It started with an email that shouldn't have existed.
No name. No subject. No sender.
Just a single line of text:
"Your mother knew about the dynasty before Marvel. Meet me. 3AM. Suzaku Crossing, Kyoto."
Tian stared at the screen. His office lights buzzed overhead, the only sound besides the ticking of the antique clock his father once kept. He reread the message again and again, fingers hovering over the delete key.
He didn't press it.
Instead, he hit Save.
He didn't sleep that night. Not because he was afraid—because he knew. He'd come too close. The truth was pressing against the edges now, so close he could taste the rust of it.
The dynasty before Marvel.
The phrase looped in his mind like static.
Marvel Industries had always claimed dominance—first in pharmaceuticals, then tech, and finally international defense. But history had gaps. So did his family's records. Something older lurked beneath the company's glossy façade.
And somehow, his mother had known.
At exactly 3:00 a.m., Tian stood at Suzaku Crossing.
Kyoto was quiet at that hour—like the city was holding its breath. Fog rolled over the old stone bridges, curling between paper lanterns and closed shopfronts. Streetlights flickered.
Then he saw him.
A man in a charcoal coat, hunched under a wide umbrella. His face was obscured by a mask, one of those medical-grade ones with custom filters.
He walked with a limp. Left leg. Military, perhaps.
"You're Tian," the man said, voice low.
Tian didn't confirm.
The man chuckled. "Smart. Paranoia is survival."
"You sent the email."
"No. I relayed the message. Your mother left markers. Traces. For someone to follow."
"And you're the someone?"
"I was once like you—hungry for the truth. I chased ghosts until I found something worse."
He handed Tian a small, encrypted drive. "Open this alone. Use air-gapped tech. And don't upload it. They're watching all uplinks now."
"Who's 'they'?"
The man paused. "Who do you think built Marvel?"
And then he was gone, swallowed by the mist like a scene from a dream.
Tian returned to his Kyoto suite and obeyed. He used a burner laptop, no network, no biometric input.
The drive contained only one image.
A still from a security camera.
Timestamp: Three months ago. Location: Kamigyo District, Kyoto.
A woman, walking briskly down a narrow alley, glancing over her shoulder.
She wore a beige coat. Her hair was tied in a low twist, sunglasses over her eyes.
But Tian would recognize her anywhere.
Han Yulan.
His mother.
Older. Thinner. But undeniably her.
He froze. For a moment, he forgot to breathe.
She was alive. Not three years ago. Three months ago.
He leaned in, zooming on the frame, looking for clues—street names, signs, anything. She had a black satchel tucked under her arm. Her expression wasn't afraid. It was focused. Intentional.
Like she knew she was being watched.
He checked the metadata of the file.
Encrypted. Scrambled three layers deep.
Whoever recorded it had gone to extreme lengths to keep it hidden. But why surface it now? Why him?
He paced, heart thudding.
If she was in Kyoto… why? Why not contact him? Why disappear for fifteen years only to show up in a city he just happened to visit?
Unless she wanted him to find her.
Unless this was the next breadcrumb.
He returned to Suzaku Crossing the next night. Waited. But the masked man never came.
Instead, a letter had been left on the ground—wrapped in black cloth and wedged beneath the corner of the lamp post.
No address. No seal. Just five words written in neat calligraphy:
"The dynasty remembers the debt."
Beneath it was a date: 1981.
The year before Marvel was founded.
Tian's pulse spiked.
He returned to his family's archives. Slept in bursts. Ate only when his hands stopped shaking. Every hour bled into the next. Every file opened another question.
He dug through the company's earliest documents and found something peculiar: before Marvel was Marvel, it operated under a temporary name—Project Kylin.
A black-ops biotech initiative with ties to both Eastern and Western intelligence agencies.
It had one objective: Legacy Extraction.
He didn't know what that meant. Not yet. But buried in a memo from an internal vault was a redacted paragraph—one line was left untouched:
"The Red Dynasty must never resurface. Eliminate all heirs."
Tian recoiled.
The Red Dynasty.
It sounded mythological. But he knew his mother was obsessed with ancient history—particularly banned royal bloodlines erased after the Second Cultural Purge. Histories rewritten. Legacies wiped.
What if the Red Dynasty was real?
And what if his mother… was part of it?
Suddenly, everything made sense.
Her disappearance. The forged death. The sealed estate. The erased footage. The warning on the wall: Trust no one born after the fire.
She hadn't vanished to escape.
She had vanished to protect something.
Or someone.
Him?
A knock snapped him out of the spiral.
Three soft raps. Barely audible.
He froze.
Another knock. Same rhythm.
He checked the peephole.
Empty hallway.
No footsteps.
No sound.
He opened the door slowly.
On the floor sat a black envelope. Inside was a second photograph—also from Kyoto.
This one was closer. Clearer. His mother standing outside a temple gate, speaking to a woman whose face had been blurred. Deliberately. Sloppily.
But it wasn't the figure that shocked him.
It was the tattoo visible on his mother's wrist.
A red phoenix. Wings unfurled. Crown on its head.
Tian had seen it only once before.
On a seal hidden in the foundation of Marvel's oldest facility—the place his father had forbidden anyone to enter. A building sealed with iron doors and no power lines.
He'd thought it was just ornamental.
Now, he knew better.
The Red Phoenix wasn't a myth.
It was the crest of the true ruling family—a dynasty that predated corporations, capitalism, and countries.
Marvel hadn't replaced them.
Marvel had stolen their legacy.
And Han Yulan had known.
She'd tried to warn someone. Or restore it. And when she got too close, they'd erased her existence.
But now Tian was on the trail.
He wasn't just uncovering corporate secrets.
He was unearthing a war of bloodlines. One that never ended—only shifted names and masks.
The dynasty before Marvel.
The dynasty that still lived.
And he? He might be its final heir.
He stared again at the photograph.
His mother looked determined.
She wasn't running.
She was preparing for something.
And the deeper he dug, the more he understood: his mother hadn't just vanished.
She had stepped off the map—into a world few knew existed.
Now, Tian was following.
And the world would never be the same.