They called it the 'war of red skies'.
It began when the moon turned violent red, casting it's lights over shattered temples and smoked-drenched fields. Thousands died beneath each gaze. Celestial altars collapsed. Sacred rivers reversed their flow. And through it all, the crimson Moon loomed—still vast and unblinking, as if the gods themselves had stopped breathing.
That was the night she was born.
No name was spoken. No blessing offered. Only silence. Her first cry through the smoke like blade, high and strange, as if it did not belong to a child. Her mother recoiled, not from the the sound, but from the searing mark that pulsed on the girl's forehead —a half-moon sigil, curved downward like a divine scythe.
It was not inked. It was etched into her flesh glowing faintly with lights not of these world.
They said the mark had not appeared in five thousand years—and the last time it did, an entire empire vanished into fog.
Her parents were nothing but villagers—worn thin by war, surviving by bone and bitterness. The moment their daughter arrived, their land withered. Wells turned black. Pregnancies failed. Dreams shattered into whispers of drowning. And the rumors came.
"The sigil of Lianxu. The silent goddess... She bears it."
"That's no child. That's a vessel."
"She was burn under the red sky. How could she be anything but rude?"
Rocks were thrown. Prayers turn into curses. Her father could no longer trade in the markets. Her mother's name spat like poison.
"Drown her,"they hissed. "End it now before the mark awakens."
And so they tried.
They took her in the dark, wrapped her in silence, and left her at the edge of the 'Mirrow Lake,' where the moonlight s trembled like broken glass.
But the moon stayed.
That was when the Old Mother Bi found her.
No one remembered where the old woman came from, only that she lived beyond the rice fields, where the trees whispers and even dogs refused to follow. Her hands were thin. Her eyes clouded. But when she lifted the child from the water, and saw the half Moon sigil, she did not drop her.
She bowed to her.
She wrapped the girl in prayer cloth and travel across provinces to an abandoned shrine. Were only the wind remembers the shrine existed. There an old diviner, with no eyes placed his fingers on the mark and whispered.
"You've brought me death in child's skin."
"Then what is she?" The woman asked.
"She's the seal they thought lost. The silence that the heavens feared to break. The blade between salvation and annihilation."
***********
12 YEARS LATER
She stood barefoot beneath the cloud -thick sky on Mt. Wuheng, unmoving, swordless quiet. Not a girl. Not yet a woman. Only a presence. Her hair fell down her back like shadowed silk, long enough to to touch her butt—yet still, the mark that the front hair had to cover, barely partly, pulsed beneath her skin like a heartbeat that did not belong to her.
12 years and no one dare to speak her name.
Except the one who saved her.
"Ruoxue," Mother Bi could whisper every 3 years, when the girl was allowed to return to the village outskirts.
"You were born marked by the gods, not cursed.
Remember that when the world calls you a monster."
Rouxue never replied, she only listened.
Beneath her still skin, the half-moon sigil starred again —cold, ancient, waiting.
The gods had not spoken in age.
But perhaps, they were watching.