---
Before there were gods, there was truth.
Not the kind written by laws, nor the kind enforced by blades.
But the kind the world once was.
Until it was cut.
---
The mark on Yun Che's hand pulsed.
Not with pain this time. Not with power.
But with remembrance.
And the world responded.
---
His vision tore open like silk in a storm. One moment, he stood beside Jasmine in the forgotten highlands.
The next, he stood at the edge of an impossible sky.
Below him, there was no ground.
Only a horizon of silver — as if creation had never known soil or star. A single figure stood there, enormous and still, wrapped in robes of shifting dark.
Not Mo E.
Not a god.
But She Who Held the Sword First.
The First.
The Origin.
---
He watched.
She raised the blade — not out of rage, not out of necessity.
But grief.
"They will not understand," she whispered.
"But they must be given the choice to misunderstand."
And with that, she cut.
---
The blade fell not on land or sky, but on meaning.
And from that wound, duality was born:
Day and night.
Male and female.
Justice and wrath.
Life and death.
Heaven... and its betrayers.
And the world screamed.
The scream became time. The scream became space. The scream became the lie that gods would one day call "balance."
---
Yun Che fell forward onto his knees in the vision, gasping.
The mark on his hand now burned, and from it bloomed a second crescent — not silver, but red, like the edge of a wound that never closed.
"You are the second scar," her voice echoed again.
"But perhaps… you are the first one who will not become a blade."
---
He blinked.
He was back.
Jasmine stood over him, her hand on his cheek. Her eyes wide. Terrified.
"Your aura just—collapsed and exploded and folded back again," she whispered. "What did you see?"
He looked down at his hand.
Both crescents burned faintly now — the full mark complete.
"I saw the first time the world bled," Yun Che said. "And I think…"
He looked toward the heavens, where the clouds no longer moved.
"I think I'm meant to stop it from bleeding again."
---
Far away, in the ashes of the Ancestral Realm, a shadow stirred.
It had waited since the first scream.
It had survived the first cut.
And it whispered now to a broken sky:
"Then we shall cut again."
---