A bright and dazzling sun rose from the far East of midsummer, casting shadows of the thick wilderness upon the isolated town, Qian. Rich songs of wild birds could be heard from all directions, an everlasting melody that could soothe the hard edges of one's heart. However and especially in Qian, that was nothing but poetry where one enjoyed with brewed tea. For the beggars, everyday was filled with torment as scorching and merciless as the sun from the East.

The other day, the girl was staring at the face of hunger.

"Mine!" The old, scrawny man shouted as he dived into a dump of trash in a dark corner of an alley where the rich avoided.

She stood and watched him from behind, thinking that he found some scraps of food in the trash somewhere but when he began to dig his face into it and eat it like an animal that had starved for days, there was a distinct sound that she couldn't bear to hear.

The squeaking sound of a rat.

In that moment, she heard another squeaking sound coming from trash beside her and before anyone could get to it, she, too, devoured it in an instant.

When in the face of hunger, did it matter what one held in one's hands? If it could fill one's belly from the grip of hunger then it no longer matters whether it's preferable or not. One would eat it without any thoughts.

The next day, a knife was thrown at the girl's scummy feet and a whisper could be heard from the edge of a dark corner for the girl to end her life - to end her suffering once and for all. It was ironic. The other day, she was so desperate to live, she ate a rat to fill her hunger so that she may live to see another day - another day just to kill herself?

How truly ironic it was.

She knew her life was destined for misery the moment she realized that the birthmark on the center of her forehead was the root of all her misery. She could see it in the faces of the people. The way they glanced at her, their eyes widened and that piercing look of terror reflecting back a dark sun with seven rays. Never did they see her for who that she was; a simple, hopeless girl - a victim of a cruel fate.

The girl hated the mark of Death or whatever the people decided to call it. She hated it. She despised it to the very core of her soul that she could tolerate death itself.

The shimmering metal, rebounding sunlight like a crystal-clear jewel shining in the sun, and the sharpness of the tip of the blade, how tempting it was for the girl to simply slits her wrist and end everything. It would be so much easier that way and ultimately, she would be at peace. Peace, a treasure she could almost hold. Only then, she could rest. She wouldn't have to worry about survival, leeching on scraps, nor would she had to see the scornful looks on others' faces.

Three times that day the girl tried to force her way to eternal peace and three times she failed. She tried so desperately to cut open her veins but it seemed like no matter how much she tried, she could only imagine it being done. She thought about millions of other ways to end her doomed life, but each time she attempted to, it was merely her imagination.

She was only a child.

And, deep down from within the depths of her soul lies something that she had fought to kill for a long time. She hated it as much as she hated the mark on her forehead, and such a thing it was to have in her doomed life, such it was the will to live on.

Tears poured down her haggard face as she tossed the knife away out of her reach.

So often did she ponder why she had the desire to live when she was cursed to die in a terrible death. She pondered it days and nights but in the end, she found no answer.

There was no answer. It was as if Death had shut the gate on her, forbidding her to die and enter into its luxurious, eternal slumber.

Needless for an answer, the girl did not have any seer of hope that she would live to see the next day. But, if she lived, in that case she wouldn't lived to see the day after that. She needed to be patient, she told herself, but patience was all she ever had. Death comes like a thief in the night and there was nothing she could do but wait until her legs failed to keep her standing, until her malnourished body gave up on her, and then, her heart.

And yet, to her dismay, she kept on living another day and then another. The days slipped by like the shadows casted down from the trees that surrounded Qian, drifting as the sun rose from the East and fell in the West exactly like the people she watched.

In a hurry, they all passed her and for a moment the air of their momentum brushed across her cheeks and her gaze aimlessly tailed after them. Everyday as she watched them passed, she came to know them. Each one of them were struggling in their own blight especially those of low status. This she realized that she couldn't possibly hate them for the way they treated her when they were all so similar. She understood them from the way they clearly expressed the sentiments of pain, sadness, and sorrow. These sentiments, too, accompanied them throughout each chapter of their lives.

Like her, they shed tears and cried out in agony of their unfortunate state, shouting out and cursing the heavens and earth of their lowly lives. The intensity of their emotions struck her in her heart more than her own suffering. She became touched by their hardships and efforts to make a decent living, and all that simply to survive. When they laughed in joy over small things, she were happy with them and for them. And, all this she did so in secret and from a distance.

As the days passed, the girl wandered and saw many awful things in Qian - things that a child shouldn't see. She saw how many of them among the beggars speedily put an end to their wretched lives and entered into the hands of Death. Their dead, lumpy bodies laid on top of their own saliva, scattered across the ramshackle isles of the street where no one bothered to lay eyes on. How she envied them. They were blessed with the courage to set themselves free from their mortality and anything that bounded them while she, who had nothing binding her, had no courage to do the same.

She also saw the repeated oppression from the rich nobles on their slaves, too many that she lost counted. Endlessly, she saw how the noblemen exercised their authority to selfishly lay their hands on the chastity of many hopeless, young women both rich and poor. With a hand, they threw their money to the ground and watched as the poor lowered their heads to lick the tip of their shoes. With the other, they pointed at them, ridiculing and mocking them to that of dogs. Their outrageous and vexatious actions fueled a seed of anger inside the little girl and for once, she came to know the feeling of loathe.

Days flew by and turned into months, and months turned into years. Before the girl knew it, eight years flashed before her eyes. But for her, it was unfortunate that she didn't die and yet lived.

Standing by herself in the middle of the empty, desolated streets, the girl noticed how empty it was compared to the years before. There was no telling how many died today by the strong odor of decaying bodies from nearly every corner. The scent of death was a usual smell that she had long grown accustomed to. Even the dead distanced themselves from her.

The girl shifted her hazy eyes above the darken horizon, her eyes slowly glanced from one end to the other. Her gravity-drawn shoulders rested lowly with her arms dangling from her side, and as she stood there as still as a statue, something seen to weigh heavily in her chest.

Another day will soon come to an end and yet, it seems like I have lived again, she thought.

She couldn't help but wondered with her doomed fate, how would she die?

Whenever the noises of life faded along with the sunlight, this depressing thought never failed to lurk inside her head.

Lilting her head a little to the left, she noticed an awful swirling water in the heavens, condensing layers upon layers of horrid that was bound to release upon Qian. From the looks of it, the storm doesn't seem to have any mercy on anything in its path. The longer she stared at it, the louder she could hear the preceding sounds of rain and thunder echoing from afar. Even from a distance, she could feel the rumbling in the very ground where she stood.

Quickly, the girl dashed off to her hideout or the place she called her home. The girl's home was located outside of Qian in the wilderness, much like an outcast like herself.

Her home was a simple but tattered triangular-shaped hut poorly made with branches and leaves that she found in the wilderness. It wasn't anything fancy or spacious but it was livable and big enough for her to move around in.

Wrapping her arms around her legs, the girl silently sat in her hut to wait out the storm. Before she realized it, the sound of rain became more audible to her ears until they began to tapped on the top of her hut then suddenly, it became pouring rain. Out of the blue, the booming of thunder clasping nearby startled the girl and on instinct she covered her ears and tightly squeezed her eyes, praying for it all to be over with.

The storm was howling violently outside along with a raging tempest that could easily blow the girl's hut away but surprisingly, her hut stood intact to the ground.

The girl was terrified that she couldn't contain herself from shaking uncontrollably. What scared her wasn't the storm but at the fact that she was alone during such a grim time of her life. She had a hatred for the storm that rained down on her already depressing life. The rain made her heart cried even when she no longer had tears in her eyes to cry. Her life was already at its loss, what could make her even more rout.

While the girl had taken shelter from the storm in the protection of the wilderness, another tragedy was about to take place. 

A group of ruthless half-barbarians and half-demons from the Eastern, Shuxi Empire known to as An Xue Sect, began their raid on Qian. The sound of terrified screams scorched up the heavens as blood spilled by the cruelty of the Eastern barbarians/demons. These half-barbarians and half-demons were no ordinary beings. They were a treacherous sect made up of criminals and outlaws in the Shuxi Empire, powerful enough to land a total assault on an empire if they desire to. They lived off plundering towns by the borders of the Hanyu Empire, their main goal was to seek and feed off cultivators for the enchantment of their own powers.

They were rumored to not tolerate a single soul in their paths leaving nothing but the dust of their slaughters behind, even demons had no way of escaping from their wrath. That was how atrocious their actions were that no one dared to utter the name of their leader.

Unfortunately, Qian just had to be lying in between the East and the borders of Hanyu.

The ear-splitting thunder continued to roar into the night as the rain poured on Qian like never before. As loud as the screeching were, the thunder and the wind seemed to have sugar-coated them causing the girl to become deaf to the sound of Death, her neighbor.

After long hours of enduring the terrible rain and thunder resonating down from the Heavens, there immediately came something distinct from it. Startled, the girl adjusted her hearing and realized that it was the sound of twigs breaking just outside of her hut.

Subconsciously, she held her breath and her pulse accelerated in the speed of light as she listened closely to depict what was out there from the pounding of her heart.

She thought there was something unusual until she heard a low, guttural voice in the midst of the storm. There was a harshness in his tone that gave the girl a sudden fright to instantly cover her mouth. In her life, she had never heard anything as fearful as this voice that immediately paralyzed her with fear and made her flesh creeped as if she was truly at the end of her time.

Then, why was she so afraid to die?

Not given a second to process her situation, she heard footsteps proceeding closer and closer to her hut.