(Still in development. The writing schedule is not yet known. The timeline weaves back and forth, making this a challenging project. I’ll make sure the book is polished before it begins, so please look forward to it. Happy ending.)
A candle painter makes a trade using candles. Whatever you wish for, offer something sincerely to the gods, then light a candle. The flame that rises is the spirit of your wish.
Later, someone discovered that this power could fuel evil desires, and used it to rise to the top overnight.
In later generations, more and more people sought to gain something for nothing through this practice. Yet its practitioners were mysterious and short-lived. Most who failed suffered divine punishment, vanishing without a trace.
But the founding master of this art, Zhirong, seemed to be an exception. Rumor had it that he was ageless and deathless, untouched by illness or mortality, and must have been a god from the heavens all along.
But rumors were only rumors. No one had ever seen him, and some even guessed that Zhirong had died long ago, and that the whole story was merely people’s delusion of ascending to immortality.
Then, one day a hundred years later, torrential rain and rolling thunderbolts struck a hungry child in a small village.
The thunderbolt shimmered with every color of the rainbow, a sign that the child was destined for greatness.
The villagers forced the child to pray for the founding master to answer, and to surrender the child’s good fortune to someone else.
“Child, what is your wish?”
“I want... to see the god once before my fate is changed by the divine.”
But after hearing the child’s words, the god suddenly appeared and spoke.
“But the god isn’t good-looking. Could we just not meet?”
The child kept their eyes tightly shut and shook their head. So the god casually agreed and met the child once.
But that single glance stayed with him for years to come.
Only when fate turned back three hundred years did he realize that the meeting between them lay across countless seasons and years.
With their past lives separated by an ocean, it turned out that all of it had been to protect this one person.
Theme: An immortal in a dream, through countless twists and turns; reunion and parting are all a matter of fate.
