Chapter 1 — The Mighty, All-Powerful Genie

The antique bronze lamp lay on dark red velvet inside a bulletproof glass cabinet in the deepest basement of the Đường family mansion, a room only three people in the world were allowed to enter. Recessed lights shone on a layer of pale yellow dust that obscured the worn carvings, making the object look like an inanimate relic waiting for auction or a museum corner. Only Mr. Đường Vĩnh Bảo knew that a life from a thousand years earlier slept inside that cold bronze shell: Cảnh Bách Nguyên.

A thousand years earlier, Bách Nguyên had not been trapped in a lamp. He had been a guardian god, born to watch over a rich land between mountains and sea, where people worshiped him with gratitude rather than fear. He could summon wind and rain and protect crops from natural disasters; to those who lived under his protection, he was a symbol of justice and compassion. That very fairness became a thorn in the side of a magician whose name history had erased, a man who wanted unlimited power but was thwarted whenever he tried to profit from human suffering. On a new-moon night, the treacherous magician used forbidden magic to lure Bách Nguyên into a spell disguised as a villagers' cry for help. By the time Bách Nguyên realized the trap, it was too late. Evil magic tore apart his divine body, condensed his soul into a small bronze lamp, and carved a cruel curse into his fate: whoever owned the lamp could command him to grant three wishes—no more, no less—with no refusal, deception, or direct harm to the wisher.

That was the beginning of a thousand years of captivity.

Bách Nguyên couldn't count how many generations of owners he had changed. The first king who found the lamp in the ashes of a ruined temple used three wishes to expand his realm with the blood and tears of neighboring kingdoms. A wealthy merchant later in life used his wish to monopolize the entire salt trade route, pushing tens of thousands of salt farmers into poverty. A thief once stole a lamp in the middle of a fight, used his last wish to escape, then threw the lamp into the river for fear of being chased, causing Bách Nguyên to lie at the bottom of the mud for nearly a hundred years until a huge flood washed it ashore. There was a stingy collector who kept the lamp in a sealed vault for decades without daring to use any wishes, just because he was afraid of losing "the rarest item in the collection" once the three wishes were exhausted.

No one, during those thousand years, ever asked Bách Nguyên a single question: do you want to be free?

The rules of the curse were clear and cruel. Each owner received three wishes. After the third was fulfilled, the lamp would "sleep" for an indefinite period—sometimes years, sometimes centuries—before falling into new hands through inheritance, purchase, theft, war, or simple chance. The cycle continued without a natural end. Bách Nguyên had learned to accept it as a law of the universe, like the sun rising in the east and setting in the west; fairness was not required for survival.

But there was one thing Bách Nguyên had almost forgotten after a thousand years: the curse had a loophole. It was so small that the treacherous mage of old had probably assumed no one would be foolish—or kind—enough to find it. If an owner, faced with the third wish, asked for nothing for himself but used it to grant the genie freedom, the curse would break completely. The genie would become a real person, with a body that could age, hurt, and die, but also love and live a life of his own, no longer bound to the lamp.

Thirty-five years ago, that lamp fell into the hands of a young man named Đường Vĩnh Bảo.

At that time, Vĩnh Bảo was only in his thirties, struggling with a small transportation company that was on the brink of bankruptcy because a large partner snatched the contract at the last minute. He bought the lamp through a private antiques auction, not because he believed in the legend of the genie, but just because he found the pattern on it strangely beautiful and the price unusually cheap compared to bronze items of the same era. That night, as he sat alone in the dark office, wiping dust from the lamp body in near-exhausted despair, Bách Nguyên appeared for the first time in front of a person he would later call the most different in a thousand years.

"I am the genie Cảnh Bách Nguyên. You have three wishes." His voice at that time was low and cold, without any emotion, because emotions were a luxury that a thousand years of imprisonment had taught him to hide deeply.

Vĩnh Bảo, instead of being panicked or happy like most previous owners, just looked at him silently for a long time, then asked a question that no one had ever asked: "How long have you been in there?"

Bách Nguyên did not answer immediately. For a thousand years, the question had always come from the other direction: people cared only about what he could give them, never what he had lost. In the end, he replied," Long enough to forget what it feels like to be asked."

That night, Vĩnh Bảo did not immediately wish for anything. He sat and talked with Bách Nguyên until dawn, asking about the land he once guarded, about the past owners, and about the feeling of being locked in a narrow space without light for centuries. It wasn't until nearly a week later, when the company was at risk of default within forty-eight hours, that he used his first wish — not to get rich, but just to save the debt hanging over the heads of hundreds of his workers. The second wish, he used many years later, on a chaotic hospital night, to save his only son's life from a near-fatal traffic accident.

But fate, even when interfered with by wishes, still has its own limits that even a genie cannot completely overcome. A few years after that life-saving attempt, his son and daughter-in-law died in another accident, leaving behind a granddaughter not yet twelve years old: Đường Nhã Kỳ.

From that day on, Vĩnh Bảo kept his third wish like a heavy stone in his chest. He did not want to use it for himself, nor did he want to use it lightly like most previous owners had done with Bách Nguyên. Over the next twenty years, the two people - an old man taking charge of an increasingly powerful corporation, a genie who was used to human betrayal - gradually became a strange kind of soulmate that Bách Nguyên himself did not expect he could still have after a thousand years of coldness.

Vĩnh Bảo was the first person to ask Bách Nguyên what he would like to eat, even though he knew the genie did not need food. He was the first to tell him about the films, books, and music released during the thirty-five years he had lived among humans—things a thousand-year-old being had never been able to experience. One evening, while they sat in the study, he looked into Bách Nguyên's eyes and said, "You are not something I own. You are a friend I was lucky to meet."

Bách Nguyên did not respond to that sentence with words. But that night, for the first time in a thousand years, he felt something warm creep into his memories that were only filled with ice.

When this story began, Đường Vĩnh Bảo was over seventy. His hair was white, his hands shook whenever he held a pen, and—according to the doctor who had followed him for more than ten years—his heart had little time left. He knew it, and had known for years. During his final sleepless nights, he thought neither of his fortune nor his shares, nor the competitors waiting for Đường Gia Group to lose its leader. He thought only of two people: his granddaughter and the genie who had accompanied him for more than thirty years, to whom he owed something greater than three wishes.

Tonight, he decided.

He went down to the basement alone, didn't call the housekeeper, didn't call the doctor, just walked slowly with his cane through the cold stone hallway, unlocked the fingerprint lock, and entered the room containing the glass cabinet where Bách Nguyên often appeared when he needed someone to talk to rather than a genie to command. The pale yellow light shone on his old face but his eyes were still sharp, and in an atmosphere so quiet that he could clearly hear his heart beating, Vĩnh Bảo raised his hand to gently touch the bronze lamp body, his voice soft but firm like a vow that had been considered for twenty years.

"Cảnh Bách Nguyên. I need to talk to you. This time, it's the most important thing in my life."

In that moment, under a layer of pale yellow dust and dim lights, a thin stream of mist-like smoke began to emanate from the mouth of the lamp, swirling slowly in mid-air, and a familiar figure gradually appeared - Cảnh Bách Nguyên, his thousand-year-old friend, was preparing to listen to something that both of them did not know would completely change the rest of their lives, and also of a young girl named Đường Nhã Kỳ who was still sleeping upstairs, completely unaware that her life was about to turn in a different direction. that she never imagined.