Hanfen was eleven.
He hated mornings—not because they came early, but because his father always woke up before him.
"Ten more strikes," his father said without raising his voice.
Their courtyard was small, but even: the ground packed hard, stone slabs set along the edges so it wouldn't turn to mud after rain. An old shield hung by the wall, its strap cracked—a souvenir from other battles, and a reminder that straps always snap at the worst possible moment.
Hanfen gripped a wooden sword with both hands. The sword was heavy not in weight, but in meaning: his father made him hold his stance as if it weren't wood, but steel.
"Shoulders down. Elbows in," his father said, touching Hanfen's forearm with two fingers and adjusting it. "A knight doesn't flail. A knight holds."
Hanfen's father, Han Zhen, had once belonged to the Hall of the Shield. Now he served in Yancheng's city guard, returning each evening with the same scent clinging to him: iron, dust, and the cold wind off the Wall.
Hanfen loved that scent.
It meant his father had come back.
He struck again. And again. The wooden blade hissed through the air and stopped exactly where his father wanted it.
"Better," Han Zhen said curtly. With him, that was almost praise.
Hanfen exhaled—and at that moment his mother's voice came from the kitchen.
"Stop tormenting the child! Breakfast is getting cold!"
Her name was Luo Yu. She belonged to none of the Halls, and she took pride in it as fiercely as Han Zhen took pride in his past with the Shield. Luo Yu believed the Halls were necessary, but not an excuse to raise a boy without a childhood.
Hanfen, honestly, wasn't sure he needed childhood at all. He had seen the Wall. He had seen the people who came back from watch duty silent and pale, as if part of them had stayed up there.
Today was the day the patrol wards would be inspected. The city felt it in the small things: shopkeepers opened more quietly, conversations grew shorter, and guards at intersections stood a little straighter.
"You're going to the square after breakfast," his father said as they ate. "They'll show the reinforcement seal today. Watch closely."
"Will it be the Hall of Light?" Hanfen asked, trying to sound indifferent.
His father nodded.
"Luminaries. They don't pray. They build purity the way others build walls. Remember that."
Hanfen remembered. He always remembered things like that.
People were already gathering in the square. A stone circle at its center was covered in fine lines—seals. Around it stood masters in gray-white cloaks, no symbols of "holiness," only dry markings of channels and rank. Their hands moved calmly, like craftsmen at work.
One of them, a young luminary named Sun Jian, raised his palm. The seals on the stone flared with a soft, almost transparent light—not pretty, but correct. The air felt cleaner. Even the crowd's noise dulled, as if someone had pressed a hand onto a boiling pot's lid.
"See?" Han Zhen said quietly behind Hanfen. "That's protection. No songs. No pleading. Just the Law of seals."
Hanfen stared without blinking. The lines of the seals looked like maps to him: understand them, and you'd understand where the enemy was, where the weak point lay, where salvation waited.
Then the light went out—the demonstration ended, people shifted and spoke again, and the square became ordinary.
Almost.
Hanfen felt it not with his eyes, but with his skin—like the shadow had thickened by a fraction.
He turned toward the edge of the square, where an old water arch stood. Children played beneath it, rolling a wooden hoop, laughing so loudly it sounded as if Rifts belonged to someone else's life.
And right there, the air trembled.
At first it was like heat above stone. Then came a sharp, glassy sound—the kind you hear in the prologue of a fireside legend. And for an instant, between two stones of the arch, a thin black line appeared.
A crack. Not in the stone—in the air itself.
"Back!" someone from the guard shouted.
The children didn't understand at once. Two girls froze. The boy with the hoop stepped forward, as if he wanted to see the "trick" up close.
The line widened by a finger's width—and cold breathed out of it, so sharp Hanfen's teeth clenched.
A paw slid through—thin, its joints wrong. Then a head followed, like a mask carved from dark bone.
A lesser rift-demon. But even a lesser one could kill a child in a single lunge.
Hanfen didn't think.
He ran.
He heard his father bark his name—short, sharp, a command. But his legs no longer listened to voices. Inside him rose the feeling he knew from training:
Hold.
The boy with the hoop stumbled and fell right in front of the arch.
The rift-demon jerked, as if tugged by an invisible thread—and leapt.
Hanfen threw himself between them and raised his hands the way his father had taught him to raise a shield he didn't have.
He had time for only one thought:
If I step back now, he dies.
And then something cracked in the sky again.
Not thunder. Not lightning. A thin, precise screech—like a nail on glass.
On the back of Hanfen's hand, a line ignited—just like the one tearing open under the arch. Only this one was bright. Clean. As if it had been burned into him from the inside.
A Mark.
The rift-demon slammed into an invisible wall in midair and ricocheted backward, claws scraping at emptiness as if it were glass.
Hanfen stood there, trembling, not understanding what he had done.
Then he felt the second thing—
the price.
Somewhere deep inside, like a sealed door, something clicked into place. Not a voice. Not an order. A dry certainty that became part of him all at once:
"A shield has no right to retreat while someone weaker stands behind it."
Hanfen lowered his hands slowly.
And saw his father—Han Zhen—charging through the crowd toward him, for the first time in many years with a face that held no calm at all.
On the boy's hand, the Heavenly Mark was glowing.
And the Rift beneath the arch kept breathing cold, as if it were only tasting the world.