In the primordial mists of the world's dawning, beings known as the Celestials descended. With the bearing of saviors, they shattered the reign of the devouring scourge, the Hearteaters, and tore asunder an age of perpetual night. The broken people of the Lower Dust, scourged beyond endurance, lifted their eyes to these radiant figures and revered them as divine. Their gratitude, etched in bone-deep relief, forged chains of eternal fealty.
Order was painstakingly rebuilt upon the ruins; wounds, physical and spiritual, slowly scarred over. Life, it seemed, had finally begun to bask beneath a promising new light.
Yet, time is a relentless grindstone. That hopeful glimmer was gradually worn away. The people of the Lower Dust awoke to a creeping terror: though the shadow of the Hearteaters had lifted, the very space in which they struggled to survive was surreptitiously constricting. The Celestials erected impassable barriers between heaven and earth, fortifications that scraped the sky itself. From amongst the Lower Dust, they raised a caste of enforcers – the Agents. These were men and women born of the Dust, yet they willingly became taloned hounds, trading the blood and anguish of their own kin for position and wealth. The price extracted was a chilling yoke clamped back upon the necks of their brethren: the omnipresent surveillance of the Purifying Gaze; the merciless silencing of any dissent through Sacred Purification (a chilling euphemism for brutal suppression); and the insidious design of the Vitality Quota system, a mechanism that pit the desperate masses against each other in a vicious struggle for scraps.
Generations of Celestials ascended their cloud-veiled thrones, their rule hardening like glacial iron. The Lower Dust descended into a desperate arena, a pit where hope went to die. For the meager, life-sustaining crumbs of Vitality Points, the people tore at each other like starved jackals. Occasionally, a gaze would pierce the suffocating fog, perceiving the brutal truth of their existence. But such awakened souls, like motes of dust caught in the lens of the Purifying Gaze, were instantly cleansed – vanished without trace, erased from memory.
Within this vast crucible of enforced devotion, the boy Ling Jin was forged into the most devout of believers. Textbooks were hymnals; classrooms, sanctified temples; every word from his teachers, irrefutable scripture. He drank in the dogma with desperate thirst: The Celestials were the Light, the sole salvation, the absolute bulwark against the return of the Hearteaters. They were deities walking the earth, their very existence the cornerstone upon which the world precariously balanced. Within Ling Jin's heart, faith in the Celestials burned pure and incandescent, an unquenchable sacred fire. He was utterly convinced that only through unswerving service to these supreme beings, only by adhering to the sacred tenets of "Integrity, Fairness, Justice, and Benevolence," could the world's promised splendor be realized, could the plight of his brethren in the Lower Dust truly be alleviated.
Fueled by this near-childlike piety and his own formidable intellect, Ling Jin achieved his fervent desire: entry into the Celestials' paramount institution – the Celestial Mandate Council. He labored like an ascetic, transmuting his faith into relentless drive. Tasked once with adjudicating a dispute from the Lower Dust, he meticulously applied the Celestial Codex and the protocols of "Equitable Process." His judgment appeared scrupulously fair, upholding the position of the local Agent. Yet, in doing so, he delivered injustice to the true petitioners – a Lower Dust family, stripped of their patriarch and livelihood by a mining accident that cost him his arm. A flicker of unease stirred within Ling Jin, but it was swiftly quelled by the worldly counsel of his mentor, Councilor Du Mingyuan: "Preserve the greater equilibrium, trust in the wisdom of the higher spheres." Indeed, Du Mingyuan held up Ling Jin's handling of this very case as exemplary proof of the young man's "firm grasp of principle" and "understanding of the greater good," showering him with praise before the assembled Council.
Ling Jin's untainted zeal, a clear spring welling up from a stagnant mire, won him the measured approbation of many, including Du Mingyuan himself. The Councilor would often clap him on the shoulder, his words heavy with implication about a glittering future, hinting at imminent elevation to a position of significant responsibility – an office overseeing the development and oversight of the Lower Dust regions. Ling Jin harbored not a shred of doubt. His mind brimmed with fervent visions: himself seated in that pivotal chair, excising the rot festering within the Agent system, becoming a beacon bridging divine will and mortal realm. This was his sacred purpose: to serve the gods, to be the savior of the forsaken.