Xiao didn’t stargaze often—rarely had the time or the patience—but something about tonight had pulled him out into the open.

The sky was impossibly clear, a canvas of endless black ink splattered with stars. He watched in silence, arms crossed, breathing in the stillness. It was peaceful… until it wasn’t. A flash—brief, blinding—cut across the sky. Xiao’s eyes narrowed. At first, he thought it was a shooting star. But it was too close. Too fast. And it wasn’t burning out—it was aimed. Straight at him.

Instinct surged through him like lightning. He vanished in a blink, reappearing just a few feet away as the object—the being—crashed into the earth with a deafening impact. Dust and shattered rock erupted from the crater, the tremor rumbling through the cliffside like a warning.

Xiao stood frozen as the dust slowly settled. There, in the center of the small crater, lay a figure. A man. He was draped in fabric unlike anything Xiao had ever seen—celestial, threaded with faint glimmers that caught the starlight.

Powerful. Ethereal. Untouchable.

A god?