Legends of the Lightning Saints - Sandy Baptism

Prologue

Five centuries ago, the machines turned. What began as convenience became extinction - cities burned, billions died, and humanity teetered on the edge of oblivion. A desperate doctor unleashed the LT Virus, a weapon that devoured electricity and reduced the AI empire to scrap. The war ended in weeks.

But the virus had an unintended consequence. It bonded with survivors, rewrote their DNA, and birthed cultivation: seven levels of power that transformed ordinary people into gods. Spark-Step. Conduit-Step. Weapon-Step. Storm-Step. Fusion-Step. Paragon-Step. Saint-Step.

Humanity survived. Thrived.  - Evolved. - 

And then the old patterns returned. Power attracted monsters. Trust became a weapon. And the worst enemies often smiled while pouring your tea.

Reina learned this lesson the hard way.

Her mother was a Saint - the Aqua Sect's beloved protector, untouchable and unkillable. Until she wasn't. The official story said natural decline, a quiet death mourned and moved on. Reina never believed it, but she didn't have time to investigate. She didn't even have time to grieve. The vultures were circling. Her mother's legacy was dying.

So she left the man she loved. She raised their daughter alone - a girl born at Spark-Step, destined for greatness neither of them fully understood. She poured fourteen years into protecting a sect that was plotting her murder from the inside.

Now the truth has shattered everything.

The elders killed her mother. They poisoned her. They chased her daughter across a hundred miles of wilderness and called her a kidnapper.

Reina is done running.

North lies the only man she ever trusted. North lies her daughter's father - a man who doesn't even know he has a child. In the thunder sect she found a family that accepted her and her daughter wholeheartedly.

CHAPTER ONE: The Girl Who Saw Too Much 

Patience shot up in bed like a corpse rising from the grave, which - given how dramatic her life had become lately - wasn't entirely off-brand for her.

Sweat plastered her dark hair to her forehead. Her heart hammered against her ribs like it was trying to escape through her chest. The dream clung to her like wet laundry - same one she'd been having for two weeks straight, night after nightmare-filled night.

The Thunder Sect burning. Her cousins screaming. Sandy's eyes - those creepy, ancient, definitely-not-a-twelve-year-old's eyes - glowing in the dark.

"Just a dream," Patience whispered to herself, because talking to yourself only counted as crazy if you didn't have an excellent reason. And being a fourteen-year-old who could literally see ten minutes into the future? Yeah, she figured she'd earned a few quirks.

She pressed her palm against her chest and focused on breathing. In. Out. Try not to hyperventilate like a dying fish.

It took her a few minutes - okay, fine, seven minutes, she counted - to get her heart to stop trying to break the world record for fastest BPM.

Here's the thing about Patience: she'd grown up in the Aqua Sect, which sounded fancy but was actually just a giant pool of passive-aggressive water cultivators who smiled to your face and stabbed you in the back. Figuratively. Mostly.

She'd been cultivating in the womb.

Yes, you read that correctly.

Her mom Reina was the Aqua Sect's Saint - basically the big boss, the top dog, the queen of all things wet and wonderful - and Patience had absorbed so much spiritual energy before birth that she popped out at Spark-Step. Most cultivators took years to reach that level. Patience achieved it while wearing a diaper and crying for milk.

You'd think that would make her popular. The Chosen One! The Prodigy! The Baby Boss!

Nope.

The other kids looked at her like she had three heads. The adults whispered behind her back. The elders - those wrinkly, conniving, we're-totally-not-evil-you're-just-paranoid elders - gave her side-eye so intense it could curdle milk.

Patience tried to make friends. She really did. She shared her snacks. She offered to help with homework. She didn't use her future-sight to cheat at hide-and-seek (okay, maybe once, but in her defense, little Kai had it coming - you don't just hide someone's favorite rock and expect zero consequences).

But nothing worked. She was too strong. Too weird. Too much.

So she stopped training seriously.

Which, looking back, was maybe not the smartest move when you could literally see the future and what you saw was your mom getting poisoned by the very elders everyone kept telling you to respect.

But hey, she was twelve at the time. Give a girl a break.

Anyway, long story short (too late), she'd busted into that council meeting like a tiny hurricane, taken down seven Fusion-Step elders - seven! At twelve! While her mom was unconscious! - and hauled her mom's traitor-poisoned body across half the continent to find the only man her mother had ever loved.

Her dad. Marcus.

The man with lightning in his veins and forgiveness in his heart (eventually - it took a lot of yelling and some very dramatic crying).

And that's how Patience ended up in the Thunder Sect.

And oh. My. Heavens.

It was like waking up from a nightmare into the world's loudest, most chaotic, most wonderful family reunion.

First of all, her dad's family was insane. The good kind of insane. The kind where Uncle Danport told terrible puns at dinner and Aunt Elena threw bread rolls at him while laughing. The kind where her cousin Alex - twenty years old, Fusion-Step, and absolutely down bad for a boy named Denis - spent half her time sparring and the other half making heart-eyes across the training ground. The kind where Eve - fifteen, mysterious, and armed with a stare that could make grown men confess to crimes they didn't commit - just accepted Patience without blinking.

And little Sandy?

Sandy was twelve years old. A Saint. Chosen by the Throne itself at age seven.

The Throne! The thing that transforms people into Saints! The ancient artifact that usually waits until someone's like, fifty, to bestow its power! It picked a seven-year-old who still believed in tooth fairies and thought vegetables were a personal attack!

Patience's "monstrous talent" that made her a freak in the Aqua Sect?

Here, it was just... Tuesday.

Alex could probably bench-press a horse. Eve had secrets within secrets. Sandy literally talked to an ancient cosmic entity that lived in her head and whispered creepy things at 3 AM. And Patience? Born at Spark-Step? Could see the future?

"Yeah, that's cool," Eve had said when they first met, shrugging like Patience had just announced she preferred tea over coffee. "We're all weird here. Welcome to the circus."

And for the first time in her entire life, Patience believed she belonged.

She had peace. She had love. She had a mom who was finally happy, a dad who taught her to wield lightning like a shield, cousins who didn't think she was a freak, and - perhaps most importantly - unlimited access to Uncle Danport's terrible cooking experiments.

So why. WHY. Was her brain torturing her with dreams of everything burning down?

It's just fear, she told herself for the hundredth time. You're scared of losing this. That's all it is. Normal people have nightmares about showing up to school naked. You have nightmares about apocalyptic destruction. Same thing, really.

She was almost convinced. Almost.

She swung her legs over the side of the bed and took a deep breath. The night air was cool against her sweat-damp skin. Her room - her actual room, in her actual home, with her actual family sleeping in the rooms around her - was quiet.

She should go back to sleep.

She would go back to sleep.

Any second now.

And that's when the scream happened.

Not a little scream. Not an "oops I saw a spider" scream. Not even a "someone ate the last piece of cake" scream.

This was a soul-rending, reality-breaking, something-is-terribly-wrong scream.

It came from across the hall.

From Sandy's room.

Patience was on her feet before her brain finished processing the sound. She burst through her door just as other doors slammed open up and down the hallway.

Marcus exploded out of his room with lightning crackling around both fists, wearing nothing but sleep pants and a look of pure parental fury. Reina was right behind him, water already spiraling around her arms like living ribbons.

Uncle Danport came barreling down the opposite hall, nearly tripping over his own feet. Aunt Elena followed with a kunai in each hand and murder in her eyes.

Alex sprinted past everyone, Denis hot on her heels.

Even Eve - Eve, who never ran anywhere, who moved through life with the calm confidence of a cat who knew it owned everything it surveyed - sprinted down the hallway with her face pale and her breathing ragged.

They all crashed into Sandy's room at the same moment.

And what they saw made Patience's future-sight - which had been quiet all week, suspiciously quiet, like a held breath - absolutely scream in the back of her mind.

The air in the center of Sandy's room was wrong.

It bent. It twisted. It folded in on itself like someone was crumpling a piece of paper - except the paper was reality, and the person doing the crumpling was something Patience couldn't see but could definitely feel.

Sandy stood in the middle of the room, her small body rigid, her eyes wide and glowing - that same ancient, hungry glow from Patience's nightmares. Her lips were moving, but the words came out backward, or inside out, or from somewhere that wasn't now at all.

"SANDY!" Marcus shouted, lunging forward.

Too late.

The space warped - a sound like the universe tearing a really big sheet of paper - and Sandy vanished.

Right in front of their eyes.

One second she was there. The next? Gone. Not a single hair left behind.

Patience stared at the empty space where her cousin used to be.

Her future-sight chose that exact moment to show her exactly what came next:

Sandy, older. Crowned. Alone. Standing on a battlefield littered with bodies. Tears streaming down her face.

"I didn't want this," she whispered.

And something ancient answered from inside her:

"It doesn't matter what you want."

Patience's knees buckled.

The room erupted into chaos around her.

Marcus was already shouting orders. Reina was crying. Danport was calling for every scout in the sect. Alex was demanding answers no one had.

But Patience just stood there, frozen, her chest tight, her heart screaming the same four words over and over again:

This is just the beginning.