The clang of metal echoed faintly beneath the hum of crickets, swallowed by the breath of a dying fire.
In a village forgotten by maps, wedged between the broken ridges of the Stoneveil Mountains, a boy labored into the night. His fingers were blistered. His arms ached. Sparks flew each time the hammer struck—fewer with each swing, as the embers began to fade.
He was only thirteen.
But the weight of his hammer was the same as any grown man's.
Jin Muyeon didn't pause. The broken iron before him had no soul, no shine, but he treated it like a treasure. He turned it over, studied the cracks, and raised the hammer again. His father's old forge—barely held together by rusted bolts and age-worn bricks—groaned as the bellows sputtered behind him.
Muyeon didn't know any cultivation technique. No Qi coursed through his body. All he had was this old forge… and the memories of a time when his father still stood beside him.
"Strike until it listens," the old man used to say. "Metal has a temper. Earn its respect. Then shape it."
But that was before the illness. Before his father stopped waking up before dawn. Before he stopped rising at all.
Tonight, Jin Muyeon worked alone.
The sun hadn't yet risen when the boy stumbled out of the workshop. His arms hung limp. His tunic was soaked with sweat. The "sword" he'd reforged wasn't elegant—but it held together, and in the dim orange of the forge, it even glinted a little.
He looked down at the blade, half-smiling.
Then a voice cut through the quiet:
"You stayed up again, didn't you?"
He turned.
At the edge of the forge, standing with arms crossed and moonlight draping her like a cloak, was a girl in a pale green robe. She was barefoot, dust on her soles, a basket of herbs at her hip. Her long hair swayed gently in the breeze.
Ruo Lianhua.
She had no surname back then, just "Lianhua," just the girl who came by to help when Muyeon's father got sick. She wasn't from the village—no one knew exactly where she'd come from—but Muyeon didn't care.
She always showed up. That was enough.
"I had to finish it," he said, lifting the blade half-heartedly.
"Then rest," she replied, stepping closer. "You're not made of iron."
Muyeon chuckled. "Not yet."
She sighed, exasperated in that way only someone who cared deeply could be. "One day, the fire's going to burn you instead of the metal."
"Maybe," he said. "But until then… I'll keep swinging."
She sat beside him on the stone steps, and for a while, they said nothing. The stars blinked above them, silent witnesses to a small boy and a tired girl dreaming of more.
That night, far above the village, a star fell.
It was no ordinary star.
It screamed as it tore through the sky, burning red and silver, falling like a blade flung from heaven itself.
It crashed deep into the Gravepine Forest, five leagues east of the village. Trees shattered. Beasts scattered.
And deep in the crater, pulsing with ancient warmth, was something no mortal forge had seen in a thousand years…
A shard of Primordial Flame Essence.