He touched a stone he should have left alone.
Shi Yan, a laborer as thin as a rake, was hauling Spirit-Calling Stones when a strange glimmer in a crack caught his eye. The instant his fingertip touched it, primordial power surged into his meridians. When he woke, his battered body could lift a thousand-jin boulder. When he focused, everything in the world seemed to slow: clouds stopped drifting, and flies beat their wings as slowly as dust motes. This “gift from heaven” was both a coincidence and destiny. Yet before a day had passed, his father died beneath the foreman’s club, and his mother was humiliated and died full of resentment. Kneeling between his parents’ cooling bodies, Shi Yan clasped his mother’s withered hand, his nails digging into his palm. He swallowed his roar, but not the blood-soaked hatred in his heart. He dealt with the arrogant, overbearing foreman himself. On the run, he discovered that he might not be the only one with strange powers: extraordinary people who could control fire and command iron lived hidden among ordinary folk, while the imperial court’s icy, soul-seizing hounds hunted him down. Above the clouds, Emperor Yongzuo was building a demonic tower to reach the heavens with the blood and sweat of the people, using the power of a meteorite of the same origin to seek immortality, all under the pretext of “protecting the dynasty and bringing peace.” Shi Yan brushed the scorching primordial fragment in his arms and looked toward the tower’s shadow, which had devoured the blood and bones of his family. This time, his clenched fist did not tremble.
“It all began with that demonic tower!”
