Understood. Here's the revised **Chapter 1** without numbered sections, and clear integration of the **world's power system** while keeping realm details subtle for later revelation:
---
### **CHAPTER 1: THE PRINCE AND THE THIEF**
The rot began in the throne room.
It seeped through gilded pillars of the **Lóngxīa Empire**, down corridors hung with fraying silk, into the marrow of a realm forgetting its own pulse. Prince Yan Ling tasted it in every labored breath – copper, chrysanthemum decay, the scent of a dynasty crumbling. He knelt by a paper-latticed window in the **Tea-Cooling Pavilion**, his refuge. Outside, vermillion palace walls flaked like dried blood. *Like me*, he thought. His brush hovered over pristine rice paper, trembling not from weakness, but from the colossal effort of *holding back*. A single unrestrained stroke could split the sky. He dipped the brush in water instead.
**The World's Hidden Truth:**
This was a world where **Qi**, the vital breath of heaven and earth, *should* flow. Where cultivators could ascend through **Realms** of power, tempering body and spirit, wielding spells that could shatter mountains. But that was the *old* world. Three hundred years ago, the **Jade Heaven Dynasty** – a pinnacle of immortal cultivation – fell. And with it, true **Qi cultivation** was severed, suppressed by an unseen force mortals no longer remembered. Only fragments remained: whispers of sword glows, artifacts with dormant power, and… Prince Yan Ling's paintings.
---
Twelve-year-old **Zhi'er** wriggled through the stinking sewers beneath the imperial gardens. Above, nobles laughed over sugared plums, deaf to the empire's death rattle. He surfaced behind a curtain of wilted wisteria, eyes fixed on the isolated pavilion. *Target: The Prince's Painting.* Rumors swirled in the slums. A general who stole one last winter was found with his eyes gouged out, sockets blooming with ink-dark orchids. Zhi'er shoved fear aside. His sister's fever raged; the palace apothecary demanded silver the slums didn't have. A single painting could buy ten cures.
Within the pavilion, Yan Ling painted cranes – wings arched in futile escape. *A lie*, he knew. Nothing escaped. Not even him. The brush tip touched paper. A cough tore through him, wet and ragged. Crimson spattered the crane's wing. Instantly, a minuscule wisp of something *other* leaked out – not Qi as mortals might comprehend, but **Sword Intent**, a refined, devastating will made manifest.
*—The pavilion's bronze wind-chimes shattered.* Not from force, but from the sheer, silent *pressure* of memory unleashed.
Zhi'er froze mid-crawl. The sound wasn't metal breaking. It was… *vision*. Mountains cleaved in half. Stars weeping fire. A man with Yan Ling's eyes, standing on a sky-bridge of crystal, a blade of condensed starlight in his hand. Then silence, and dust. The vision vanished, leaving only broken chimes glittering on moss-stained tiles. *Sorcery? Ghosts?* Panic fluttered, but desperation was stronger. He peered through the moon-shaped doorway.
Prince Yan Ling looked like a ghost draped in imperial yellow – skin translucent over sharp bones, hair an unnatural white cascade, fingers stained with ink and something darker. He wiped blood from his lips with a silk sleeve, the dying light carving tombs beneath his eyes. *He's dying*, Zhi'er thought, emboldened. *What threat can he be?*
Yan Ling sensed the boy instantly. Not with the scorched meridians that once channeled Qi, but with the predator's sense for silence. A small, desperate hunger lingered at his threshold. He almost welcomed it. Hunger was honest. Far better than the court's honeyed knives. He made no move, feigning absorption in his bleeding crane.
Zhi'er moved like shadow given form, a skill honed in **Rat's Alley** where light meant capture. His fingers brushed a scroll beside a jade paperweight—
*—and the world dissolved again.*
*Floating crystal pagodas piercing clouds. The starlight sword sheathed. An entire city crumbling into silent ash.* The scroll hummed with trapped thunder beneath his touch.
"That one is not for sale." Yan Ling's voice was soft, frayed, yet it pinned Zhi'er like a dagger. The prince hadn't turned. "It remembers… too loudly."
Zhi'er snatched his hand back as if burned. "H-How did you—?"
"You smell of lotus root and the river's underbelly." Yan Ling finally glanced at him. His eyes were the only vibrant thing about him – deep, frozen lakes seeing *through* flesh. "And despair. It has a particular pungency."
Shame burned Zhi'er's cheeks. He drew a rusted kitchen knife. "Give me a painting. Or I'll scream. Guards will come."
Yan Ling sighed, stirring dust motes. "Guards see only what lines their pockets. Today, that is not you." He gestured weakly with his brush towards a smaller scroll depicting mist-shrouded peaks. "Take *Mist Over Autumn Peaks*. Sell it to **Old Man Luo** at the Antique Bazaar. Tell him…" A faint, weary smile touched his lips. "…the *gardener* sends his regards."
Zhi'er hesitated. Trap? Yet the prince had returned to his cranes, painting as if the boy were smoke. The offered scroll felt… cool. Silent. No visions. He grabbed it and fled.
As he slipped through the wisteria, Zhi'er glanced back. Prince Yan Ling dipped his brush in water, then touched it to the bloodstain marring the crane's wing. The crimson dissolved, swirling and reforming into a single, perfect **red maple leaf** drifting beside the bird. *Impossible. Magic… or madness?*
---
Far beyond the crumbling capital, on the majestic **Bridge of Nine Sighs**, riders clad in feathers of fiery red approached. **Xiao Hong**, their leader, sneered at the faded imperial crest on the gate. "This empire is carrion," she declared, her voice sharp with disdain. She was no mortal soldier; her aura, though constrained by the heavy silence blanketing the world, vibrated with a suppressed power – the echo of a **Quasi-Immortal Realm**, a whisper of the cultivation glory lost. "Pluck it, and the **Celestial Peaks** will feast." In her saddlebag lay a decree bearing the sigil of a mountain piercing the clouds:
*Surrender Prince Yan Ling—the Last Painter of Jade Heaven.*
---
Night draped the palace. Yan Ling set aside his brush. The cranes were finished – seven straining towards emptiness. He touched the painting. The ink seemed to ripple. The cranes' wings blurred into strokes too sharp, too clean for mere art. The red maple leaf pulsed once, a silent command. The violence of the cough, Zhi'er's desperation, the envoys' malice – all sealed away, compressed into stillness. The painting became merely art again. He coughed, fresh blood staining his palm. Every seal cost him fragments of his dwindling life. *Soon*, he thought, watching his blood soak into the silk. *Soon, I'll paint nothing at all.*
Zhi'er sold the scroll. Old Man Luo's face turned parchment-white at "*the gardener sends his regards*." He paid ten times the ginseng's price, coins spilling into Zhi'er's hands. "Never come back, boy," the old man hissed, eyes darting to deepening shadows. "Things stir around that prince… *old* things. Things that remember when mountains flew."
---
High in the **Celestial Peaks**, where thin air tasted of frost and forgotten power, **Jiang Xi** opened a jade case. Inside lay a single, withered crane feather. It trembled. He was a figure carved from arrogance and cold light, radiating an aura that bent the very air – a lord dwelling in the highest **Immortal Realm** still clinging to existence in this suppressed world. Three hundred years of coiled hatred sharpened his smile as the feather vibrated. *He weakens… but still, he paints.* He sent a thought, sharp as a blade, down the mountain paths: "Find the painter, Xiao Hong. Tear his *silence* apart. Bring me his brush."
---
Prince Yan Ling stood at his window, watching the moon drown in the empire's smog. Zhi'er's face lingered – young, fierce, clawing for life. Like he himself once was, before he became the **Nightless Blade**. Before he painted the world into forgetfulness. He raised a skeletal hand towards the obscured stars. From his ink-stained fingertips, mist coalesced, forming the shape of a crane. Its wings beat soundlessly against the suffocating night. For a heartbeat, it strained upwards… then dissolved into nothingness. Yan Ling closed his empty hand, the cold certainty of endings settling deep within his bones.
> *Far away, in a sickroom smelling of hope and cheap herbs, Zhi'er's sister clutched the precious ginseng root and whispered, "Was the prince kind?"*
> *Zhi'er thought of blood becoming maple leaves, of scrolls humming with trapped thunder, of a dying man who saw despair in the air.*
> *"No," he said, staring at his ink-smudged hands. "But his paintings… they breathe."*