On a cloudy night, somewhere on Earth, a man stood on a balcony, the glow of his cigarette faint against the dark. He exhaled a plume of smoke into the still air and muttered to himself,
"How boring."
As if the dark clouds had been listening, a rumble of thunder rolled angrily in the distance. Then, with a blinding flash, lightning tore through the clouds — a sudden, final answer.
The man's life ended in a crackling blaze of light.
.....,...
Zeru kingdom
Zeru city, Li family mansion
The courtyard lay in ruins, a silent monument to a massacre. The stone ground, cracked and uneven, glistened with pools of fresh blood reflecting the pale light of a cloud-choked sky. The air was thick with the scent of iron and the faint, acrid tang of smoke. Bodies, twisted and lifeless, sprawled across the space—warriors who had fought, but in vain.
In the center of it all stood a figure, an unsettling stillness surrounding them. Blood soaked every inch of their clothes, the crimson stains vivid against dark fabric. But none of it was their own. The figure's eyes were cold, like shards of ice forged in some forgotten abyss, reflecting no pity, no remorse. They gazed over the scene of carnage with an emotionless intensity, as if searching for something—or someone—amid the slaughter.
At their feet lay the broken body of an old man. His face, wrinkled and lined by the burdens of age, was locked in a mask of pain. Yet, even as his lifeblood pooled around him, his lips moved. The voice that came out wasn't one of a dying elder, but of a youth barely past fifteen—soft, trembling with a mixture of fear and despair.
"You will not get away.." he whispered, his eyes clouding over. As the word left him, his chest gave a final, shuddering rise, and he was still.
The figure swiftly slipped the ring off the dead old man's finger, its movements urgent and precise. Without a sound, it faded into the shadows, dissolving like mist on the wind. Only silence remained, as though the figure had never been there at all..
The courtyard was still once more. The lifeless body of the old man lay there, a stab wound carved directly into his heart. Time seemed to freeze, the weight of death pressing down on the air.
Suddenly, a flash of violet split the heavens, and a bolt of purple lightning tore downward. It struck the old man's corpse with an earsplitting crack. The body convulsed, jerking violently as if a marionette controlled by unseen hands. Fingers curled and uncurled, legs twitched, and the old man's back arched unnaturally off the ground.
The gaping wound in his chest began to close. Skin pulled itself together, Muscles reformed beneath the surface, and veins pulsated with renewed vigor. The color slowly returned to his pale, sunken cheeks, and his eyelids fluttered.
The lightning dissipated, but the air still buzzed with an unnatural energy. The once-dead man's chest now rose and fell in slow, shallow breaths. His eyes snapped open, and they were not the eyes of an old man—they were filled with confusion,fear and exhaution
He inhaled deeply to calm his terrified heart, looking around at the carnage before him as if to make sense of what has occured.