Deep within the sea of stars, the lamp-light of the Lamp Guarder was still spreading. Yet upon the land of Jiu Zhou, a silent awakening was quietly sprouting amidst the mortal realm.
On the old site of the Nanming Lamp-Guarding Shop, the oil lamp ignited by the child had been burning for seven days and seven nights. The flame flickered not, extinguishing not, its color shifting from gold to silver, as if blending into some will transcending the mundane. Wind and snow could not extinguish it, rain could not drench it, and even the deepest eternal night could not obscure its radiance.
The village elders said, "This lamp was not lit by mortal hands."
What they did not know was that flowing within that lamp-light were the final light-patterns left behind by Xiaoman.
When Xiaoman journeyed far through the Star Gate, he quietly sealed a core light-seed of the Twin Lamps into the ley lines of the Nanming Lamp-Guarding Shop. That was not for power, not for eternal existence, but for inheritance—so that one day, when Jiu Zhou once again needed a Lamp Guarder, someone would rise from the mortal dust to inherit that unspoken mission.
And now, that light-seed had found a host.
The child was named A Ming. His parents had died in the wars of the old days, and since childhood, he had been raised by the village elders. He could not speak, mute from birth, yet he could always hear the whispers in the wind and see light that others could not perceive. He liked to gaze up at the starry sky at night, tracing star-tracks in the air with his fingers, as if writing scripts no one could understand.
That night, after he lit the oil lamp, it never went out again.
On the morning