The days passed in a blur of physical exertion and mental discipline. Sun kept to a strict routine: rise with the sun, train until his limbs ached, meditate, repeat. The Qi in his dantian now responded with subtle ease—like a breeze at his fingertips, like heat resting beneath his skin.
But he kept his growth quiet.
Old Ling watched in silence, his gaze at times unreadable. Once or twice, when Sun practiced in the yard, he caught a strange flicker in the old man's eyes—not pride, but something deeper. A memory, perhaps.
One night, as the moon bathed the village in silver, Sun found Old Ling sitting on the threshold, staring into the sky.
"Did you ever cultivate, Old Ling?" Sun asked, voice casual.
Old Ling didn't answer at first. Then he chuckled, the sound low and brittle. "I did more than that, once. But that was a lifetime ago."
Sun waited, but Old Ling said no more.
The village felt unchanged, yet Sun noticed the subtleties: the way birds didn't sing in the southern forest anymore, how the river sometimes ran murky at dawn, and how animals grew uneasy when they neared the boundary of the village.
Something stirred in the wild.
He kept his distance from Drake and the other children. But Drake's gaze grew more venomous each day. Word had spread of the way Sun had deflected a blow during their last encounter, and Drake didn't like being humiliated.
"Stay away from him," Old Ling warned. "He's not the danger—his father is."
Sun tilted his head. "You knew his father?"
"Knew of him," Ling said. "He was once a border lord, not unlike myself... before the wars."
It was the first time Old Ling spoke of a life before the village. Sun watched him carefully. His back may have been bent, his leg crippled, but there was an unmistakable edge in the way he carried himself. One night, Sun even swore he saw the man standing atop the roof, unmoving, eyes glowing faintly in the dark.
Then came the dream.
Sun found himself floating in a dark expanse. Stars pulsed above, and a figure loomed in the distance—vast, divine, cloaked in ethereal fire. It bore no face, yet its presence pressed on him like the weight of mountains.
The figure raised a hand, and symbols blazed in the void: a spiral galaxy, a serpent devouring its tail, and a blood-red lotus.
He awoke with a gasp, his heart racing.
[New Trait Detected: Blood Resonance – Origin Unknown]
The system's voice was quiet, even reverent.
Sun trembled. Something ancient stirred in his blood.
He looked at his hands. They were the hands of a child. But something else, something older, now lived beneath his skin.
Later that week, as Sun gathered herbs near the southern forest, he spotted movement—a figure cloaked in black, standing too still beneath the trees.
The figure turned.
Sun's breath caught. The man's eyes shimmered like mercury, ancient and unsettling.
He said nothing. Just watched.
Then he was gone.
Sun returned home unsettled. He told Old Ling.
The old man's face darkened. "The winds are shifting. And the past... the past is waking up."
He limped to the corner of the hut, reached beneath a floorboard, and withdrew a sheathed blade wrapped in old cloth.
The moment he unsheathed it, the air in the hut changed—heavy, electric. The blade shimmered with runes that pulsed like a heartbeat.
"If you awaken what's truly in your blood, boy," Ling said, not looking at him, "you will need this. And more."
Sun's mouth was dry. "What... am I?"
Old Ling looked up. "Not of this world. Not fully. Not even close."
And that night, beneath the silent moons, Sun sat alone, hand pressed to his chest, feeling the rhythm of a heart that was no longer just his own.
To be continued...