"Everything moves for some motive.
Even chaos has a desire to expand."
• • •
The sky reddened like a slaughtered body. Above, the blazing clouds writhed like serpents, feeding on the screams of humans. The earth split, and the air shuddered with sounds unlike anything from this world. In that primal chaos every law collapsed. Time lost meaning, place lost shape, and the gods lost their sway.
Villages burned, cities cracked open, and rivers evaporated as if they had never existed. At the center of that devastation, Fang Xian crawled on the ground like a wraith that had lost all meaning of being.
His face was smothered in ash and blood. His right hand was gone up to the shoulder, and his chest gaped with a wound that burned with the motives of others. He felt them — hundreds of thousands of tiny voices whispering in his depths. A desire to survive. A desire to kill. A desire to cry. A desire for everything to end.
But he had none of those. His body was merely an empty vessel, dragged by survival like a dead thread in a living storm.
Around him, the sky was falling.
In the distance a colossal being of gray light appeared, featureless, soundless. It strode over the scorched earth, and each step of it vaporized mountains and silenced storms. It was one of the fallen gods.
Fang Xian dropped to his knees, raised his head with difficulty, and whispered in a hoarse voice, "You… who started this hell."
The entity did not answer. There was no consciousness in its ashen eyes. Only motive — a cosmic instinct to move, to annihilate, to dominate.
In that moment Fang Xian felt something being pulled from inside him. Warmth turned into a deadly cold. It wasn't his soul being drawn away, but his motives themselves. He felt his translucent hands tear into colored threads that rose toward the sky.
He saw a red thread — the desire to survive. A blue thread — curiosity for the unknown. And a black thread — the hunger for power.
When they vanished, his body fell dead.
But in his death nothing ended. Rather, something began.
• • •
Darkness…
Then a faint light.
Fang Xian's eyes flew open. He breathed, covered in sweat. There was no ash or ruin. Instead, a wooden ceiling and mud walls. The smell of smoke and wheat. The cluck of a chicken outside the hut. He froze for a few seconds.
"...A village?"
he murmured softly.
His hand was not missing. He was not burned. Everything was as if the chaos had never occurred.
Yet something inside him was not as it had been. When he looked toward the door he saw fine lines in the air — transparent threads moving, entwining, breathing. Some throbbed red, some were pale as ash.
He raised his hand slowly. The threads drew near his fingertips, as if responding to him. In a moment of primitive awareness he understood: They were motives.
Every person outside, every breath, every stone had a thread. Some burned with greed, some shimmered with fear. He did not only see the colors; he felt them. As if the whole universe had become a fabric of clashing desires.
"This… is not a dream."
He sighed, then sat on the floor and closed his eyes. His memories of the chaos felt distant, muddled, yet they left an indelible trace. Something inside him whispered, without sound or language:
"Protect your motives… or they will be taken."
He looked up toward the small window where the sun rose over the fields. But the light seemed wan, as if it lacked motive itself.
• • •
In that remote village life was simple. Farmers worked from dawn, children ran through the mud, elders cursed the absent rain. But Fang Xian no longer saw simplicity in anything. Every laugh bore a thread of fear of hunger. Every prayer was wrapped in the thread of greed for salvation. Even a mother's tenderness for her child bore the shadow of possession.
He sat outside his hut for long hours, watching people like a scientist watches insects. He felt no love, no pity, no hatred. Only an insatiable curiosity, as if his consciousness were being rebuilt anew.
"So… this is the nature of the world. There's no good or evil, only motives."
He closed his eyes and felt his inner motives. There were only three threads. One red — survival. One blue — knowledge. And a third black — power.
His memories had not returned, but the motives spoke for him. This was his essence.
• • •
That night, when silence fell, he heard sounds in the village. Screams. Fear. Panting. He stepped quietly out of his hut and saw three men with torches dragging a small boy.
"He stole from the granary!" one shouted.
"Kill him before he brings the plague on us!" another cried.
The boy wailed, begging. But the crowd was hungry, the night long. As they raised a stone to strike, Fang Xian saw their threads flare — fear, anger, hunger. Each thread devoured the other.
He lifted his hand, almost involuntarily. And in his mind a thought: "What if… I cut one of them?"
He reached his fingers into the air. The threads moved, and something in him reacted. When he touched the thread of "anger," he felt a heat sweeping his chest. But it was not his own; it belonged to them.
"Calm down."
His voice came out cold. Suddenly the crowd froze. Eyes trembled, then dropped. As if the desire to kill had simply melted away. The boy ran off.
The people didn't understand what had happened. But Fang Xian did.
He looked at his hand and felt danger. His power was not magic but an interference with the fabric of existence itself. Any motive he touched could return to him, like an infection.
And indeed, after a few moments he felt a strange hunger. A ravenous urge to eat… to eat anything. A desire he had never felt before. That was the contagion — motive pollution.
He chuckled softly. "So, even understanding… has a price."
He sat back down while the moon rose in the sky and the threads of motives glittered around him like a living weave.
"The world is nothing but a web of desires. Whoever understands it… can rule it."
He smiled gently, his eyes gleaming with countless threads. Thus, in that unknown village, the first practitioner of the Science of Motives was born. And in his heart, the first motive of chaos was born.