It was supposed to be the start of my life. Graduation day. For an orphan with no friends, that day felt like a finish line I had crawled toward since the accident that took my parents. Only one person had been good to me—our class monitor. She was the one who helped me through the darkest years, and when she invited me to the party, I hesitated. I didn't want to go, but I somehow agreed. I felt I owed her that much.
I didn't know it would be my last day in that world.
Everything at the party was smooth until the air shattered. A gang war. Screaming, the smell of gunpowder, and then the sudden, sharp sting in my chest. A bullet found my heart. I died instantly.
But somehow, I feel alive.
My body is heavy, like I'm made of lead. I can't open my eyes, but I can hear. People are shouting, and they are spouting absolute nonsense about me.
"This child has the aura of a wicked fiend!" a raspy voice screams, vibrating with a terror I don't understand. "If you don't get rid of him soon, your family will face destruction! The world will suffer too!"
"His body holds a calamity mark," another voice joins in, breathless and panicked. "Anyone born with this only brings ruin. Look at the sigils on his skin! He is a curse!"
The same nonsense, over and over again. I want to yell at them, to tell them I'm just a guy who graduated college, but my tongue is useless. My limbs won't move. I feel so small, so weak.
The weight of my own eyebrows feels like a mountain. Despite the shouting and the talk of destruction and calamity, I can't help it. A deep, heavy exhaustion washes over me, and I feel myself falling into a dark sleep.
The room felt cold, the kind of cold that bit through the thin silk swaddling me. I could feel stone beneath my back—hard, polished, and freezing.
"The ritual must be done now!" the raspy voice barked again. "If he breathes the air of this mountain for another hour, the Spirit Veins will turn black!"
"He is just a babe, Great Elder," a softer, trembling woman's voice pleaded. "Look at him. He hasn't even opened his eyes. How can a soul so small carry the weight of a world's end?"
"His soul is not small, woman! It is ancient and stained!"
I wanted to laugh. Ancient? Stained? I just finished four years of business school and a part-time job at a library. If anything was stained, it was my lungs from the city smog. But the more I tried to focus, the heavier my eyelids became.
The hall around me echoed with a strange, humming energy. It wasn't like any sound from my old world. It was a deep, rhythmic vibration that made my very bones ache.
"The Calamity Mark is already feeding," the Elder whispered, his voice now right above me. I could smell incense and old parchment. "Look at the way the light dies when it touches his skin. He is a hole in the universe."
I felt a rough, calloused hand press against my forehead. The heat from his palm was searing, like a hot iron.
"We cannot kill him here," a third voice said, deeper and more stable than the others. "The blood of a Calamity Child on the Ancestral Altar would curse our lineage for ten generations. Take him to the Forest of the Forgotten. Let the beasts and the wild Qi tear the mark from his flesh. If the heavens want him to live, they will shield him. If not... he was never meant to be."
"To the forest, then," the Elder agreed.
I felt the stone disappear as someone lifted me. The movement was jarring, making my stomach flip. I wanted to cry out, to ask for the class monitor, to ask why my graduation day ended in a freezer with crazy people.
But the exhaustion was a tidal wave. As the heavy doors of the hall creaked open, letting in a gust of mountain wind that smelled of pine and something dangerously electric, my mind finally gave up.
I fell into a dreamless, heavy sleep, unaware that I was being carried toward a green hell.