He remembered her sitting by the fire on wet days, her hands red and stiff from grinding millet by hand. She never spoke unless he was sick. Then she'd sing something strange, neither a lullaby nor a prayer.
One night, during the third winter, when the wind howled more fiercely than wolves, he had asked her why she received him. She'd stopped.
For just a second.
And she stated, "Because you were crying. And someone had to stop it."
That was it. No grand explanation. No divine guidance. Only quiet necessity.
He hadn't cried since.
"Was I a burden to her?"
"Did I remind her of the lost son?"
"Did she love me at all, or did I just take a place in her life?"
He would never know. She died without answers. She was pounding rice in the afternoon, sleeves rolled, braid pinned back with reed cord. She did not wake up the following morning. Her body was cold, jaw clenched, and eyes wide open.
He stayed beside her all day. He lit the fire. He boiled the water. Did not complain once. He didn't know how to keep her alive. He didn't know what was killing her.
He just continued to hold her hand until it grew cold. Later that night, he dug the grave manually and buried her beneath the jujube tree in the backyard. The earth was cold and firm. His fingers had been bleeding through the frost.
The village sent no priest. No incense. No rite. Just an old woman who left rice cakes on the doorstep and didn't look him in the eye.
The jujube tree never bore fruit again.
They didn't hate him.
They just never noticed him. The village children never played with him. Not openly.
One day, there was a girl named Yun'er who had tied a piece of ribbon in his hair, laughing. It had felt… good. But the next day, her uncle forbade her from speaking to him. He never said why. He didn't need to.
He had no family name. No father working the fields. No mother sweeping shrines. Just a dead woman's kindness, and the quiet ache of being too invisible to hate.
Once, an old man grumbled, "Ghost-thing," as he walked by.
He didn't even protest. Just kept going. What would he say? He didn't know what he was. Only what he wasn't.
But still, the words stung. More than any cut. More than cold. It suffocated him like wet linen.
He glanced up.
The sky above was a sickly hue—washed-out blue bleeding into the oncoming dusk, like the last gasp of a dying ember. It wasn't yet night. But it had stopped being day.
He swallowed.
Then, he spoke.
Not because he wanted to get a reply. Not because someone would hear.
But since silence, when not spoken, acquire teeth.
"....What do I do now?"
The words tumbled out of his mouth like rocks thrown into water—rippling, but plummeting quickly. His voice surprised him. It was reed-thin. Delicate. As if it had lost the memory of belonging to anyone.
"I.... I want to get strong," he repeated, softly. The words didn't feel heroic. They weren't bold. They didn't carry flames or banners or declarations. But they were true.
"I don't want to be afraid any more," he whispered, his throat constricting. "I don't want to be hiding any more. I don't want…"
His breath hitched.
"...to starve."
He curled his fingers into fists—not with anger. No. This was a weaker emotion. The desperation of someone trying to hold onto nothing and finding even that slipping away.
His hands trembled.
"....But I don't know how."
No cultivation scrolls in the village. No hidden ancient masters living in huts. No sects, no spirit roots, no trials. Only inebriated old men who spoke about legends they could hardly remember—tales of immortals flying on swords, gods who held lightning in their fists, and heroes who never shed a drop of blood.
But none of them had walked the mud of this village. None had ever slept in wet thatch under a stolen blanket and a blade made from a shattered bowl.
He was just a child. And children were not meant to shape the future. They were meant to disappear quietly into it.
What future could he carve?
And yet.
Yet.
Somewhere under the hunger, under the fear, under the bruises that never scabbed and the frost that nipped at night— there was something else.
A silence that did not whimper.
A refusal that did not shout.
He never believed in greatness. He never believed in destiny. His gods had been silence, and hunger, and disappointment.
But he did believe in wanting.
And wanting was enough to make a creature crawl.
He hungered—not for food, though his stomach had long since forgotten fullness. He hungered for something.
An opportunity. A spark. A fissure in the world where a boy such as he could slip through and become something greater than dust under other people's feet.
The gentle breeze rustled through the foliage, disturbing the moss above softly. One drop followed afterwards—softly, cold, against his face like an unprompted unshed tear of his own.
Rain.
He blinked up at the sky, its pale face darkening into gray now. Thunder rumbled softly in the distance. The boy winced and cursed under his breath.
He sprang up, grabbing for the burlap sack slumped against a root—the one he'd stored the scrawny hare he'd caught. It was little, but it was something. And something was better than nothing.
The rain intensified into a misty curtain of rain, the kind that penetrated clothing and the mind. He half-stumbled, half-ran back to the worn path that curved to the bent shed he used for cover. The ground underfoot, slick with moss and new mud, became slippery.
Then—his foot struck something.
The world spun. The slope betrayed him.
And then the fall—knees thudding into wet ground, his shoulder smashing into curled roots, thorns ripping into his arms. His face slammed into mud, stinking and vile.
"Fuck the ancestors of this cursed rain!"
He coughed, spat filth, dragged himself to his knees. His hand found the sack—soaked, torn open. The hare lay half-spilled, its fur muddied and limp.
His lips clenched.
"Just my luck," he grumbled, breath catching as the rain grew heavier, cold and thin like needles pricking at his skin.
Mist clung to his ankles, holding on to the earth. He was drenched. Mud tugged at his feet. He looked up, peering over the arc of the slope.
There—just ahead. A shallow ridge, nearly concealed behind a slanted group of old rocks and thick vines, covered by a century of moss and time.
He squinted.
Behind the tangle…
A hollow.
Not—not merely an empty.
A cave.
It did not appear sacred. It did not even appear special. He moved forward.
The cave wasn't large. It breathed dampness—thick with the scent of moss and still water. The air was old. It clung to his skin like a second layer of rain. The walls shimmered faintly with grey-green lichen, and the ceiling curved low, forcing him to walk hunched. He didn't go far. Just deep enough to escape the worst of the rain.
His body shuddered with cold and the fall, but here at least the ground wasn't shifting mud.
He sat down, folding up his knees, his head laid on the rock. Beside him, curled up in the battered sack, lay the body of the hare, its countenance as dejected as he felt.
But as his eyes adapted, and his breathing relaxed into deeper, softer breaths, he saw something.
A little deeper in—past a bend.
A wall.
He rose slowly, curiosity replacing where frustration had been. The rear of the cave was exposed.
A wall, high and smooth, stood before him—too smooth to be natural. It was cracked, worn dark with moss and time—but its surface bore the unmistakable pattern of hands.
And on that wall… words.
Dozens. Hundreds. Etched in dark strokes, looping, bleeding into the stone like ink scorched into flesh.
They started off neatly, at eye level. But as the lines fell, they slanted. Twisted. Became frantic.
By the end, the script had twisted into forms that refused to be words—crawling lines like veins, or thorns, or something that was eager to talk but had lost the memory of how.
His mouth felt dry.
His heart beat slower.
He read.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
I'm not writing this to be remembered.
Fuck remembrance.
I'm writing this 'cause the voices won't stop gnawing my goddamn skull.
They whisper in my sleep.
They bite when I breathe.
They curl under my tongue like worms in rot.
So perhaps if I vomit it out here, in this piss-stained cave where even the ghosts gag—perhaps I'll have a moment's peace.
You discovered this location?
Shit.
I'm sorry for you.
Or perhaps I ain't.
Perhaps you did deserve it.
Perhaps you're like me. Empty as a broken bone. Ill with wanting. Ill with needing.
If you're reading these words, then life's already kicked your ribs in and pissed in the cracks.
You're starving.
Not for bread. Not for safety.
You're starving for something meaner.
Some fucked-up reason.
Some speck of power.
Some harsh reality to respond to that voice that yells inside your head whenever you glance up into the sky and remember that it doesn't even see you.
That cry that screams, "Why the fuck am I this small in a world this fucking big?"
Yes. That one.
Let me tell you something, cave crawler.
They named me Xie Wuming.
The Nameless Bastard.
The Hollow Flame.
The Sky-Buried Curse.
The Oath-Breaker.
The Filth-Tongue.
The Spiral-Souled Scum.
The Weed That Grew in Shit and Still Learned to Fucking Bite.
And still after all of that, they weren't done.
The Heir of Fuck-All.
The Beast That Pissed on Heaven's Seal.
The Nine-Lie Bastard.
The Devil Who Burned Backwards.
The Ghost That Wouldn't Stay Dead.
The Shit-Stain on the Dao.
Tch. So many names.
You needed names, did you?
Needed something to spit between your teeth so that you didn't choke on your fear.
You referred to me as demon, curse, stain, shadow, freak, blasphemy.
As if a fucking name could cage me.
As if putting me in your little holy books would cleanse the blood from your hands.
Well fuck your names. Fuck your seals.
Fuck your sanctified paths.
I will tell you the truth.
I wasn't born evil.
I was fucking built that way.
I had no one to crawl to. No one to cry to. No one to fucking beg.
No mother's lullaby.
No warm fatherly hands.
They died face-down in gutter froth behind a piss-washed wine house.
Stabbed. Starved. Forgotten.
No incense.
No names.
No tombstones.
Their corpses were scooped up like old dogs and dumped behind a dusty temple like spoiled rice.
And me?
Wrapped in fishskin. Sleek with blood and guts. A beggar sustained me long enough to sell me for a half-rotten peach in the famine season.
So yeah. That's my origin story. Big fuckin' deal.
No phoenix. No dragon. No destiny.
No glowing birthmark.
No jade-eyed elder arriving with a divine mandate.
No mystic prophecy scrawled in stars.
Just hunger. Just filth.
Just me, gnawing on bone to learn before I could fucking talk.
I wasn't born beneath the heavens. I was spat out by the dirt.
I wasn't an error.
I was waste.
--------------------------------------------------------------
No one fucking visited me.
No kindly sage in moonlight robes.
No wandering goddamn master with a twinkle in his eye and a legacy to pass on.
No family crest imprinted on my ass.
No savior.
Just me, a cracked-fingered little shit in the gutters, chewing on bark and bottle glass for the taste of anything.
I wasn't a hidden dragon waiting to be found.
I was a damn sewer rat with hate in my lungs and scars where dreams ought to have been.
Scabs covered my hands from brawling over garbage. My knees were bleeding from crawling along alley filth. I had fleas that were nearer to me than humans were.
I learned to steal before I could speak.
Bit fingers before I could beg with them.
Snarled like a dog at people twice my size for the right to chew bones already dripping with other bastards' spit.
I bled so long that the taste of iron was more comforting than my own name.
Smiles? They were warning signs. A smile always meant that someone was going to steal something from me—flesh, pride, breath, didn't matter.
And what did this world teach me?
That it don't care a rat's bloated dick about the weak.
It eats them.
Shits them out.
Then unearths them and laughs as he grinds their faces back into the ground, declaring it fate.
"There's no justice in Heaven. There's only a fucking hierarchy."
You ever look and notice what power is?
It ain't flowing robes and glittering talismans. That's window dressing. Theater.
Power is not resplendent baubles or bloodlines steeped in incense and vanity.
Power is teeth.
Power is fists that never stop even when your fucking bones scream.
Power is limping on broken knees with your insides spilling out and still muttering, "Not yet. Not fucking done."
They say righteousness exists.
Fuck off.
That's a bedtime story the powerful tell themselves so they can sleep after coating the walls in someone else's blood and painting them red.
I torched the part of me that yearned for hugs. Strangled out the kid who longed for lullabies.
I murdered that soft little shit inside me—and from the rot, I built something else.
Not a man.
Not even a beast.
A fucking demon. One that won't heal. One that bites back.