I blinked hard at the page. Re-read the first paragraph just to make sure I wasn't hallucinating from too much caffeine and existential dread.
"…What?"
The more I read, the more everything I thought I knew about the Nian unraveled like a badly tied shoelace. This beast—this supposed monstrous terror that haunted New Year legends and village scare-stories—wasn't a villain at all.
It was sacred.
Sacred. I leaned back slightly, the weight of that word hitting harder than expected. My fingers hovered over the sketch of Nian on the page—its towering form etched in sweeping strokes of lunar silver and obsidian ink. The image was feral, yes, but regal too. Like a storm in stillness.
All this time… they got it wrong.
Before the world had smartphones, spellmaps, or even functional plumbing, Nian existed—born from a collision of time, chaos, and memory itself. A cosmic mistake, or maybe a correction. I wasn't sure.
