The mirror appeared at the end of his first month.

Meng Hao found it in a storage shed behind the Outer Sect kitchen, buried beneath a pile of moldy cultivation manuals and broken pill furnaces. It was a small bronze mirror, no larger than his palm, its surface tarnished green with age. When he picked it up, the tarnish flaked away, revealing a surface so polished and perfect that it seemed to glow with its own inner light.

'That's been here for two hundred years,' a kitchen disciple said, noticing Meng Hao staring at the mirror. 'Senior Brother thought it was trash.'

Meng Hao was not particularly superstitious, but he was quite curious. He pocketed the mirror and took it back to his dormitory.

That night, while circulating his Qi in meditation, the mirror began to vibrate. Faintly at first, then more insistently, until the air around Meng Hao filled with a humming sound like a bell being struck underwater. Light bled from the mirror's surface — not the golden light of the sun, but a deep crimson, the color of old blood and dying stars.

A voice spoke, directly into his mind.

'Child of Earth, you have awakened the Legacy of the Demon Sealers. The path before you is pain. The path behind you is dust. Choose.'

Meng Hao opened his mouth to say that he would very much prefer not to choose anything, actually, and could this mirror perhaps find someone more qualified — but the light had already wrapped around him, and he was falling, tumbling through a void that smelled of incense and old stone, toward something vast and terrible and waiting.

When he opened his eyes again, he was lying on the cold stone floor of his dormitory, the morning bell ringing for breakfast, and the bronze mirror was cool and inert in his hand.

But in his mind, a new technique had taken root — something called the Demon Sealing Hex, and it whispered of powers that could seal the heavens themselves.