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## **Chapter Two: What She Was Before**
> *Twelve years ago – the Red District Ruins, South of Old Xintai*
The sky burned crimson that night.
Ash fell like snow over shattered rooftops. The air was thick with the copper sting of blood, the scream of something no longer human echoing through the broken district. Sirens had long stopped coming here. Even the bravest of Hunters had turned away.
What remained were monsters.
And **her**.
Bai Lu was eleven years old when she first died.
She remembered the heat of her mother's blood on her face. The sound of her father's bones snapping one by one. The way their eyes stayed open after the demon was finished. Eyes that begged her not to scream.
But she had.
And the demon had turned.
She could still see its mouth—split open too wide, lined with teeth that curved inward like hooks. Its skin slick, pulsing with glyphs in a language no human should remember. The smell of rot, sulfur, and something older than death.
She should've died then.
But something inside her opened.
Something that had waited.
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The monster had lunged. She remembered the fire. Not on her skin—but under it. A sensation like wings unfolding from her bones, like light screaming through cracks. The world blurred, bent, and then—
**Silence.**
She stood, trembling in the red haze, and the creature was on its knees.
Not breathing. Not whole. Its head bowed in reverence. To **her**.
She hadn't touched it.
But it bled for her.
A voice—not hers—whispered in her skull:
> *"Blood recognizes the First."*
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### **Now**
Bai Lu jolted awake in the back of the moving town car. The glass reflected her pale face, calm again. No sign of the nightmare in her expression. But her fingers still tingled.
That night had never left her.
Her abilities hadn't returned all at once. They came in pieces—uncontrollable, fragmented. For years she was taken in, hidden, trained in silence by those who feared her even as they served her. The **White Flame Sect**—a splinter of the old monster-hunters who had turned cultist the moment they saw what she was becoming.
And she was becoming something not human.
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### **The Hidden History**
The world Bai Lu lived in wore a mask: phones, tech, capitalism, traffic. But behind the illusion was an ancient truth.
Monsters had always walked among men. Some were born of curses, others of desire. The old texts called them many names, but only three mattered now:
* **Demons**: entities from the Fracture Realm, drawn by pain, corruption, and blood sacrifice. They whispered through cracks in the soul, turning people into *Vessels* or *Hollows*.
* **Vampires**: the *Children of Night's Breath*. Not undead, but a parallel evolution—beings once human, reshaped by an ancient queen who drank the stars. They ruled from the shadows, aristocrats of blood and memory.
* **The Forgotten**: monsters with no name. Old gods, failed experiments, fractured realities. Some slept in stone, others wept through static in old radios.
The veil separating the human world from the monstrous was called **The Shroud**. Only the **Awakened** could pierce it—and only those who had *bled into power* could walk both sides without dying.
Bai Lu had never needed to pierce it.
The Shroud obeyed her.
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### **Blood Memory**
In the archives below Mount Hexing, Bai Lu once read of a creature called the **White Flame**, born when an ancient being was betrayed and burned alive by both gods and demons. Its soul scattered across worlds—but a shard of it took root in a bloodline.
Her bloodline.
She wasn't a vessel.
She was a **key**.
A being of *convergence*.
Light and dark. Order and chaos. Human... and not.
It made sense, in a way. Her power didn't manifest like normal magic. She didn't chant. She didn't call spirits. She *commanded them*. Instinctively.
When vampires met her gaze, they looked away. Not out of fear—but respect. Ancient recognition.
Demons trembled in her presence.
Monsters bowed.
But not all of them.
Some remembered the war.
And wanted her **dead** before she remembered who she truly was.
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### **The Vampire Prince**
The first time she killed a vampire, she was fifteen.
He'd looked barely older than a university student. Clean. Handsome. But his soul was a storm of hunger.
He offered her power. Immortality. Said her blood was a "seed of royalty." That she could drink from him and awaken fully.
She smiled.
Then she broke his spine.
He'd screamed something in Old Drakhan before she set him on fire with a glance.
> *"The White Ember returns… We are not ready."*
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### **Now – Again**
Bai Lu stepped out of the car and onto the rooftop of an unfinished skyscraper. The city stretched below, unaware of the gathering storm.
A gate shimmered in the air before her—an illegal portal opened without permission. Traces of sulfur, chalk, and dead roses lingered in the wind.
"Demon sign," she murmured.
Her coat fluttered. Her eyes glowed faintly.
Behind her, two members of the Night Division approached. Both were armed with silver-edged rifles and holy brands. They stopped when she raised a hand.
"This is my hunt," she said.
They nodded and vanished into the shadows.
She stepped through the gate.
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