Eternal Flame: Rise of the Spark Sovereign

The boy broke his arm trying to catch wind.

Not from a fall. Not from a beast.

He'd simply leapt off the roof of a chicken coop after the village "healer" told him he had awakened his spirit roots and could now "run with the wind."

The healer's diagnosis had involved incense smoke and muttered rhymes. She'd slapped his chest and told him to jump.

Arion watched the entire event unfold from a pile of firewood, silent.

No one questioned the method.

No one ever questioned the method.

Not when the roots were tested with bones that glowed faintly in the dark.

Not when cultivation levels were judged by how loud one could shout under moonlight.

Not when elders spoke of "Qi tangles" or "spirit hunger" without explaining what either actually meant.

Arion had seen enough.

This world worshipped power—but it understood very little of it.

He knew there was real power. He'd seen the lightning arcs summoned by the merchant guards. He'd watched a silver-robed traveler hover three steps above the ground before flickering away in a blur. Those weren't tricks or myths.

But they were also not the same as the village healer chanting over a cracked tooth.

This was a cultivation world—but it was uneven, fractured, and unexamined.

And for Arion, that was an opportunity.

—

Over the next season, he began piecing things together.

Not through books—there were none.

Not through teaching—none was offered.

He learned by watching.

There were those who could punch harder than steel. Some whose eyes shimmered slightly at dusk.

One girl, Ressa, once survived being bitten by a Shade Snake—her blood apparently too "hot" for the venom to spread.

The term used was spirit root. It came up often.

"You'll go far if your root's pure," the old hunter would say.

"She'll be wasted—can't even sense the stone," the butcher muttered one morning.

And always… always that word: cultivation.

Arion tested it in his mouth as he hauled buckets of water from the crooked stream.

"Cultivation."

In his past life, the word meant growth. Investment. Patterned, intentional development.

Here, it seemed to mean… everything.

Power. Status. Health. Even destiny.

No talent? You were a peasant.

Great talent? You might one day join a sect.

Arion didn't need to be told where that placed him. His own "talent" hadn't awakened. Not even a flicker. If anything, he felt less attuned than most.

But his mind was not dormant.

So he started treating cultivation like a system.

He created categories in his thoughts:

Spirit Roots: The inner potential, the base affinity. A natural advantage—or lack thereof.

Spirit Stones: Crystals used in rituals or recovery. Currency among the powerful.

Energy Flow: Qi, or spiritual energy, drawn from nature—but why only nature?

Realms: Ranked levels. But what were the limits? Where did the knowledge stop?

Techniques: Movements. Breathing. Channeling energy—but based on what logic?

He noticed something strange.

There were no books, diagrams, or standardizations.

People repeated what they'd heard. Mimicked what they'd seen. Passed down distorted versions of techniques like folk songs.

One elder taught his grandson a breathing method that began with a hiccup.

Arion watched the boy practice it daily, coughing until he bled.

In the boardrooms of Earth, Arion had crushed companies for less.

Here, he bit his tongue, held his anger.

He was a child, weak, unnoticed.

But he was also a man who once turned data into nations.

And this cultivator's world?

It was running on superstition and memory.

That meant it could be improved.

---

Later that week, as dusk bled into the sky, a merchant caravan passed through.

They stayed only an hour, bartering grain for copper scraps and worn boots.

But one of the guards had a pouch tied to his hip—a pale-blue crystal that hummed when a spirit beast neared the trail.

A stone that reacted to energy.

Arion's heart raced.

Spirit Stones.

They were real. Measurable. Perhaps manipulatable.

And if he could study them—if he could understand how they worked instead of just accepting the myths—

Then maybe…

Just maybe…

The boy with no talent could rise in a world where talent was everything.