10 Years Ago...
"Get away! Stay back!" the young boy screamed, his lungs burning with every desperate breath.
He was barely five feet tall, far too young and far too small to be out in this deadly wilderness alone. His dark black hair clung to his sweaty forehead as his small feet pounded frantically against the damp bamboo forest floor.
Behind him, a chorus of guttural snarls echoed through the dark woods.
The Corpse Eater Hounds were closing in. These were no ordinary beasts. They were mutated wolves, vile demonic beasts that fed on the bodies of dead spirits. Their faces were terrifyingly eerie, stretched into permanent, unnatural human like grins showing rows of razor sharp teeth.
"Wind Arrow!" the boy shouted, twisting his body mid stride.
He pulled back his empty hands, gathering his rapidly fading spiritual essence. A pale green arrow formed in his palm and shot through the thick air. It struck the leading hound square in the chest with a loud smack.
The beast barely flinched. It shook off the wind magic as if it were a light summer breeze and continued its relentless sprint.
"Why is it not working? Why am I so weak?" he cried out in pure frustration. "If only I were stronger! If only my cultivation was higher! If only someone helped me..."
His wind arrows were completely ineffective. The horrific beasts were simply too strong, and he was far too weak.
Suddenly, his foot caught on a thick tree root hidden beneath the overgrown grass.
"Ah!" he yelped as he fell on the ground, his small frame scraping painfully against the rough dirt and rocks.
He could hear the clicking of claws drawing closer. As he lay there gasping for air, images flashed before his eyes. The faces of his two beloved older brothers.
"Why?" he whispered to the empty air, tears welling in his eyes. "Why did you do this to me, Brothers?"
He had no answers to that question.
This young man was the youngest, the ninth son of the Hua clan.
His father, Hua Gu, was the powerful and respected clan leader. But the boy himself had no grand backing. His mother was a simple maiden from a very small clan. He had absolutely zero chance at the succession to the clan leader position. He was not even in the competition.
The memory from earlier that day played vividly in his mind.
"Brother Luo, Brother Jing, where are we going?" he had asked, skipping alongside them happily.
Hua Luo, his second brother, had smiled warmly. "We are going hunting, Little Brother. Deep into the woods. We want to show you something special."
"Yes, something very special," Hua Jing, his fourth brother, had added with a strange glint in his eyes. "We heard there’s a wild spirit here that helps the cultivation from elders."
"Will there be fierce beasts? Mother told me the deep woods are dangerous," the young boy had asked, his eyes wide with a mix of fear and excitement.
Hua Luo had stopped walking entirely. The warm smile vanished from his face. "Only for you, Little Brother."
"What do you mean, Second Brother? With you two here, I am safe."
"We mean you have overstayed your welcome in our clan," Hua Jing spat, stepping menacingly behind the boy.
"We don’t need another brother competing against us. You need to be gone," Hu Luo muttered with a dangerous, cruel grin on his face.
"But I do not understand! I do not want to be clan leader! I just want to stay with mother! I do not compete with you!" the boy pleaded, his heart hammering in his chest.
"It is not about competition," Hua Luo said coldly. "Your mere existence is an abnormal incident. Father might ignore you, but we will not. You don’t need to know details why."
"Please, let us just go back! I will not tell father anything about this! I swear!"
"We know you will not tell him," Hua Jing laughed darkly. "Because dead boys tell no tales."
Before the young boy could react, a heavy wooden pole swung through the air. Hua Jing had struck him incredibly hard on the back of his head.
Everything went dark. When he finally woke up, he was entirely alone in the deepest part of the forest. A pack of Corpse Eater Hounds had already caught his scent, forcing him to run blindly until he tripped over an exposed root and fell.
Now, he was on the floor, waiting for a gruesome death.
Neither Hua Jin nor Hua Luo used their spirit essence to kill their brother. If the clan elders discovered they had murdered their brother, their reputations would be ruined. Any lingering essence left in the corpse would make their guilt undeniable.
"Father never cared about me. My brothers want me dead," he muttered. "Is this my fate?"
He closed his eyes, accepting the end. But then, a bright image pierced through the darkness of his despair. His gentle mother, smiling brightly. Beside her stood a young girl, her eyes full of innocent admiration.
"You have to be strong for us," his mother’s voice echoed gently in his mind.
"I will wait for you to come back! You promised to play with me!" the young girl’s sweet voice rang out clearly.
The young boy’s eyes snapped open. The sadness in his heart morphed into a burning will to live.
"No. I cannot die here. I cannot leave them alone!"
He scrambled to his feet just as the hounds lunged. He dodged blindly and looked up, spotting a massive, decaying tree branch hanging precariously above the pack.
"Wind Arrow!" he roared, pointing his hands at the sky.
The pale green projectile shot upward, slicing cleanly through the rotted wood. With a deafening crack, the massive timber crashed down onto the pack of Corpse Eater Hounds, blocking the path and crushing a few of them beneath its weight.
"That bought me some time," he panted, breaking into a desperate sprint once again.
His spiritual essence was practically empty now. "I can only cast two more arrows. Maybe three at most. After that, I will become completely useless."
He pushed his burning legs to run faster. But the forest was relentless. From the thick bushes on his right side, a stray hound leaped out without a single sound of warning.
"Get off!" the boy shrieked in shock as the beast tackled him.
Its razor sharp teeth sank deep into his right arm. Warm blood sprayed across the green leaves.
"Ahhhhh!" he screamed in pure agony.
In a blind panic, the young man jumped away from the beast, trying to shake it off. He threw his body weight to the side, completely missing his footing. The ground suddenly gave way beneath him.
He plunged into a huge, gaping hole hidden by overgrown ferns. The walls of the tunnel looked like a cave, but they were slick, wet, and terribly slimy.
"Help me!" his voice echoed uselessly as he slipped deep inside it.
He tumbled down the steep, winding cavern. He slid faster and faster, bumping against the cold stone.
One minute passed. Then five. He kept sliding for a good ten minutes, descending endlessly into the absolute dark.
Finally, the tunnel ended.
He crashed heavily onto the floor of a large cave filled with a slimy water like substance. The impact knocked the last bit of breath from his lungs. His vision blurred as the pain in his arm flared intensely. The teeth marks were deep, and he was already bleeding heavily.
"It hurts... it hurts so much," he groaned, trying to lift his head. "I don’t want to die,"
He commanded his arms to move, but they refused. His body was completely broken and exhausted. He just lay there on the cold stone. His red blood slowly seeped from his terrible wound, mixing into the strange slimy water of the cave.
"Mother..." he whispered, his voice incredibly faint.
His eyes rolled back, and he fainted completely.
For a long moment, the cavern was dead silent. But as his blood fully mixed with the slimy water, the entire cave suddenly started to shake violently. Loose stones fell from the ceiling, splashing into the pool.
Deep within the rocky wall directly in front of his unconscious body, ancient stone ground against ancient stone. A massive, hidden door slowly began to open, revealing a mysterious path into the unknown, waiting for the young man to awaken.