The Nether Totem might have been the ideal of the entire Qinghuo Tribe, but that ideal did not belong to Qinghuo Qiming.
His grandfather had been a tribal warrior, his father the tribe's shame, and his adoptive father the greatest Shaman in Qinghuo Tribe's history, one who had initially completed the Nether Totem... They had all died because of it.
The Qinghuo Tribe had been dragged down by an ideal that was difficult to realize.
And Qinghuo Qiming was only a boy who had lost his father, lost his grandfather, and then lost his adoptive father.
Because of those repeated losses, he had come to fear Nether Heaven and dared not approach the Earth Cave. The tribe therefore regarded him as a disgrace and called him a coward. Though he had inherited the position of Shaman, he was not respected.
Jiang Wang had never understood what Qinghuo Qiming had been thinking when he leapt into Nether Heaven.
Their time together had been so brief. Apart from that Scorching Fire Bone Lotus on his back, it seemed nothing else had been left behind. Yet Qinghuo Qiming's leap still occasionally surfaced in his mind—when he gazed up at the stars.
Some people were born powerful; some might never overcome their own mediocrity. But beneath the same starry sky, did they possess the same right to live? Or was it truly the survival of the fittest, where only those who adapted could survive?
That was the question Qinghuo Qiming had left in Jiang Wang's heart.
Qu Kingdom lay roughly along the border between the Northern Domain and the Eastern Domain. It was also a sovereign, independent state, one that had long been at odds with Zheng Kingdom.
Of course, anyone with eyes could see that the friction between these two nations