Ronghua: Arson Personified

As A Kindling

To revisit Ronghua's formative years, we must first go back three centuries in time, back to the beginning of the industrial age. Metalworkers often pumped out waste iron like how a fountain spewed out water, and it was rare to see a factory operating with even fifty percent efficiency. 

Pao Lee was tired. Very tired. Months, no years had blended together with the same dull routine, shovelling lumps of metal into a hole so that the waste didn't pile up. His hands were blistered and sweaty, the shovel grip was too tough, the cold, smoke-filled air caused his skin to sting - all in all, a horrible job. But he needed to feed his family, even if it meant working long hours in pretty much the middle of nowhere. In China back in those days, it was rare to even have a minimum wage job, for most people took poverty over what was (privately) considered slavery.

The last few piles of steel seemed to dissolve over time with each strike of the shovel. Looking up at the sky, Lee could tell that the sun was pretty much fully set, for the late evening glow had dimmed substantially and the rocky terrain around the ditches filled to the brim with scrap had gradually descended into silence. Wiping his sweaty forehead, his grimy sleeve brushed against a receding hairline as Pao trudged away, his feet crunching against gravel as he carried the shovel with him.

To view the following events, we must shrink down to the subatomic level. Underneath the piles and piles of metal, there lay a deposit. A deposit of a radioactive substance, then unknown, unnamed, and undiscovered. Being the responsible, underpaid metalworker he was, Pao hadn't even scoped out the area he was digging his ditches in - but who blamed him? With that kind of salary, he wasn't even eating enough to give a damn. As the radioactivity seeped into the piles of metal, they began to heat up, both from the constantly degrading toxic substance... and through something else entirely. The scrap left in the ditches melted into a sludge - a searing hot mix of iron and steel hot enough that the colour was akin to lava inside a volcano: and you would be forgiven to think that it was in fact, magma. But it wasn't. As the moon and stars gleamed in the sky, they illuminated something: A small, withered arm, reaching out from within the molten goop. 

Thus begins the story of our young Ronghua, who was exposed to the wide world. Rapidly growing from a measly 2 metres in height, the combined metal in the ditch was enough to boost his size to nearly 100 metres, and his weight to nearly 100,000 tonnes. Despite the general depiction of fire monsters being disfigured and somewhat horrific, our formative Ronghua possessed a surprisingly humanoid body structure.

As our character grew, so did the damage he caused. Forest burns spread  across most of southern China, then across most of the continent. Then.. Ronghua discovered the hollow Earth, and it was pretty much all over. The fires moved from one location to another, wreaking destruction on pretty much any and every settlement on the planet. And that's when the rivalry began.