“The celestial omens are in chaos, the celestial omens are in chaos!” Ryan Foster kept muttering to himself. After a while, he could no longer hold it in and suddenly coughed up a mouthful of fresh blood. He knew that in his attempt to unravel this nameless heavenly secret, he had already suffered serious internal injuries. Clutching his chest, he slowly sat down, leaning against the wall, his heart filled with endless frustration. Was it really impossible to even know what it portended? Then what was the point of his position as the Director of the Imperial Observatory! Thinking of the immense imperial favor he had received, he finally made up his mind. Ryan Foster bit his finger and, using the blood, began to draw on the ground, his obsession and fervor as intense as when he first studied the stars as a child. After a long time, he lifted his head in confusion—there was no result. After all this calculation, there was still no result. With a bitter smile, Ryan Foster knew he had no hope of deciphering the unknown. Absentmindedly, he glanced at the sky again, and his pupils contracted sharply.

“Impossible!” His anguished cry pierced the night sky. The strange phenomenon from before had vanished without a trace—no bright star, everything looked as ordinary as it always had. If not for the star chart on the ground, he would have doubted his own sanity. “Why, why did you make me see these things? Heavens, why do you mock me?” After a heart-wrenching scream, Ryan Foster finally fainted.

The news that the Director of the Imperial Observatory had gone mad overnight caused quite a stir in the capital. However, once the emperor appointed a new director, the matter quickly died down. The court officials naturally paid little attention to the madness of a minor fifth-rank official, and since the new director reported no anomalies in the stars, these important people soon put the matter out of their minds. The emperor also gradually forgot about the middle-aged man named Ryan Foster, as he had far too many other concerns. Only the streets of the capital gained a new madman.

“A demon star, I saw a demon star!” The ragged Ryan Foster wandered the streets with a vacant stare, stumbling as he walked. Behind him trailed a group of mischievous children, who kept throwing stones and rotten vegetables at the madman. The adults watched in silence with a complex mix of sympathy, pity, and contempt in their eyes for this man they had once looked up to. They did not know that this man had once witnessed a spectacular omen that would affect the dynasty for generations. In later times, this scene would be widely recounted, and the name Ryan Foster would forever leave a brilliant mark in the annals of history. But at this moment, he was just an ordinary madman. That fleeting celestial spectacle, though not only seen by Ryan Foster, was dismissed by most commoners as a trick of the eyes, while most hermits and recluses kept silent about it, and the high officials and nobles rarely stargazed at midnight. Thus, the event was buried by the passage of time.

Samuel Clark, his hair completely white, stared blankly at the strange scene in the sky and let out a long sigh. Since childhood, he had loved gazing at the stars, listening to his master tell one mysterious story after another. As he grew up, though his extraordinary talent allowed him to master most of the Daoist arts of the Luoying Sect, it was only the art of stargazing, which could glimpse the secrets of heaven, that truly captivated him. Perhaps it was fate.

He smiled self-deprecatingly and slowly turned around. In the ancient texts passed down in the sect, there was a record: “When the demon star appears, the world will change.” This was why successive sect leaders placed great importance on stargazing. But Samuel Clark did not believe in such overly mystical things. Yet at this moment, the strange sight seemed to linger before his eyes, making disbelief impossible. But if this was heaven’s will, what more could he do?

“Master!” A deep voice called from behind him. “It’s so late, and you’re still not asleep?”

Even without turning around, Samuel Clark knew it was his eldest disciple, Henry Smith. By nature, he was lazy, and since the Luoying Sect had strict requirements for succession, he did not find a disciple until he was sixty, when he met Henry Smith. He could still vividly recall the scene: the village reduced to ruins, the corpses with eyes wide open in death, and the boy hiding in the corner of a wall still billowing with smoke. That human tragedy cast a shadow over his once unshakable Daoist heart, and for the first time, the usually peaceful man was truly enraged. In the thirteenth year of Wanlie, there was neither war nor banditry, and the world was enjoying a prosperous harvest—so who dared commit such a heinous crime in defiance of all under heaven?

From the boy’s broken words, Samuel Clark gradually learned the truth. The villagers had refused to pay the extra three-tenths fire tax imposed by the prefect of Lanzhou, leading to a conflict with the tax-collecting soldiers, in which three soldiers were injured. The ruthless prefect Olivia Brooks then falsely accused the entire village of colluding with bandits and ordered a massacre. The boy survived only because he had been sleeping under the bed at the time, but all his family had been killed.

Unable to contain his rage, Samuel Clark took the boy straight to the Lanzhou prefecture office and denounced Olivia Brooks’s atrocities. Enraged and humiliated, Olivia Brooks flatly denied everything and accused him of slandering a court official, ordering his arrest and imprisonment. Seeing this, Samuel Clark simply said, “Beware the wrath of the nine thunders,” and drifted away, unstoppable by anyone.