pulse. The reed dragon snaked through the crowd, scales flashing, the sun laying gold across every upturned face.
Then the wind changed.
It came down from the high passes wild and cold, frothing the prayer flags, lifting the dragon's paper. The drum faltered, then quickened to catch it. Shan Wei felt the pressure gather in his chest—a hot kernel and a cool ring around it, as if a coal had remembered being a star. The tail shivered in his hands. The paper scales stood upright like the hackles on a cat about to choose violence.
Not now, he told his breath. Not here.
But the wind insisted. It found the narrow gap in his restraint and pressed a thumb there.
The paper dragon snapped like a living thing. Its tail bucked. The reed spine trembled, every joint complaining. Children squealed with delight—until the air around Shan Wei's hands thickened, and the reed began to glow.
A petal of crimson light, then a filament of gold. A hinge of shadow where light refused to go. The Prismatic Flame unfurled, not with a roar but with the precise, awful grace of a surgeon's first cut.
Shan Wei clamped down. He squeezed his own wrists as if he could throttle the energy out of mischief. The tail smoked. The paper curled inwards like a leaf recoiling from frost. The glow pulsed once—twice—and then, as if offended by the boy's refusal, went dark.
The drum stopped.
For a long moment, the world made only the sounds of people trying not to breathe.
Elder Lu stepped down from the shrine with the unhurried certainty of someone walking on ice that knows his name. He crouched and lifted the scorched end of the dragon. His face—arranged and mild—did a thing like a ripple troubling the surface of a pond.
"Accident," he declared, and his voice carried the neat weight of a decree. "The wind is a bad teacher and a worse student."
The crowd's tension bled into relief, thin and unsatisfying. Lin Zhao's mouth contorted, then smoothed. The tail-boys glanced at Shan Wei with a new arithmetic in their eyes: awe, fear, envy, the costs and discounts of proximity to danger.
That night, the door of the Qi house listed in its frame as if it too had been startled. Qi Duan set a steaming bowl of millet porridge in front of his son and waited. Shan Wei stared at the pale surface, at the swirls of butter his mother had stirred into little suns.
"I didn't mean to," he said.
"I know." Qi Duan's voice was gentle. "Meaning is a boat. Power is the river."
"What if the river doesn't let the boat decide?"
"Then the boat learns to read current before he learns to build dams."
Old Matron Yue, who had come to deliver green plums and gossip, sucked her teeth. "The river you carry is not from these hills," she said. "It remembers a sea. That is the inconvenience—and the joy—of being born under a sky that had the courtesy to announce you."
"So what do I do?" Shan Wei asked.
"You learn to be a better boat," she said. "And when the river rises, you do not stand there arguing that it should not."
After they slept, a soft knock pulled Qi Duan from the blanket. Elder Lu waited under the eaves, rain hatching faint lines across his shoulders. Up close, the neat elder looked tireder, as if carrying words that did not fit comfortably in his mouth.
"I will speak plain," he said. "The Pavilion can shelter the boy—for a while. He needs anchors and a room dedicated to his breath. He needs a rule that will bend when he bends and not splinter. But there is a different scent to his energy. It is layered. Color in it, the old kind. If it flares again in the wrong eyes, someone will come with a casket and call it a gift."
"A casket?" Qi Duan's jaw tightened.
"A gilded one," said Elder Lu. "With a window. Bands of jade and a very polite lock."
He meant a patronage that was not a choice. He meant a cage a boy could only decorate, never open.
"We will come at dusk tomorrow," Elder Lu went on. "Let him stay a month. If he hates it, he will return. If he doesn't, you may beat me like a drum when the festival comes again."
Qi Duan laughed once, without humor. He looked past the elder at the ridge-lines holding up the sky.
"Dusk," he said. "If the mountain agrees."
The following day the wind was easier. Shan Wei moved through the house touching familiar things as if taking attendance—stove, water jar, the worn beam where his head had learned its height. He stood at the threshold and listened to the village's heart. Chickens. A lute. The clack of a go stone against wood. He breathed—down, not out—and the world set its weight in his feet like a promise.
Lin Zhao appeared where the path narrowed between the paddies, a bundle at his back and two bamboo poles riding his shoulder like extra bones. He looked as if he had come to gloat and then misplaced the words.
"My father says if you come to the Pavilion I'm to keep an eye on you," he muttered.
"Why?" Shan Wei asked.
"In case you explode," Lin Zhao said, then added quickly, "or to make sure no one else does."
Shan Wei smiled despite the stone in his stomach. "We can run later," he said. "I'll show you how to breathe."
Lin Zhao snorted. "I already know how."
"Not like this."
Dusk found the mountain dressed in copper. Elder Lu led the way with a lantern that stitched a small sphere of gentleness into the coming dark. They climbed past fields and into cedar shade, the start of a road that pretended to be a stair.
At the first bend, the world changed. The sky felt closer. The silence acquired a fringe of bell-tone. Shan Wei glanced back. Lingtian Village had become a patient arrangement of roofs and smoke, a toy made with care.
"Remember," Qi Duan called, voice steady though his hands were not. "Breath one: arrive. Breath two: agree. Breath three: anchor."
Shan Wei nodded. He took one more step, then another, feeling the mountain measure him as it measures water in a leaf.
At the second bend, the lantern flame bowed. The air in front of Elder Lu stiffened like cloth in a sudden frost. The elder stopped so cleanly the group behind nearly walked into him.
A shape slid out of the cedar shade. Not a sect runner, not a bandit, not a wild beast of fur and fang. A man in plain gray, with no token at his belt and an absence where a name should be. He carried nothing and wore nothing that caught the eye, which made him more dangerous than a blade held to the throat.
His eyes went from the lantern to Shan Wei and stayed there, not in hunger but in recognition, as if he had at last located a house he'd been circling for days.
"Evening," he said mildly, and the evening shivered.
Elder Lu shifted his weight, the lantern steady. "The Pavilion road is closed after sundown."
"Roads are lies we tell mountains," the gray man replied. "I am here for the boy."
Qi Duan moved without thinking, stepping between the stranger and his son. The stranger did not look at him. He looked at Shan Wei as one looks at a spark in dry grass.
"Your breath," the man said to the boy. "Let me hear it."
Shan Wei felt the river inside him sit up like a dog smelling thunder. He ringed it with calm as best he could. "No," he said.
The gray man's mouth made the smallest of pleased shapes. "Good."
He raised his hand—not a threat, merely a statement—two fingers drawing a sigil in the air, an arc that recalled storms. Lines of force stitched themselves across the path like careless spider silk. The lantern flame folded neatly in half, as if bowing to a lord, then straightened.
"Test, then," Elder Lu said, voice silk around steel. "But be a teacher, not a thief."
The gray man's eyes flickered to the elder and back. "If the Pavilion wished to keep him, they should have rung a louder bell."
Behind them, far down in the patient village, a dog barked as if it had heard the mountain choose.
Shan Wei took the first breath the way his father had taught him. He took the second because there was no other step. He gathered the third like a cloak around his shoulders and felt, for the second time in his life, the presence of something that was his and not his—the Prismatic Flame turning its head to look through his eyes.
He could run. He could plead. He could flare and curl the road into glass.
Instead he did the only thing pride could not eat.
He bowed.
And the stranger smiled, thin and bright as the edge of a coin.
To be continued…
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