Year sixty-eight of the Firefolk Era, early spring.
The snow had yet to melt completely, and the frozen rivers had only begun to thaw. The Nine Provinces still lingered in the afterglow of winter's slumber. Yet beside the Ruin Abyss Well, signs of spring had already appeared—not budding plants, not birdsong breaking the dawn, but a lamp, picked up by a boy and carried home.
The boy was named A Ming. He lived in an abandoned alley in the Central Plains. His parents had died young, and he survived by scavenging. He knew nothing of the rites of the Guardian Lamp or the legend of fireflies forming a river. He had simply spotted a broken lamp standing alone beside a bluestone in the snow by the Ruin Abyss Well. Cracks crisscrossed its body, and its wick was charred black as cinders, yet it stood stubbornly upright, like a soul that refused to fall.
He crouched, picked up the lamp, tucked it against his chest, and whispered, "It's so cold. I can't leave you here all alone."
He did not know that, with this one act, he had picked up a thousand years of flame seeds and taken up a homeward journey spanning ten thousand miles.
A Ming carried the lamp home and set it on the windowsill of his shabby room. He had no oil to add, no wick to replace it with. Each day, he merely wiped away its dust with a cloth and warmed it with his body. At night, he often spoke to it. "You had an owner before, didn't you? Did they wait for someone to come home too?" The lamp said nothing. Yet one rainy night, its wick flickered, and a thread of light seeped from the charred blackness, like a stirring in the womb,