**Part I — The Lotus Child**
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Heaven remembered him every dawn; the world learned to bend and to hush.
It had been six moons since the heavens had split to deliver him, and the air still carried the old tremor — a hum like the echo of thunder in stone. The fields around Chentang Pass grew taller than they ought, and the river ran clearer than memory. Children chased shadows that seemed to dance with the wind. People crossed themselves when they passed the Li manor, not for blessing alone but for fear — fear that the world which had woken that night might wake again.
Nezha's face was not the face of an infant. There was an intelligence there, ancient and knowing, sharp as struck bronze. Light clung to him like an answered prayer. When he smiled, the prayer flags shivered. Wherever he walked, the dust arranged itself into patterns no plow had taught. The hens would stop mid-cluck. The temple cats would lay their heads upon their paws and stare at him as if at a doorway.
The people called him, with trembling mouths, both blessing and curse.
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Inside the manor, Madam Yin kept him close, as if proximity could hold back the horizon.
Li Jing watched from the threshold, sword at his hip though he did not wish to draw it. The house smelled of beeswax and incense and something older — ozone, sharp as lightning's aftermath.
"Born strange, but born mine," she would whisper when the house held its breath. She would press her forehead to his and feel heat like a small summer within his chest. Her hands were never gentle enough; she learned gentleness as if learning a prayer.
Li Jing's love was not less; it was different — steel that did not sing, duty wrapped in tenderness. He had fought men whose names shook provinces. Still, every time the boy laughed and a candle bent, a weight settled on his shoulders like winter.
"We can shield him," he told her once, because speaking the fear aloud made it a thing they could set a spear against. "We keep him hidden, we keep him small — we keep him ours."
Madam Yin lifted his hand to her mouth and kissed the back of it.
"You cannot keep what Heaven has prepared to be unkept," she said, her voice so soft the words were almost a blessing. "But I will keep him until the sky takes him — and if the sky does, I will have kept him all the same."
Outside the windows, the old storm seemed to listen.
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Three years passed like rain on jade.
The pass learned to hold its breath around him. Where he went, the air carried a faint chime, and the temple bells answered his steps with shy echoes. The people muttered prayers and crossed thresholds — not all for protection, but for permission. Permission to live beneath a light they did not command.
One evening, as the sun bowed its last and the pond beyond the courtyard took the color of ink, Nezha slipped away from the servants and went to the water alone. He liked the way the moon split itself into the surface. He liked to see how many faces the world could make of his own.
Madam Yin found him there and sat beside him, her knees wet from the grass. Li Jing came slower, as if each step measured what the sight of his son cost him.
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"It happened again," Nezha said without looking up.
His voice had the plainness of a child making an observation and the gravity of a man stating a verdict. He was barely three years old, yet when he spoke, even the wind seemed to pause.
"The pond froze when I touched it."
Madam Yin's fingers brushed his, and she laughed — a small sound fringed with fright.
"Then it remembers you, my bright disaster," she replied, calling him the name she had not meant the world to hear. "You warm it and chill it both. That is your way."
Li Jing stood behind them, eyes like flint.
"People stare," he said. "They thin the night with whispers. If the sea shudders, if the rains go strange, they will not look kindly on our house."
Nezha turned his face toward his father. His gaze was blunt as a blade, ancient despite his youth.
"Can I be not what they expect and still be yours?"
The question hung in the air like smoke.
Madam Yin wrapped both hands around him, as if containing an ember.
"You are ours," she answered. "Even if the world names you thunder. Even if the heavens grind their teeth."
Li Jing knelt beside them, unshouldering his doubt and trying to fashion it into something like courage.
"The world will learn," he said, and his voice broke at the last word like a reed snapping. "Or it will turn on us. We will do what fathers must do. We will pay whatever toll it asks."
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Nezha watched the water consider the moon.
Then, with childish mischief and something older, he dipped a finger into the pond.
The water shivered — not to ice, but into a ring of petals that rose and settled at his feet. They were lotus blossoms, pale as bone and luminous as the inside of a conch.
Nezha smiled as if at a secret gift.
Madam Yin cried then, openly. Li Jing took her hands in his — a gesture of impossible tenderness. For once, the two of them shared a look that did not belong to parent and warrior, but to two people who loved the same impossible thing and had to decide whether loving it was a crime or a sacrament.
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Beyond the hedge, the mist moved with purpose.
A single bell rang somewhere in the village, though no priest had struck it. The air cooled along the path. Something white gathered at the gate — not wind, not shadow, but a shape that made birds fall silent.
They watched as a figure walked up the lane, robes shimmering like frost under moonlight. The monk's steps left no print. His face was calm as still water, and though his appearance was that of an old wanderer, there was something ageless in the way he moved — as if time itself made way.
He paused at the threshold and bowed — the gesture small, reverent, and exact.
No one spoke. The world seemed to hold its breath.
When the monk finally spoke, his voice carried the weight of mountains and the gentleness of rain.
"I am called Taiyi Zhenren, a humble servant of the Heavenly Way. I have traveled far to see the child born beneath thunder."
Li Jing's hand moved instinctively toward his sword, but the monk only smiled — a knowing thing, neither mocking nor unkind.
"The child you call Nezha bears the fire of the cosmos," he continued. "He is not born of flesh alone, but of spirit. His fate will not belong to your house — but to Heaven's reckoning."
Madam Yin's grip tightened on Nezha. Her voice was steady despite the fear threading through it.
"Will you take him from us?"
The monk's gaze softened.
"Not today. But when the time comes, he must walk a path no mortal child can walk. If he stays here, Chentang will drown in Heaven's envy."
---
He turned then to Nezha, who watched him with eyes too old for his small face — as if recognizing something he had never seen but always known.
The monk knelt and opened his palm. In it lay a single lotus seed, no larger than a teardrop, gleaming faintly in the darkness.
"When you are lost," he said, placing the seed gently in Nezha's hand, "cast this into water. It will remind you who you are."
Nezha looked at the seed, then up at the monk.
"Who am I?"
The question was simple. The silence that followed was not.
The monk's smile deepened, sad and knowing, as if he had heard this question before — perhaps from another child, in another life.
"You are thunder learning to be rain," he said. "Fire learning to be light." He glanced at Madam Yin, at Li Jing, then back to the boy. "You are born of Heaven's chaos and mortal love. Neither realm will accept you easily, yet both have shaped you."
He rose, his robes whispering like wind through reeds.
"When the time comes, I will return for you."
And without another word, he turned and walked into the mist. The air closed behind him like water over stone, and in moments, he was gone — leaving behind only silence and the faint scent of sandalwood.
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Madam Yin whispered into the night, half to the boy, half to the vanished monk:
"If you are a messenger, let it be mercy."
Li Jing said nothing. He simply held his family close and watched the mist thin into nothing.
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That night, Nezha could not sleep.
He slipped from his bed and went to the pond, clutching the lotus seed in his small fist. The moon lay reflected on the surface, broken and beautiful. He hesitated only a moment before dropping the seed into the water.
The pond glowed.
Lotuses bloomed all at once — silver, gold, and crimson — their scent heavy as rain and memory. And at the center of the water, where the reflection of the moon once was, a faint silhouette appeared: a boy made of light, smiling back at him.
Nezha reached out. The reflection reached too.
The water stilled, and the light faded.
But when Nezha looked down, he saw lotus petals circling his feet, just as they had when his mother and father were watching. Just as they had when he first touched the water.
He did not understand yet what he was. But somewhere deep within, a part of him remembered.
---
Beneath the stillness, something older than memory shifted.
The sea listened. The clouds rearranged their patience. And far below the Eastern Sea, in his palace of jade and coral, the Dragon King opened his eyes once more — not in wrath, but in watchfulness.
He had felt the monk's presence. He had felt the seed planted.
And he knew, as Heaven knew, that the child of thunder had been claimed by forces greater than blood or land.
The reckoning was no longer a question of if.
Only when.
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⸻
**End of Part I — The Lotus Child**