The red star appeared at midnight.
Across ten thousand li, cultivators woke from their meditation. Some opened their eyes to blood-colored light bleeding through their chamber walls. Others felt it first. A wrongness in the spiritual energy, like a bowstring pulled too tight.
In the Li Clan manor, Patriarch Li Xuanming stood in the eastern courtyard. His hands clasped behind his back. The red light painted his white robes the color of rust. He had not moved for an hour.
Elders gathered in silence around him. No one dared speak first. The wind that moved through the courtyard carried no warmth. Above them, the red star pulsed like an open wound.
"Patriarch." Elder Li Jian's voice was carefully measured. "The astrologers have confirmed it. The star points directly at our manor."
"I know."
Three words. Nothing more.
In the eastern wing, a woman screamed.
The labor had begun at sunset. Now, three hours later, the midwives whispered prayers to gods whose names they half-remembered. With each contraction, the spiritual energy of the estate twisted. Formations that had stood for three centuries flickered and dimmed.
Lightning split the cloudless sky.
"The child is coming," one midwife said.
In the courtyard, an elder stumbled. Blood leaked from the corner of his mouth. In the Ancestral Hall, unseen by anyone present, his Life Lamp cracked straight down its center.
"What's happening to us?" someone whispered.
The Patriarch's expression did not change. "Heaven is rejecting what we're bringing into this world."
The moment of birth arrived like the snapping of a chain.
The child did not cry.
Lightning struck the manor roof. Clay tiles shattered and rained down on cobblestones. In the mountains beyond the estate walls, spiritual beasts turned and fled toward deeper wilderness. Every formation the Li Clan maintained died in a single instant, be it protective arrays, qi gathering circles, ancestral wards.
Three hundred years of accumulated defenses, gone.
In the Ancestral Hall, three spirit tablets split vertically. The cracks ran clean through ancient wood that should have lasted ten thousand years.
The head midwife lifted the infant with shaking hands. The child's eyes were already open. Not the unfocused gaze of a newborn, but clear. Watching. Aware.
"A boy, Patriarch," she managed to say. Her voice trembled. "But he..."
The words died. The infant was looking at her. Not through her, not past her. At her.
Far above the mortal realm, in a place where space folded into itself and Heaven's laws pressed down like the pressure of eternity, an everlasting woman stood upon nothing at all.
The woman wore robes of jade so deep they appeared black in certain lights. Her face could shatter a cultivator's dao heart if they looked carelessly. Around her, invisible to any mortal eye, formations bloomed and twisted, calculations of fate and probability made manifest in light and law.
She watched the red star with eyes that held no warmth.
"Ten thousand years," she said softly to the empty air. "Ten thousand years of observation and calculation."
Her hand moved. The gesture was slight, almost careless. Reality bent around her fingers. Arrays of light spread across the heavens like spider silk woven from captured starlight. Each thread represented techniques that would take other immortals centuries to even comprehend.
She had begun these calculations before the Li Clan existed. Before their kingdom had been named.
"The first piece is placed." Her lips curved, though it was not quite a smile. "Now we wait. Survive, little star. The board isn't ready for you yet."
She looked down through layers of reality at the distant manor, at the child who would never know her face, and spoke a single word.
That word fell through Heaven and Earth. It threaded through fate itself. It landed in the infant's unopened meridians like a seed pressed into prepared soil.
Then she turned away. There were other pieces to position. Other calculations to complete. She had waited ten thousand years already.
A little longer would not matter.
In the Li Clan manor, the Patriarch entered the birthing chamber. Elders followed at his back. All of them stopped when they saw the child in the midwife's arms.
The infant's eyes tracked their movement.
"Patriarch." An elder's voice shook. "This child... the way he watches us..."
Li Xuanming studied the newborn in silence. The infant stared back without blinking.
Around them, broken formations still smoked. Outside, the red star pulsed in rhythm with some cosmic heartbeat only it could hear.
"This child carries Li Clan blood," the Patriarch said at last. His voice was measured. Practical. "He was born of our lineage. That can't be changed."
"But Patriarch, the omens—"
"I'm aware of the omens, Elder Li Jian." The Patriarch did not raise his voice. He had no need to. "I'm aware of what Heaven showed us tonight. Every formation destroyed. Three ancestors' tablets broken. The beasts fled our lands. The very air rejected his arrival."
No one spoke.
"This child will be raised within the Li Clan," the Patriarch continued. "He'll be given food and shelter as his blood demands. Protection. Care."
Someone released a held breath.
"But he will never touch cultivation." The Patriarch's gaze remained fixed on the infant. "No techniques. No manuals. No spiritual resources. Not a single thread of qi will be directed toward his growth. From this day forward, Li Tianchen will live as mortals live."
"You believe if he cultivates—"
"If he cultivates, Heaven will respond." The Patriarch finally looked away from the child. "The red star was a warning. We'll heed it. Raise him like any other child of our blood, but keep him from the Dao. Perhaps if he lives quietly enough, Heaven will forget he exists."
The elders bowed their understanding.
None of them saw what the Patriarch saw in that final moment before he turned, the way the infant's eyes followed him to the door. The too-sharp intelligence in that tiny face.
None of them saw the faint smile that touched those small lips before dissolving into ordinary newborn sleep.
Outside, the red star began to fade. By dawn, it would vanish entirely, as though it had never stained the sky.
But in the Li Clan's private records, in journals kept by elders and histories they would never speak aloud, this night would be remembered.
The night Heaven showed its displeasure.
The night the cursed star fell.
The night Li Tianchen was born.