Cangyu

In Kailong, they press a crystal to every newborn's chest. The colour it glows tells you what kind of life you are allowed to want. Hao Xuan's glowed white. Null-grade. The lowest. A result that closes school gates, ends conversations, and quietly informs a child, before he is old enough to understand it, that the world has already made a decision about him. His mother left the night of his birth. She left a cultivation manual by his cradle as an apology — a cheap thing, market-bought, unremarkable. She did not read it carefully. Neither did anyone else. They should have. The manual is called the Myriad Hearth Circulation Method. It is the rarest cultivation manuscript on Cangyu. And it is going to make Hao Xuan into something the world has no framework for — not despite his white roots, but because of everything white roots forced him to become. This is not a story about a chosen one. It is a story about a cost that became a weapon, and the people who stayed while it did.