Zheng did not cry when he fell.
He did not cry when tutors struck him for mistakes or when generals scowled, impatient with his silence. The boy's face, small and pale beneath the blindfold, remained calm even when the world tried to bend him. Yet inside, every strike, every failure, every misstep from those around him pressed into his chest, heavy and unrelenting.
He cried only once.
It was not from pain inflicted upon him, but from the suffering he could not prevent. A servant, weak and shivering in the cold palace halls, had died quietly, leaving behind a life unremembered and uncelebrated. Zheng felt the servant's fear, the slow collapse of hope, the fading warmth of a life snuffed out too soon. His small body shook, tears running beneath the blindfold that covered his impossible eyes. When it ended, he was forever changed.
From that night onward, Zheng trained. Not like other princes, who learned to command armies, to deliver speeches, to wear silks and sit on thrones. Zheng trained to endure.
He mastered his own body before any blade. His fists split against wood and stone, until his knuckles cracked and bled. His lungs burned with every breath, every inhalation, every exhale, until the air itself seemed to tremble beneath his determination. His will became sharper than the emperor's finest swords. Where other children learned the politics of a palace, Zheng learned the calculus of suffering. Where they practiced etiquette, he practiced endurance.
And when the world offered him pain—he offered it back, measured, absorbed, and unflinching.
By the age of fourteen, whispers traveled faster than his tutor's reports. The boy who never cried, who never blinked behind silk and sealing runes, was a force beyond calculation. He could feel not only the intentions of men, but the weight of their hearts, the hidden fractures in their chi. A lying courtier, a scheming general, a starving child in the streets—he bore them all as though they were his own.
Yet no one could see it. Only Master Ru knew. Only the old mystic who had wrapped silk around the infant's eyes understood that what the boy endured was not punishment or suffering, but preparation.
"Endurance alone does not make a king," Ru murmured as he watched Zheng train. "But a king who cannot bear what he must see is no king at all."
Zheng did not respond. Words were unnecessary. His fists, his breath, the small, silent strength of his body spoke in a language older than dynasties: resolve.
And so, he walked alone among the living and the dying, blindfolded, yet seeing more than anyone dared.
It was during those years of relentless training that the first whispers of Ethereal Lock emerged. Not in the courts, not in the libraries, not in the weapons of generals—but in the battlefield itself.
When neighboring states thought to test the young prince with war, expecting to intimidate a blindfolded boy, they learned a terrifying truth. Zheng moved not with eyes, but with empathy sharpened into strategy. He struck, and the enemy froze—not paralyzed, but judged. Every attack he executed wrapped invisible chains around the chi of his opponents, suspending them between moments, between existence and oblivion. Pain entered him as they fell, searing and pure, but he endured.
By the time he emerged from each confrontation, the battlefield lay quiet. Soldiers whispered of a boy who could not see, yet knew everything. Generals feared him without understanding why. And somewhere beneath the mountains, the Tuktan—the immortals who had abandoned reincarnation—stirred in their stone coffins, sensing a sovereign who could bear what even eternity itself had not asked for.
Zheng's training was not for victory, nor for glory. It was for endurance, for the understanding that to rule a world fractured by suffering, one must first become the vessel for all that pain.
And so, behind his blindfold, he learned the first law of kingship: to see everything is to carry everything, and to carry everything is to be ready for everything that the world will demand of you.