Before they called him the Crimson Tyrant, before history turned his name into a curse, Yan Zhuo had been a child of scholars.
He was born in the outer district of Tianjin, in a house where books outnumbered blades and silence was prized over swordplay. His father, Yan Mu, was a spiritual historian whose hands trembled from too much ink and not enough rest. His mother, Si Wanyu, once an elite cultivator of the Azure Blossom Sect, had sealed away her cultivation to raise a family in peace.
Yan Zhuo was different from birth. He remembered things no child should. By age three, he traced formations with candle soot. By five, he debated with elder scholars. But his greatest curse—and gift—was his ability to remember.
Not just facts, but feelings. Wounds. Injustices.
When the Azure Blossom Sect was attacked by a rogue sect during his seventh winter, his mother took up her blade once more to protect the family. She fought like a comet—burning bright, leaving trails of blood across the snow. She died at the foot of a library, shielding a scroll of forbidden prophecy.
Yan Zhuo was found clutching that scroll. He hadn't cried.
He never did again.
Years passed. He joined the Sevenfold Pagoda Sect—not the most powerful, but the one closest to the forbidden libraries his father once studied. There, he rose fast—too fast. Jealousy festered. Elders watched him like he was a candle next to dry parchment.
When he was seventeen, he exposed a senior cultivator for using soul-shackles on disciples. The cultivator was punished—but Yan Zhuo was marked. "Disruptive," they called him. "Too clever. Too unyielding."
He learned to speak carefully.
He learned not to trust applause.
By the time he reached Nascent Soul, his name had become a warning whispered in high towers.
And then came the massacre.
The Xuanjin Sect, famed for their harmony, had been trafficking children to demonic cultivators in the north. Yan Zhuo uncovered it.
But he did not report it. He burned the sect.
Every elder. Every talisman. Every ward.
He saved who he could. A hundred children lived. But in the flames, a thousand died. The survivors saw only the blood. And when asked what had happened, few dared tell the truth. The surviving elders of allied sects called it treason.
Yan Zhuo said only one thing before vanishing:
"If justice cannot bloom from the soil of your heavens, then I shall water it with fire."
They declared him tyrant.
He did not refute it.
Because he remembered.
Because the sky had burned—and no one had cared until it was his flames.
Years later, rumors said he perished sealing a rift in the Desolate Wastes.
But his enemies feared silence more than death.
So they rewrote him.
Erased the names of the children he saved.
Buried his motives beneath words like madness, heresy, crimson wrath.
History turned. But memory? Memory lived in those who still whispered his name like a prayer not yet answered.
Yan Zhuo.
The man who burned heaven's lies.