"Run, Jin! Run away! They're coming!" the farmer shouted, his wife's blood staining his straw shirt and the hay beside him. The arrow was still jammed in her chest. His voice trembled and was drowned in a shrieking sea of agonizing cries and pleas.

The scarlet red blood flowed throughout the fields, flooding everything it encountered along the way. Horses marched across the once peaceful village and with them they carried a death stench along with earthquakes.

From the top of the hill, Jin could now see his friends’ bodies huddled up in the green hills, the place where they used to spend some of their most boring afternoons, sunbathing, talking about what they would do if they ever got out of there. The blood colored his best friend's blonde hair and ran down the forehead of another one of his childhood friends, concealing his greenish eyes. Others had been beheaded at the seashore near the burning mill, their heads half sinking into the water, their bodies nearly buried in the sand. The waves of white foam washed away the blood, dragging the bodies whose foreheads grazed against the boulders beneath, the skin finally ripped. The screams of those whose homes had been burned down with them inside were ephemeral. The armored soldiers awaited them at the exit of their small houses, cozy with sloped ceilings made of wood and stones, and chopped their heads off. The sound of the blades scrubbing skin rang out for a few seconds, replaced by the friction of the heads rolling down the dirt road after being kicked by Kaji soldiers.

Their orders were simple: kill, pillage and burn everything. Their eyes had no life. It had been a long time since any of them had even thought of having mercy.

Jin was totally wrapped up in the flash of images that unfolded before him. One of the Kaji soldiers, the school represented by the insignia of a red dragon on the lapel of the garments, pierced the heart of one of the city's elderly women. His spearhead was coated with a green goo. It was used to atrophy the victim's muscles as it spread throughout the blood—a poison of choice used when they had time to torture. That wasn't the case, not this day. Not that it would make any difference.

The soldier was twirling the spear on the woman's body when he noticed Jin, standing there with his face awash with tears, his eyes red and swollen and his chest heaving.

"Jin, please run!" the old man shouted once again, now on his knees, holding his dead wife’s head.

His chapped lips were now damp, and so was the goatee on his chin that he trimmed every morning, using a scratched mirror and the water from the ocean that bordered the west side of the village.

The skull and gallows had ascended to the earth and embraced the small fishing village. Souls abandoned their bodies and headed for the world that awaited them in the hereafter. The soldiers rejoiced at each death, some of them even competing for the highest number felled by their spears.

To them, it was just another village, another batch of bodies that they had to butcher. They saw anyone who didn't belong to their school as cattle. That was the teaching and legacy, passed on from soldier to soldier, of the Kaji School, for the past twenty years, when Quan Lu was sworn in, replacing the late patriarch Luan-Lu and cut ties with the remaining four schools.

The war started soon after. Kaji's motto was to the point: "From the fire we will rise, in the fire we will burn our opposers.”

Jin was trying to move, to run, but he couldn't. His feet were fastened to the ground, his straw sandals felt like they were made of iron. His throat was dry, and nothing came out, not even the screams of terror locked in his core.

The soldier made his way to the old man, laughing his head off. Jin noted a trail of saliva seeping down his chin. His leather boots stamped through the mud. Under the orange luminescence of the fires, the houses crumbled into ashes while the fields burned, and the smoke covered the skies. The soldier seemed bigger under the color stripes, the shadow fading amidst the gray fog. The brown eyes had taken on an amber color. Splinters and sparks were caught in his beard, while the rest polluted the air. It was a nightmare brought to life that was running rampant now that it freed itself from the chains of sleep. He was very alive and very real.

The old man didn't even have time to get up before being pierced by the blazing metal tip. The soldier's chi was rattling. He had no need whatsoever to use it against the villagers and yet he could not contain himself. A crimson layer covered his body and spread out through the sword.

Jin had never seen anything like it before. These were myths and fables that he had heard from the peasants on those faraway, idyllic sunny afternoons when there was not much to do but ask the heavens to rain on the following day. The boy's bones froze when he heard the soldier's sick laughter.

"You're next," he said, pointing toward Jin as he pulled the chi-drenched flaming sword from the old man's belly. He used his boot to kick Jin’s adopted father’s body to the ground. It bounced and rolled twice before finally coming to a stop.

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The old man, with a face of someone whose springs had not been kind to him, his skin wrinkled and scarred by time, murmured meaningless words, his fingers wrapping and scraping on the earth that now seized his body on his deathbed. He spat what looked like a ball of blood. The red scattered around and beneath him, staining his white straw clothes and adding a tone of red wine to the land. His eyes lost their color seconds later.

Jin couldn't take it anymore. It was far too much for him. Abandoned by his parents, his alcoholic mother and his unknown father, he was entrusted to the care of old Bardolph, a reliable foreigner. In that small village, far from the war, they had been living in peace for ten years.

Within him, an energy never felt before manifested itself. In his dantian, the center of all vital energy, his sleeping chi awakened and scattered through the meridians, the hallowed corridors in his body. Jin's thoughts were now black, catastrophic; premonitions of what was coming. The chi that was running through his veins now was black, putrid, clogging his whole body.

The energy flowed from his fingers into the outside world, clutching his hands, spinning around them. Black chi bracelets that fed on the boy's body.

"What the hell do you think you're doing, child?" the soldier asked as he got closer. His voice had dropped a tone and his fingers slid down the spear.

"What's going on? I've never seen you so scared," a nearby young soldier confronted him as he saw his bulging eyes, the fear stamped on his face, his chi disintegrating into sparks that burst out throughout the air.

He didn't answer. There was no one who belonged to a school that did not know the meaning of black chi; the eternal sign of a necromancer, an earthly anomaly. Even mere peasants, miners, or servants knew the crime of daring to even speak of such abominations.

It took a few seconds before the soldier broke the silence again, "Look at that kid! How is he doing that?" he asked, even though he knew no one would have an answer. The voice trembled and the sword that just before had taken the lives of the couple who had cared for the boy, lost its sparkling color.

The darkness was a curse. It was what was shared, amid whispers, beyond the edge of the forest that proceeded the village. It was now the racket of ravens that sat on the few rooftops that were not on fire and on the scarecrows far from the devastation. The boy's eyes changed color. The chestnut darkened and swallowed the white until both eyes were no more than two chasms. He wasn't himself anymore. He had surrendered to the power that reigned in his body. A black flame he didn't know existed.

After all, the poor boy had grown up thinking that he had not been blessed with the gift of taming the mana so ever-present in the environment. And yet, now that the thirst for revenge merged with the fear of dying, he could finally feel it. The outcome was a ridiculous explosion of chi that devastated the whole road ahead of him. Gusts of wind sprang from the horizon and waves of dust broke upon the soldiers' bodies and on the remnants of the houses. Most of the fires cooled, a few vanishing completely. The white sky closed. The boy's chi was now mixing with the mana around him, causing black clouds to form.

"This has got to be a bad joke! No child has this power and all necromancers were burned eighteen years ago. Damn it. Men, get ready! Concentrate all your chi on the next attack. We can't let him walk out of here alive. You heard me," the commander shouted, also surprised and really frightened by the sight unfolding in front of him.

How could such a slender boy release so much power? The control he seemed to have of mana and chi was only comparable to that of a Level Two in terms of power and grasp. Even him, captain of a military unit, already with more than twenty years of experience, a white beard stained with the blood of hundreds, a totally tattooed body, each black line indicating a death, was nothing more than a mere Level Three. He could call to himself a portion of the mana that hovered above and fuse it with his weapon, but no more than that. He could not convert it, use it to improve his abilities, nothing that the great cultivators, those who worked the martial and mystical arts, could achieve. He wasn't even close to reaching them. He didn't have the spiritual roots, the innate talent, for that. Even his daily workout of body and mind could only take him to a certain point.

The anger grew inside him. How could a poor child with tattered clothes and torn sandals dare to face them? It was a lack of respect that had to be mended and disciplined with the harshest of punishments: death.

His men were all well-armed: the armor that protected their bodies shone no more, but red flooded their eyes. There were swords, bows, spears, sabers and even shields wrapped in orange flames, some hot as the inside of a waking volcano and others weaker, almost translucent. The soldiers were forced to keep that pose despite the lack of power. The punishment of refusing or failing to obey the orders of a commander was one hundred lashes in front of their families. No one dared to move.

It was still daytime, but the night had already started to set. Blood ran down the beaten earth. Most of the houses had already burnt down. The sparks and ashes filled the sky like bright, luminous stars. The smoke blurred the soldiers' vision, acting as a curtain between them and the boy.

"Ah, commander," one of the younger soldiers began, hesitating to continue before obtaining permission.

"Speak," the commander told him.

"Some members in the rear are afraid. No one's ever seen a necromancer. They only heard the legends..."

"Fear? Fear? We're from the Kaji School. We're not afraid of anything or anyone. We're the ones who carry fear to other people's homes. Warn them that if I see them hesitating, they might as well run away because I'll rip their heads off before we go back to the city," the commander said.

Truth be told, he too, was afraid. The legends were clear; necromancers could not only use the dead as zombies but could also drain the mana around them. The commander, Cheng-Li of his name, had participated in several battles between schools. He had seen what levels two and even some levels one could do. The megalomaniac creations that could alter the fate of a battle in seconds. Fire dragons, stone walls, ice arrows that dissipated on the west and emerged on the east, and even thunderstorms that ran from side to side, fulminating hundreds of soldiers at once. But he had never seen or felt such dark energy, such nightmare.

"This is it! I'm going to count to three and we're going to go. No mercy!"