It was said in the oldest myths that before the world was named, it was thought. Before it was thought, it was understood. And before even understanding came a question—the question.
Ren Isamu asked it first when he was four years old.
"Why do stars disappear?"
He had no cultivation. No bloodline. No core. His mother died at birth. His father, a sickly herbalist with more silence than words, vanished into the freezing storm of Winter Hollow when Ren was five. The villagers assumed the mountain took him, as it did everything too weak to fight it.
And Ren, to them, was the weakest of all.
Born in the forgotten mountain village of Inaho, nestled between dying leyline rivers and rotting spiritual graves, Ren had grown up beneath a sky of faded stars. The heavens no longer whispered secrets. Spirits slumbered. The great clans of Earth had long since abandoned the world for higher realms. Cultivation—once the birthright of all—was now myth and relic.
Ren Isamu lived in a world of ash and echoes.
Yet still, he asked questions.
It was dawn when Ren woke to the shrill cracking of roof tiles collapsing under weight. Snow had broken through again.
He wrapped his threadbare cloak around himself and climbed up with numb fingers. The roof was paper-thin reed thatch—barely surviving another season. As he brushed off the snow and nailed it back together with splinters and thread, he whispered to himself a soft rhythm:
"Thatch breaks because tension exceeds tolerance. Nails hold because friction resists gravity. Wind hums in tones of resonance. All things speak."
Not a mantra. Not a spell. Just observation. Knowledge.
He returned inside, opened a clay jar, and lit the dried bark of willowroot. The scent filled the hovel like a library left too long in fire.
It would be another day of silence.
Or so he thought.
Ren wandered the village outskirts collecting salvage. Near the frost-split shrine of the Eight Petal Path, he found a collapsed relic chest—ancient metal wrapped in rusted locking glyphs.
He knelt.
Glyphs—the written blood of ancient spellwork. Dead to the world now, but beautiful.
"A looping compression. Outer layer was Qi-activated, but the underlayer... looks mechanical?"
He spent two hours sketching the interlocking patterns on birch bark. Three more hours crafting makeshift unlocking tools from iron twigs and spiritual glass shards he'd found last winter in a frozen beast carcass.
When the chest clicked open, there was no glow. No blast of ancient wind. Just dust.
And a cube.
Palm-sized. Unmarked. Warm.
Alive.
Ren felt it before he understood it. Something inside him—some memory that was not memory—shivered.
"This doesn't belong to this world."
He looked up.
Above him, the sky cracked.
It was subtle—a sliver of dark splitting light. No one else saw it. But Ren did. Not with eyes. With understanding.
It was as if reality blinked—hesitated.
And something behind the blink stared back.
Ren clutched the cube to his chest and ran.
He spent the night disassembling the artifact, not with tools, but with intuition. It responded to his thoughts, unfolding like a flower in reverse. It showed him circuits of non-metal. Runes etched not into matter, but into absence.
A language of void.
"This isn't a relic. It's a seed. A schematic. A message."
What message?
"Build me."
He obeyed.
By moonrise, he had constructed a tiny engine. It pulsed faintly—like a heartbeat.
He fed it powdered ember-dust, animal bone, cracked leyline stones. It absorbed them all.
And spoke.
"Query accepted. Identity: Ren Isamu. Designation: Echo-Bound Heir."
"Unlocking neural gate fragment."
"Warning: Zero-core detected. Initiating synthetic bridge."
Then the pain hit.
Ren screamed.
His skin glowed with burnt script. His blood boiled with circuits. His vision shattered.
When he awoke, he could hear the world think.
And this, at last, is where his story begins.
A boy with no power. No lineage. No cultivation.
But a mind that had just awakened to the forbidden patterns beneath reality.
Ren Isamu, the weakest under heaven, had just heard the first whisper of what no one else could hear.
And something ancient heard him back.
[End of Chapter 1]