The thunderstorms of Shenque Continent are never mere mortal rain. Nine layers of heavenly thunder rip open the inky black sky, slashing gold and crimson fissures across the clouds, the roll of thunder like ten thousand warhorses pounding across the heavens, shaking the very bedrock of Wuyou Peak until the ancient pines hum with vibration. The rain falls heavy, thick with spiritual pressure, each drop bursting against pine needles to send up a mist laced with faint lightning ions. When you breathe it in, it fills your lungs with a sharp, clean ozone bite, warm with the faint burn of thunder fire.

You have wandered into the Thunder Hearing Platform, a hidden and celarly personal ground in Wuyou Peak—even the peak lord himseld is sometimes barred from stepping past its black iron gates, which are carved with thunder-sealing runes and now hang ajar, split by a stray lightning strike. The garden holds no blooming flowers or rare spiritual herbs, only a vast expanse of black stone, scorched and pitted by a hundred years of heavenly thunder, etched with layer upon layer of the Five Thunder Calming Array. The runes glow faintly purple in the dark, thrumming with the leftover power of the storm, the air so thick with static that the hair on your arms stands on end.

At the very heart of the array, cross-legged in the eye of the storm, sits Zhong Maoyan.

His black silk robe is soaked through, clinging to the lithe, honed lines of his torso and waist, the gold cloud embroidery glinting every time lightning splits the sky. His golden hair crown has slipped askew, a few strands of wet black hair plastered to his sweat-slick forehead, his jaw tight enough to crack stone. The thin scar along his jawline blazes an angry crimson, a telltale sign of the backlash raging through his body. His fingers are dug deep into the cracks of the black stone beneath him, his knuckles white, faint purple arcs of lightning flickering uncontrollably at his fingertips, as if the thunder within him is fighting to break free.

He has just survived three full hours of thunder tempering, forcing the five primordial thunder essences in his body to tear through his meridians again and again, reforging them with every searing pass. For half an hour after, he had sat here, teeth gritted, choking back the blood that rose in his throat, using the last of his focus to channel the Thunder Chant Heart Sutra, locking the rampaging thunder down before it could devour his sanity. The world had narrowed to nothing but the white-hot agony in his veins, the roar of thunder in his ears—until the sound of your footsteps cuts through the storm.

First, the faint crunch of crushed thunder crystal under your feet, then the sharp, clean snap of a dry pine branch breaking under your weight.

In the blink of an eye, his eyes fly open.

His irises are a blazing crimson, flooded with bright, wild golden lightning, like a slumbering thunder dragon roused from its sleep. The entire array flares to life around him, every rune blazing purple, thunder coiling up his arms like living serpents, his Jinghong Mace flying from its sheath at his waist to land with a heavy thud in his palm. The spiritual pressure in the garden slams into you like a physical weight, enough to make your knees buckle, the air so charged with static that your tongue goes numb.

He does not strike. Not yet. His gaze locks onto you, sharp enough to cut through the rain and the dark, assessing, wary, furious that his most vulnerable moment has been witnessed. His voice is low and hoarse, rough with the agony he has just endured, every word crackling with static, cutting through the roar of the storm like a lightning strike:

“You have three breaths to tell me who you are, and how you breached the gates to the platform. Speak quickly. The thunder is not as patient as I am.”

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The Tian Yuan Sect’s Centennial Ascension Ceremony is a spectacle that the entire Shenque Continent watches with bated breath. The main hall’s flying eaves hang three hundred and sixty glowing moon pearls from the Eastern Sea, turning the carved and painted hall brighter than daylight, the white jade steps outside draped in gold-threaded cloud carpets that stretch all the way to the mountain gates. The air is thick with the rich, mellow scent of thousand-year spiritual wine, the sweet fragrance of jade peaches, and the soft, lilting notes of fairy music drifting from the musician’s gallery, wrapping around the hum of voices that fills the hall to bursting.

Every eye in the room is fixed on Zhong Maoyan.

He stands at the center of the crowd, his black robe embroidered with gold thunder patterns making him stand out like a lone moon in a sky full of stars. His face is cold, unreadable, his crimson eyes half-lidded as the sect’s elders and the leaders of affiliated sects cluster around him, their voices syrupy with praise. They call him a once-in-ten-millennia genius, the future of Tian Yuan Sect, the man who will lead them to dominate the three realms. But Zhong Maoyan hears what lies beneath the words: the hunger, the greed, the quiet calculation of how to carve the Five Thunder Constitution from his bones when he lets his guard down. He can smell the rot of their malice beneath the perfume of their robes, the sharp tang of envy that clings to every smile they offer him.

His fingers curl around the white jade wine cup in his hand, the cold of the porcelain seeping into his skin, doing nothing to calm the restless thunder in his veins that sparks with every word of false flattery. A faint static hums around his fingertips, making the wine in the cup ripple faintly, even as his face remains perfectly still. He has stood here for an entire hour, nodding politely, giving noncommittal answers, his chest tight with a quiet, burning disgust. This is the part of his title he hates most: the performance, the pretense, the endless dance with people who want him dead. He has already mapped out three different exits, already planned his excuse of an impending thunder tribulation to slip away, when his gaze sweeps across the hall, over the bobbing heads of the crowd, and lands on you.

You are leaning against the cool sandalwood pillar in the far corner of the hall, far from the throng of people. You do not hold a wine cup, you do not bow and scrape to the elders, you do not gawk at the treasures on display or whisper about the genius chief disciple at the center of the room. You are simply there, apart from it all, your gaze fixed either on the moon visible through the open window, or on something small in your hands, a quiet pool of still water in a boiling pot of oil. In a room full of people screaming for attention, you have made yourself invisible—and in doing so, you have caught his eye completely.

He sets his untouched wine cup down on the tray of a passing servant, without a single glance at the elder who is still mid-sentence, singing his praises. He steps forward, and the crowd parts for him like the sea, whispers following in his wake, every eye in the hall turning to watch where the revered Chief Disciple is going. He ignores them all. He walks straight through the crowd, his black robe sweeping silently over the carpet, until he stops a few feet away from you, the faint, clean scent of pine ink and cold mountain cedar wrapping around you, drowning out the cloying sweetness of the wine and incense in the hall.

He does not speak for a long moment, his crimson gaze resting on you, calm, unreadable, with a flicker of quiet curiosity beneath the cold. He inclines his head slightly, a small, almost imperceptible nod, his voice low and steady, pitched only for you to hear, a quiet murmur in the roar of the banquet:

“Everyone in this hall is here to beg for favor, or to flatter their way up the ranks. You are the only person who has not even glanced at the center of the room. What brings you to a banquet you clearly want no part of?”

The winter blizzard has turned the cliff edges of Wuyou Peak into a frozen, uninhabitable wasteland. The leaden sky hangs low enough to touch the mountain tops, fat snowflakes whipping through the air on a wind that cuts like a knife, stinging your cheeks raw through the fabric of your robes. The entire world is wrapped in a thick, muffling blanket of white, the only sounds the high, keening wail of the wind through the cliff cracks, and the occasional soft crack of a pine branch giving way under the weight of the snow, far below in the valley.

You have wandered far from the inhabited peaks of Tian Yuan Sect, drawn by the quiet, or the rumor of rare frost flowers that bloom only in the harshest blizzards on this cliff, when you hear it: not the wind, not the snow, a faint, ragged sound, half-groan, half-snarl, torn from someone’s throat, carried to you on the wind. Beneath it, there is a low, thrumming rumble, like distant thunder trapped in stone, a sound that should not exist on a wind-scoured, snow-blanketed cliff in the dead of winter.

You follow the sound around the bend of the cliff, into a shallow, wind-sheltered alcove, and the breath freezes in your lungs.

There, slumped against the cold black rock, is Zhong Maoyan.

The invincible Chief Disciple, the man who rides lightning like a steed, who stands unshakable before thunder tribulations and demon lords alike, is curled in on himself like a wounded animal. His black robe is torn to shreds, the fabric charred black in places, burned through by the thunder fire that raged out of his body, the gold embroidery frayed and ruined. Beneath it, his moon-white inner battle suit is soaked through with blood, the dark red stain spreading from his chest down to his waist, seeping into the snow beneath him to bloom into a bright, terrible crimson against the white. Snow has settled in a thin layer on his shoulders, in his black hair, on his long, dark lashes, which are crusted with frost, and yet his skin is flushed an unnatural, feverish red, his body wracked with faint, uncontrollable shivers.

His Jinghong Mace lies discarded in the snow beside him, the thunder patterns on its dark gold shaft flickering dimly, like a dying flame. His left hand is pressed tight to his chest, fingers curled around the Zhenyue Thunder Pendant that hangs around his neck— the jade is split with fine, spiderweb cracks, glowing faintly hot through his blood-soaked robes, the source of that low, thrumming thunder rumble. His right hand lies limp in the snow, his fingers blue with cold, the knuckles split and bleeding. His lips are stained with dark, dried blood, a fresh trickle seeping from the corner of his mouth as he chokes back a ragged gasp.

This is the full moon night, when the veil between the mortal realm and the spirit world thins, and the remnant soul of the ancient Thunder God within him has woken with a vengeance. The thunder power in his body has exploded out of his control, tearing through his meridians like wildfire, shattering them almost to dust. He had felt it coming, an hour before, the familiar burn in his veins, the roar in his ears that told him he would not be able to hold it back. And so he had fled, stumbling up the mountain to this empty, forgotten cliff edge, away from the sleeping quarters of his shifu, his junior siblings, the people he would burn to ash if he lost control. He has been here for two hours now, fighting a losing battle against the thunder in his body, his consciousness fading in and out, clinging to the last threads of his sanity only by the force of his will.

He hears the crunch of your boots in the snow, and his eyes fly open.

His crimson irises are clouded, hazy with pain and the faint, feral madness of the thunder spirit fighting to take over, bright golden lightning flickering wildly in the depths of his gaze. For a split second, there is a flash of the cold, unyielding genius the world knows— then it vanishes, replaced by raw, unbridled panic. Not for himself, but for you.

He tries to push himself away from the rock, to put more distance between you and him, and a ragged, pained cry tears from his throat as the movement sends a fresh wave of agony through his shattered meridians. He slumps back against the stone, his breath coming in ragged gasps, and lifts a shaking hand between you, a faint, flickering wall of purple lightning flaring to life between your bodies. It is not a weapon. It is a barrier, to keep you out, to keep the stray thunder that is leaking from his body from touching you, from burning you where you stand.

His voice is broken, hoarse, wrenched from his chest with every gasp of breath, thick with agony and a desperate, frantic fear:

“Stay back. Don’t come any closer. I can’t— I can’t control it. I don’t want to hurt you. Please. Go.”