Nine years ago, at dusk, five-year-old Xiao Fan's palm split open, blood pouring from the wound. His father left him with just one sentence: “Someone will come for you,” then vanished into the light outside the door.
Xiao Fan believed him for nine years. He was quiet and withdrawn, often sitting lost in thought among the ruins of a bamboo hut on the back hill. He never played with the other children in town.
Before dawn on the day he turned fourteen, the scar on his palm turned blue. Something that had lain dormant within him for nine years suddenly awakened, like a seed meeting its first spring rain.
A middle-aged man in white emerged through the mist in the bamboo grove. He touched Xiao Fan's palm with a fingertip. “Your father didn't abandon you. He spent nine years shielding you from those hunting you.
“That scar is a seal, locking away the cultivation talent that should have let you defy the heavens. Once your father left, your enemies lost the trail, and that's why you survived until today.
“Now the seal is broken. I'll take over from here.”
Xiao Fan clenched his burning right hand and suddenly understood: that scar had never been a mark of abandonment. It was the last protection his father had left him.
He opened his palm. The blue mark shimmered faintly beneath the rising sun.
“Nine years ago, you protected me. Today, I'm coming to find you.” What he didn't know was that his father had protected him from far more than nine attempts on his life.
And the entire cultivation world would soon be roused by the quiet boy from Qingshi Town.
