A fine spring rain fell on Qing Mao Mountain, drawing its rugged peaks into a veil of translucent mist. Under the touch of a light breeze, the pine forests rustled in continuous murmur, while the scent of damp earth and fresh sap rose from the valleys below.

  Along one flank of the mountain, a trail of lights sparkled like a belt of forgotten jewels. These few thousand lanterns, strung from the rocky heights all the way down to the foot of the slope, marked the location of Gu Yue Village. In the pre-dawn darkness, that cascade of warm light stood as the only testimony to human presence, tenacious and small against the wild immensity of the mountain around it.

  At the center of it all, the Ancestral Pavilion burned gold.

  Inside, time seemed to hold its breath. The clan chief stood before the altar, a middle-aged man whose hair and sideburns had begun to silver, while behind him a dozen elders formed a solemn semicircle. All were dressed in white ceremonial robes and knelt on the cold stone floor with hands clasped, their chanted prayers filling the wooden hall with a low, resonant vibration. Before them, rows of commemorative tablets carved from precious wood honored the lineage of the ancestors, and blue smoke rose in slow, undisturbed columns from great copper incense burners, stretching upward until they dissolved against the ceiling.

  The ritual drew to its close. The clan chief pressed his forehead to the floor in a deep bow, and the elders followed in a single synchronized movement. When they rose, fabric rustled through the hall as the assembly filed out into the outer corridors, where the rigid ceremonial atmosphere finally began to ease.

  — Time really flies... In the blink of an eye, a whole year has gone by, sighed one of the elders, adjusting his robe as he walked.

  — It feels like the last ceremony was only yesterday, agreed another.

  — I just hope that some great talents emerge this time. It's been a long time since any real genius has appeared in our clan.

  — It had better happen. The Bai and Xiong villages already have their prodigies. That Bai Ning Bing from the Bai clan alone, the boy is monstrous.

  The mere mention of that name cast a chill over the group. Faces tightened with a concern none of them bothered to conceal. In just two years of training, the young man had already reached Rank 3, and the pressure he radiated had become suffocating even to senior elders of rival clans who faced him.

  — All hope isn't lost for this year's participants, said a voice, cutting through the unease.

  — That's true. It's said that the Fang line has produced an exceptional child this generation. Already composing remarkable poetry at the age of five, his intelligence is something out of the ordinary. A pity that his parents left so early... Fortunately, his uncle and aunt took over and have raised him well enough.

  The clan chief was the last to cross the temple threshold. As he drew the heavy wooden doors shut behind him, he caught the tail end of those words. He had no need to ask who they meant.

  As clan leader, he kept a careful eye on every promising young prospect, and Gu Yue Fang Yuan sat at the top of that list. Experience had taught him that children who displayed early gifts, whether a remarkable memory or a precocious grasp of the world, almost always carried strong cultivation talent within them.

  If this child reveals Grade A talent, he thought, he could stand against Bai Ning Bing. With a mind like his, the odds are in his favor.

  A faint smile moved across his face before he turned back to his subordinates with a sterner expression.

  — Gentlemen, it's late. The opening ceremony is tomorrow, you should all return home and rest. And above all, save your energy for what comes next.

  A few coughs, a few carefully neutral expressions. The unspoken meaning landed clearly enough. Every year, a quiet war was waged between the clan's different branches over who would succeed in drawing the new talents under their wing, and the chief had no patience for it beginning tonight.

  After a round of brief and carefully cordial exchanges, the elders dispersed into the village, each carrying their private calculations home with them.

  Most of the houses still had lights burning. The coming day would seal the fate of an entire generation, and that knowledge sat in the chest like a stone, heavy enough to keep even the most exhausted minds from finding sleep. An electric atmosphere, a mixture of anticipation and dread, had settled over the village like the mist on the mountain above.

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  At that moment, a pair of clear, quiet eyes watched the lanterns from a window above the street.

  Fang Yuan stood at the sill. It was the third time he'd witnessed this particular scene, the third time he stood in this exact moment. The spring rain murmured against the wood below him with the same familiar rhythm it always had, a melody he'd long since stopped finding beautiful. He closed his eyes and let his memories unwind.

  Through the eyes of what he'd become over six centuries of living and living again, Qing Mao Mountain and Gu Yue Village were nothing more than a cage. But while the bars of a cage limited freedom, they also held the storms out, and Fang Yuan knew the storms beyond these walls better than anyone.

  Tomorrow is the awakening ceremony, he thought. I'll finally be able to resume my Gu Master training. Now, let's see how my little brother is doing.

  He turned from the window just as the bedroom door opened. A young teenager stepped in with careful, hesitant steps.

  The moment Fang Zheng crossed the threshold, he found his elder brother's gaze already waiting for him in the shadows, motionless, as though Fang Yuan had been standing there for hours. The boy dropped his eyes to his feet immediately. It was his characteristic posture, submission and unease worn like a second skin, learned so early that it'd become indistinguishable from instinct.

  — Big brother, why are you standing so close to the window in this rain?

  He waited for an answer. The silence that followed grew heavy enough to press against him, and he filled it himself, his voice dropping lower.

  — I saw that your window wasn't closed, so I came to shut it... Tomorrow is the awakening ceremony. It's late, you should be sleeping. If Uncle and Auntie found out you were still awake, they would worry.

  As Fang Zheng stumbled through his explanation, Fang Yuan noted the imperceptible trembling of his younger brother's shoulders. The same sight as always. He already knew how every step of what followed would unfold, every small decision, every gradual shift, every betrayal waiting further down the road.

  Fang Zheng, for his part, wasn't surprised by the silence. Since their earliest childhood, Fang Yuan had always been this way, distant, unreadable, as though the normal rules of human warmth didn't quite apply to him. Although they had the same face, Fang Zheng felt himself to be something entirely ordinary standing beside his elder, as unremarkable as a pebble next to a lantern.

  Born from the same womb, at the same moment. And yet the heavens had apparently found this arrangement amusing.

  To the whole village, he was nothing more than Fang Yuan's younger brother. His uncle and aunt invoked his elder's example at every opportunity. Even his own reflection in the mirror had become something he preferred not to examine too carefully. These thoughts had been accumulating for years, each one adding its weight to the stone he carried, pressing his head a little lower with each passing season.

  What Fang Zheng had never understood, what he'd never been told, was that the relative comfort of their upbringing had nothing to do with their uncle and aunt's generosity. It was the direct result of Fang Yuan's deliberate work. After their parents died when the brothers were three, Fang Yuan had reached into the memories of a previous life on Earth and drawn out the tools he needed to survive. What the village perceived as the precocity of a born genius was in fact the carefully managed performance of a mind that had already lived several lifetimes. He'd manufactured social pressure, shaped the clan's perception of himself, and created conditions that forced their guardians to treat them with a minimum of decency.

  Without that shield they'd both have broken under their uncle's hands long before now.

  Soon, fate would play its most ironic hand.

  When each brother's talent was finally measured before the whole clan, the spotlight would swing entirely from one to the other. Fang Zheng, the overlooked younger son, years of resentment quietly compounding, would suddenly become the clan's most precious asset. And when that power came to him, he wouldn't use it to protect the brother who'd spent years protecting him without ever saying so. He'd use it to settle an old debt, one that existed only in his own accounting, and in doing so, make himself exactly the kind of person he'd always told himself he'd never become.

  In his first life, that had been enough to shatter something in Fang Yuan. Now, after centuries of wandering through worlds where every creature fought for its own survival and seized whatever it could reach, all he felt was a cold and thorough understanding. The law of the jungle held everywhere, on Earth, in this world of Gu. What was there to be surprised by?

  His heart moved only toward one horizon: immortality. That path was narrow and solitary, and it made enemies of the entire world eventually. He'd made his peace with that long ago.

  Fang Yuan cast one last glance at his brother's bent silhouette by the door.

  Look at yourself, Fang Zheng, he thought. You despise your own reflection because all you see in it is my shadow. You don't yet know that tomorrow fate will reverse our roles, and that it'll make a fool of you for it.

  Then, breaking the silence at last with a voice as calm and flat as still water, he spoke:

  — Go rest, Fang Zheng. Tonight's rain washes away the past. But tomorrow, the sun won't rise the same way for everyone.

  Fang Zheng stood frozen for a moment, turning the words over slowly, searching for a meaning that kept slipping just out of reach. At last he answered in a voice barely above a whisper:

  — Then... I will see you tomorrow, big brother.

  He pulled the door shut without adding anything more and disappeared into the corridor, leaving Fang Yuan alone with the murmur of the rain and his centuries of memory.