The blood tasted like copper and shame.
Ye Chen lay on the cold stone floor of the servant quarters, his cheek pressed against the ground, his body refusing to move. Not because he couldn't. But because he had learned — long ago — that getting up only invited more hits.
"Pathetic."
Senior Disciple Zhao Wei stood over him, wiping his knuckles clean on a white cloth. Behind him, two other disciples laughed quietly, the kind of laugh that didn't need a reason anymore. Laughing at Ye Chen had become a habit. Like breathing.
"You know what today is?" Zhao Wei crouched down, grabbing Ye Chen's jaw and forcing him to look up. "It's been three years since your mother died. Three years of feeding a useless cursed trash like you." He released his jaw with a shove. "You should be grateful we haven't thrown you out."
The disciples left.
Their laughter faded down the corridor.
And Ye Chen stayed on the floor.
He didn't cry. He had used up all his tears two years ago. Now there was just a quiet, hollow ache in his chest — the kind that becomes familiar after a while. The kind you stop noticing.
Slowly, he pulled himself up. He pressed his back against the cold wall and looked at his hands. Cracked knuckles. Calloused palms. The hands of a servant, not a cultivator.
At seventeen years old, Ye Chen was the lowest ranked individual in the entire Azure Sky Sect. No cultivation base. No spiritual roots. No future.
Just a curse.
He pulled down the collar of his robe slightly, glancing at the mark on his chest — a dark spiral pattern, like smoke frozen in place, sitting directly over his heart. The Dao Devouring Curse, they called it. The sect physicians had examined it when he was five. Their verdict had been simple and cruel: "This mark blocks all cultivation. He will never gather Qi. He will never be a cultivator. He will never be anything."
His mother had held him that night and said nothing.
She had just held him.
He closed his collar.
The graveyard at the back of the sect was not maintained. It was for servants and unnamed dead — people the sect didn't care to remember. His mother's grave was a simple stone, no inscription except the name someone had scratched in with a nail.
Wei Ling.
Ye Chen sat in front of it as the sun went down, his knees pulled to his chest.
"Three years," he said quietly.
The wind moved through the trees. Somewhere far away, disciples were training — he could hear the distant crash of techniques, the thunder of cultivators testing their limits.
He would never have that.
"I don't understand why you never told me anything," he said. "Who my father was. Why we were here. Why you always looked at this mark like it broke your heart."
He reached out and touched the cold stone.
"I found the diary, Maa. The one you hid beneath the floorboard." He paused. "Half of it was burned. I couldn't read most of it. But you wrote — you wrote that the mark wasn't a curse." His voice cracked slightly. "You wrote it was a gift."
The wind stilled.
"What kind of gift is this?"
He sat there until the stars came out. Until the sect went quiet. Until the cold seeped through his thin robe and his breath made small clouds in the night air.
Finally, he stood.
He pressed his palm flat against the grave stone — a habit he had developed, his version of a goodbye.
"I'll come again next week."
He turned to walk back.
And stopped.
His hand was on fire.
Not literally — no flames, no heat. But the mark on his chest had come alive. It was pulsing. Slowly, rhythmically. Like a second heartbeat that had been silent his entire life and had suddenly, without warning, decided to beat.
Ye Chen looked down at his chest, eyes wide.
The dark spiral pattern was glowing.
Faint. Red. Like an ember deep inside cooling ash.
What—
And then he heard it.
A sound. Not with his ears — with something deeper, somewhere behind his thoughts. A sound like a voice speaking in a language he had never heard but somehow almost understood. Ancient syllables that vibrated in his bones.
He pressed his hand over the mark. The pulsing intensified.
"Beta..."
He froze.
That voice.
That was his mother's voice.
"...waqt aa gaya hai."
The time has come.
It lasted only a second. And then it was gone — the glow faded, the pulsing slowed, the voice disappeared like smoke. Ye Chen stood in the cold graveyard, completely alone, his hand pressed over his heart, breathing hard.
He stood there for a long time.
He didn't sleep that night.
He sat on his thin mattress in the corner of the servant quarters — a room he shared with four other servants, all of whom were already asleep — and stared at the ceiling.
The mark had never done anything before. Seventeen years of silence. And tonight, on the anniversary of his mother's death, it had pulsed. Glowed. And he had heard her voice.
The time has come.
For what?
He pressed his fingers against the mark again. Nothing. Cold skin. Still pattern. As if nothing had happened.
He exhaled slowly and lay back.
Maybe grief did strange things to people. Maybe he had imagined it. Maybe three years of loneliness and humiliation had finally started breaking something inside his head.
He closed his eyes.
And in the darkness behind his eyelids, for just a moment, he saw something.
A spiral of black energy — vast, ancient, and impossibly deep — like looking down into a void that had no bottom. And from somewhere inside that void, something looked back at him.
Not with malice.
With recognition.
I see you, it seemed to say. I have always seen you.
Ye Chen's eyes snapped open.
His heart was hammering.
The mark on his chest was glowing again — brighter this time. Not red. Deep, burning crimson. The color of old blood and older fire.
And then, from the doorway of the servant quarters, came a sharp intake of breath.
He turned his head.
Uncle Liu stood at the door — the old caretaker, the one who had always slipped him extra food when no one was looking, who had patched his wounds after particularly bad beatings with trembling hands and guilty eyes. Uncle Liu, who had known his mother.
The old man was staring at the mark with an expression Ye Chen had never seen on him before.
Not surprise.
Terror.
"Uncle Liu—"
The old man's mouth opened. His face had gone pale as chalk, his eyes fixed on the glowing mark with a look that was equal parts horror and recognition.
"That mark..." he whispered. His voice was barely audible. "That's not — that can't be—"
He stopped himself.
Pressed his lips together.
And then, before Ye Chen could say another word, Uncle Liu turned and walked away. Fast. Faster than an old man should have been able to move.
Ye Chen sat up.
"Uncle Liu!"
No response.
His footsteps disappeared down the corridor.
Ye Chen looked back down at the mark. The glow was fading again, slowly, like a fire running out of fuel. In moments, it was gone. Just the old dark pattern, silent and still.
But Uncle Liu's expression stayed burned into his mind.
That wasn't the look of a man who had seen something strange.
That was the look of a man who had seen something he already knew about.
Something he had been afraid of seeing.
Ye Chen's jaw tightened.
What did you know, Uncle Liu?
What do you know about this mark?
And what did my mother never tell me?
He lay back down.
Sleep did not come for a long time.
But when it finally did, he dreamed of a spiral that went on forever — and deep within it, an ancient fire that had been waiting, for seventeen long years, to burn.
Tomorrow, the secret begins to unravel.
But some secrets, once unraveled, cannot be put back.