Enshrined by a Bowl of Rice

Chapter 2: The Ritual Begins — and the Crystal Explodes

The line moved faster than Chen Xifan had expected.

Probably because most people were done in seconds — press both palms against the Guidance Stone, wait for the flash, hear the examiner call out a rank, next. Assembly-line efficiency. Not unlike checkout at a convenience store.

He shuffled forward a few more steps. Ahead of him, a girl in plain white robes was walking barefoot toward the stone. That’s when he noticed: everyone in the queue had changed into the same white robes. A row of temporary tents had been set up alongside the line — you walked in wearing your own clothes and came out looking like everyone else had been copy-pasted. Chen Xifan had just emerged from one himself. While swapping out, he’d fished his little sample pack of brown rice from the pocket of his rough-cloth tunic, hesitated, and tucked it into the fold of his new robe’s sash. Thirty grams of plastic-packaged grain. Small enough to hide, light enough to forget.

A notice posted inside the tent announced that participants were expected to fast for three days prior to the ritual, “as a mark of sincerity toward the Guidance Stone.” Chen Xifan had read it without much feeling. He’d been underfed for three months straight. Fasting for three days just upgraded him from “chronically hungry” to “completely empty.” The experiential gap was smaller than you’d think.

Everyone around him wore expressions of solemn piety. Hollow-cheeked, yellow-faced from hunger. He was hollow-cheeked and yellow-faced too — just not for the pious reasons.

“Next.”

The girl pressed both hands to the Guidance Stone. The surface of the crystal bloomed a dim, reddish-dark glow — like the last flicker of a match burning out. The examiner glanced at it, voice carrying the practiced flatness of someone who’d done this a thousand times: “Fire-kindler.”

No applause. Reddish-dark was the most common result. The girl lowered her head and stepped down from the ritual platform. Her expression wasn’t exactly disappointment. More like she’d known already.

Chen Xifan counted the people ahead of him. Around thirty.

“Next.”

A tall, thin young man walked up. The moment his hands touched the stone, the color along its surface began to shift from the bottom — the dim red deepened quickly, crossed a threshold, and warmed into steady amber. The light was clear and bright, illuminating the runes carved into the top of the crystal.

Gasps rippled through the spectator stands.

“Dew-gatherer!” The examiner’s voice had an actual lilt to it this time.

The young man’s face broke open with a smile he clearly couldn’t hold back. A water-droplet mark materialized on the inside of his wrist, amber light pulsing under the skin for a few seconds before settling. By the time he stepped off the platform, several middle-aged figures had already pushed forward to intercept him — faction recruiters, by the look of it, competing for prospects with more urgency than a convenience store running a limited-edition bento.

Chen Xifan filed away what he’d observed: reddish-dark meant Fire-kindler, amber meant Dew-gatherer. One barely registered, the other at least made the stone glow. He didn’t have much confidence he could make it flash at all.

Then came a nobleman.

You didn’t need to read the embroidery to know. The sheer logistics gave it away — the young man had three attendants at his back, and someone had straightened the folds of his white robe before he even stepped onto the platform. Chen Xifan noticed a few people in the nobility stands rising to their feet, leaning forward for a better look. They clearly knew this particular young master.

Both hands met the Guidance Stone.

The crystal ignited.

It skipped right past reddish-dark, bypassed amber entirely, and plunged into a deep, oceanic blue. A beam of light shot from the top of the crystal — only about a body-and-a-half tall, but it sent visible ripples through the surrounding air. A scattering of the ancient runes on the ground flickered to life around the column, like someone half-asleep being jabbed awake.

The entire plaza erupted.

“Grain-bearer! Grain-bearer!”

The cheering from the stands slapped against the oval walls and rolled back in on itself as a continuous roar. The examiner set down his ledger — the first time he’d done that all morning — and actually smiled. A senior figure in ornate robes descended the steps from the nobility section personally, meeting the young man at the platform’s edge. Three ear-of-grain marks took shape on the inside of the young man’s wrist, the deep-blue glow lingering for a long time before it faded.

“Fire-kindler, Dew-gatherer, Grain-bearer… Granary-keeper.” Chen Xifan murmured the rank names he’d picked up from the conversation around him. “Why does the naming system sound like an agricultural documentary? Is the next rank up going to be ‘Thresher’?”

The middle-aged man next to him shot him a look.

He shut up.

The queue crept forward. Waves of reddish-dark, the occasional amber causing a small stir, but no second blue. Waiting, Chen Xifan pieced together more fragments from the chatter around him: Granary-keeper — golden light, a column that punched through the sky, every rune on the ground firing at once — hadn’t appeared in a hundred years. It was the stuff of legend.

He reached through the fabric of his robe and pressed a finger against the shape of the sample pack in his sash. Still there. He didn’t know why the feel of it — that specific texture of cheap plastic packaging — steadied him a little. At least he had that.

Five people ahead.

His palms were starting to sweat.

Three.

One.

“Next.”

Chen Xifan pulled in a slow breath, and stepped barefoot onto the dark stone floor. The cold bit into his soles. The ancient runes that looked dull and unremarkable from a distance were much clearer up close — dense interlocking lines woven into patterns he couldn’t begin to read, covering the entire surface.

He walked toward the Guidance Stone.

Three meters of translucent crystal, and it was more imposing at this distance than it had been from across the plaza. The runes on its surface seemed to stir faintly inside, like something alive was sealed within. This stone had stood for three hundred years, weathered the tests of countless prodigies, and never once cracked.

“Both hands. Hold steady.” The examiner didn’t look up.

Chen Xifan pressed his palms flat against the crystal.

It was cold.

The first three seconds: nothing. He almost exhaled — Fire-kindler was fine, at least it was something. Even nothing was fine, he’d been invisible for three months already, he could keep rooting through garbage if he had to —

The Guidance Stone went white.

Not glowing. Not the red-to-amber-to-blue color progression he’d been watching all morning. The entire three-meter column, starting from its core, filled — like someone had poured milk into it — and turned a pure, absolute, opaque white.

The noise of the plaza vanished in about three seconds.

Several thousand people shut their mouths at the same time.

The examiner looked up. His expression shifted from professional blankness to complete bewilderment, with no transition between. ”…White?”

He flipped open his ledger — the one that had been consulted at every ritual for a hundred years. His fingers swept rapidly through yellowed pages. Reddish-dark, amber, deep blue, gold — no white. He went through it again. Still nothing.

“White… I’ve never seen white.” The examiner’s voice had gone slightly unmoored.

Chen Xifan tried to pull his hands away.

He couldn’t.

His palms were welded to the surface. A force surged out from inside the stone and poured into his body, moving up his arms — like scalding water rushing into a dry riverbed. It didn’t hurt, but the fullness of it made his temples start to throb.

Then the white light detonated.

A column of white shot from the top of the Guidance Stone. Not the Grain-bearer’s modest beam — this one shattered the upper limit of Chen Xifan’s field of vision, driving straight into the sky, like someone had planted a sword in the center of the plaza and thrust it clean through the clouds.

Wind rushed in from every direction.

Not natural wind. The magical energy within a radius Chen Xifan couldn’t estimate seemed to be grabbed by an invisible fist and hauled toward the ritual plaza. The air thickened. Breathing took effort. Someone in the spectator stands screamed; people started pushing toward the exits; but most couldn’t even stay upright — Fire-kindlers went pale, several sinking straight to their knees. The Dew-gatherers weren’t doing much better, gripping their armrests, cold sweat breaking on their foreheads, the fear on their faces completely unguarded.

“Huh?” Chen Xifan’s inner state was strangely, almost worryingly calm. “Did I press the wrong button? Is there a reset somewhere?”

A sharp crack.

A fracture appeared on the surface of the Guidance Stone.

Starting from the base, it crawled upward along the rune lines, like cracked earth splitting open. Three hundred years. This stone had survived three hundred years of rituals, the tests of countless prodigies, and reportedly even a level-six magical resonance event — and it had never once cracked.

“Stop! Stop it!” The examiner had finally snapped out of it and was waving frantically at Chen Xifan. “Take your hands off!”

He would love to.

A second crack. A third. What had been a single line became a web, and the web became a dense lattice of fractures. The interior of the stone produced a series of sharp, splintering sounds — like something trapped inside was desperately trying to get out.

Then the stone broke.

Broke — and detonated. The three-meter Guidance Stone exploded from its center, shards and white light blasting outward in every direction. The shockwave overturned the front-row spectator seats; the examiner was thrown several meters and slammed into the platform’s stone railing. The white light surged upward, blazing ten times brighter in the instant of detonation.

For every person in the plaza, the only sound left was the shriek the white column made as it tore through the cloud layer — like the sky being ripped open.

Then silence.

Absolute, suffocating silence.

Fragments settled. Where the Guidance Stone had stood, only a ring of scorched base stone remained. White dust drifted down through the air, slow and out of season, like the wrong kind of snow.

Nobody spoke. Nobody moved.

Chen Xifan stood exactly where he’d been, his hands still out in the position of pressing them against a crystal that no longer existed. A very small voice inside his head was saying: I’m going to have to pay for this, aren’t I.

Then the ground lit up.

Not from the stone’s residual glow. The ancient runes carved into the dark stone floor — the ones that had never activated in a thousand years, the ones everyone assumed were purely decorative — began igniting, one by one, moving inward from the outer edge of the plaza toward its center.

The light was white. The exact same white as the crystal before it shattered. The rune lines lit up one after another, like something enormous was being drawn with a single brush, stroke by stroke. The light spread from beneath Chen Xifan’s feet, across the ritual platform, under the spectator stands, and out to the farthest edge of the plaza.

When the last line blazed to life, the full pattern was finally revealed.

Seen from above — if anyone could have gotten high enough at that moment — the thousand-year runes would have formed a single image.

A rice stalk in full ear.

Head heavy with grain, stem straight and upright, roots reaching deep into the earth.

At the highest point of the nobility section, an old man who had been sitting quietly through the entire ceremony lurched to his feet. His movement was so sudden he knocked over the teacup in front of him. Scalding tea spread across the gold embroidery at his cuff. He didn’t notice.

Can Sui — one of the academy’s senior elders, the undisputed authority on ancient civilization research — stared at the rice-stalk pattern glowing across the ground. In more than seventy years of living, he had spent forty on ancient runes. He had proposed countless hypotheses. He had been mocked by his peers countless times. And now, the most outlandish hypothesis from those forty years was lighting up right in front of him.

“Interesting…” His voice was barely above a murmur, but the people beside him all heard the tremor in it.

His gaze moved from the pattern on the ground to the young man in white standing at the center of the plaza. That look was not the look you gave a person. It was the look a scholar gave a complete, intact artifact pulled from an ancient ruin — possessive, electric, and shot through with a hunger that was almost indecent.

“Gran… Granary-keeper?” someone nearby stammered.

“No.” Can Sui shook his head. His voice had gone suddenly, unnervingly clear. “This surpasses the Granary-keeper. This is something the classical texts record only once —”

A violent surge of energy rebounded from the base of what had been the Guidance Stone.

Chen Xifan felt like someone had reached into his skull and pressed his off switch. Darkness crept in from the edges of his vision; every sound poured into his ears through thick cotton. He glanced down at his own wrist. Something seemed to be glowing beneath the skin.

He didn’t get a better look than that.

His knees folded. His body pitched forward. In the moment before his consciousness went dark, the last thought in his head was:

Is the sample pack still in the sash…

His white sleeve slid down as he fell, covering the mark that had just appeared on the inside of his wrist — not a flame, not a droplet, not an ear of grain, not a granary.

A ring of complete rice stalks, circling his wrist all the way around.

Nobody saw it.

Everyone was looking up — at the white column’s afterimage still hanging in the clouds, long after it had any reason to stay.