The White Court Empire stood like a crown upon the world — a bastion of ancient glory, divine lineage, and imperial will. Its palaces glimmered with spiritual inscriptions, and its training halls echoed with the cries of martial prodigies perfecting their Dao. From the lowest outer disciple to the exalted princes of blood, the Dao was everything. It shaped one's destiny, one's worth. And in a world ruled by such certainty, Aeon was the exception.
He was born not beneath comet stars, but beneath a phenomenon that silenced even the heavens.
The moment Aeon drew his first breath, a scroll appeared in the sky — vast, ancient, and unfurling across the firmament, its edges vanishing beyond sight. It was not flame nor cloud, not light nor shadow, but something that was — more real than reality, inscribed into the sky like truth itself.
Even the Matriarch, who had once beheld the collapse of a realm and named the colour of its death, could not see its end.
Those who dared gaze upon the scroll wept, screamed, or feel wordless. For upon its endless surface were not words, but lines of meaning, truths etched into the bones of existence. Each viewer saw something different — their origins, their endings, the falsity of time. And yet, amid all that unbearable truth, one thing remained the same:
A blank space.
Where there should have been a name — a destiny — there was only absence.
The elders of the White Court did not speak of it aloud, but they felt it: the Record of Existence itself had unfurled, as if to investigate the birth of the child. And in that investigation, it had found nothing.
The Grand Dao, which flows through all things by way of the Record, stirred.
It did not rage. It does not rage.
It simply moved — to correct the anomaly. To erase the undefined.
Across unseen folds of time, lives where Aeon would have walked were severed. Destinies in which he would have been warrior, wanderer, sage, or tyrant — all extinguished like dreams forgotten at dawn. The Dao did not strike his body. It struck his being. It reached into the foundation of reality to erase the idea of him.
But just as the Record turned to final silence…
A name appeared.
Not etched by divine will, nor by fate. But carved in a script that preceded both.
A signature written by Aeon — not as he was, but as he would become. A future self, forged beyond mortality, having transcended even the Grand Dao, reached back through the veil of time and inscribed his origin.
"To exist, I must have existed. And if I have existed — you cannot unmake me."
The paradox sealed.
The Dao, bound by its own eternal logic, could no longer act. And so, the scroll — the sky — folded in upon itself, vanishing as though it had never been.
And in the nursery of the imperial palace, a child yawned and blinked, staring at nothing with eyes too deep for a newborn.
As a baby, he barely cried. As a child, he listened more than he spoke. His eyes were deep, always watching — not the way children look at toys or sweets, but as though he could see through the very air between things.
"It's as if the world… quiets around him," an old nurse once whispered.
Yet, when the family healers began to measure his spiritual roots and test for Dao affinity, the results were… blank.
"He has no Dao signature," one murmured.
"Test again," his father commanded.
They tested again. Then again. The results never changed.
Yurell, sovereign of the Lower Realm's most powerful family, remained still before the results. Lady Hanyin, one of the few flame-body cultivators who had excelled without assistance, dismissed the court in silence.
But when the doors closed, the truth of their love spoke louder.
"He is our son," Hanyin said. "With or without Dao."
Yurell said nothing, only placed his hand gently on Aeon's head. The boy, barely five, looked up at his father and smiled. Yurell's stoic face cracked, just a little. And from that moment, nothing was said about it again — not within the core family.
But in the wider empire, the whispers grew.
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The Matriarch of the White Court was not one for idle sentiment. She had outlived six emperors, overseen wars that fractured continents, and watched entire cultivation sects rise and vanish like foam on the sea. But when Aeon was brought before her at the age of six, trailing behind his nursemaid with shy eyes and an odd calmness,
she felt… a flicker.
'A boy without Dao, yet walks like he knows something we do not.' she thought, watching him sit cross-legged without being told.
"What strange spirit resides in you, child?"
Over the years, Aeon became a shadow behind her robes. When the imperial court debated martial law or territory rights, he sat quietly by her throne. When she walked the Forbidden Library, he toddled after her. At first, the ministers scoffed. But when even her cultivator bodyguards said nothing, they held their tongues.
One day, during a stroll through the oldest wing of the library, Aeon — now nine — wandered past the Matriarch's gaze. She was in the midst of testing a new soul-seal when she turned and felt something… shift.
A pulse. A change. A pull.
She found him standing before a dusty shelf sealed with six golden threads — a section even she had not entered
for decades. The boy wasn't touching it. Just staring. As if the scrolls whispered to him.
"What do you see, Aeon?" she asked, stepping beside him.
"One of them… said something," he murmured. "It said: 'existence is before Dao.'"
The Matriarch froze.
No scroll could speak. And yet, looking at his face — eyes wide, fingers trembling — she felt the weight of something older than her own cultivation roots pressing into the room.
She gently guided him away. But that night, alone, she entered that sealed wing herself. There, hidden behind layers of spiritual barriers and locked by ancestral intent, she found the scroll. It bore no author's name, no title. Just a single phrase scrawled across its surface:
**The Dao exists because we do. But before we do, what is the Dao? **
She burned incense until dawn. And for the first time in a millennium, the Matriarch dreamed of her youth — and of choices she never made.
"I cannot stop him," she whispered. "But I can walk beside him… until he leaves us all behind."
From that day, Aeon changed.
He still laughed with his brothers. He still trained with wooden swords and followed the palace tutors in their basic lectures on spirit, body, and soul. But when the lessons ended, when the halls quieted, he would return to the forbidden scroll — not physically, but in his mind. The phrase had branded itself into his soul.
"What is the Dao… before Dao?"
he would ask himself while watching birds glide between towers.
"Is existence not the only truth? The one thing even nothing must acknowledge?"
At age eleven, he began visiting the Grand Archive — a library open to all core members of the imperial family. Unlike the Matriarch's wing, it held no dangerous texts, only philosophies, cultivation histories, and sealed treatises on heavenly laws. Aeon devoured them. He read with a hunger that startled the scholars.
"Not martial techniques?" one archivist asked.
"I'll reach them," Aeon replied. "But first, I must know why techniques matter."
By thirteen, he began meditating beneath the silent waterfall in the Sky Garden. He said little to anyone except his closest sibling — his elder sister Kaelara, who bore the Dao of Memory. While others found Aeon distant, she understood him more than anyone. She remembered everything — not just facts, but feelings.
"You Walk like a man who's forgotten something he never knew," she once said, brushing his hair.
Aeon nodded. "Do you think… I'm supposed to remember something?"
Kaelara smiled. "Maybe not remember. Maybe awaken."
She shielded him from their more boisterous siblings. She often redirected curious elders or ministers. When one asked in jest if Aeon would one day choose a Dao at all, Kaelara snapped back with a serene smile: "He doesn't need to choose. He already is."
Their bond became his anchor. For all his introspection, Aeon never felt alone. His family loved him. His mother often brought him midnight tea and warmed his blankets with soul-fire. His father would speak little, but every nod of approval carried the weight of mountains. Even the youngest cousins treated him not with pity, but quiet respect. They didn't understand why. Only that Aeon was… different.
But the empire still expected.
And so, at age sixteen, the testing came.